Jindal has been traversing the country and yesterday stopped in NH to campaign for Republican Gubernatorial candidate John Stephen. The American Spectator’s Andrew Cline has a glowing review:
In New Hampshire, retail politics is king. You cannot win the first-in-the-nation primary if you are bad at winning over small crowds of voters, if you haven’t the personality to make a room full of people think, “I like that guy.” Granite State political operatives size up candidates on how well they can work a room, tell a story, make people smile. Before yesterday, the New Hampshire scouting report on Bobby Jindal was that he was sharp as a whip, but very wonky, and policy wonks tend to lack the social skills needed to thrive in the primary. After yesterday, the scouting report is very different.
What Bobby Jindal did at the 100 Club on Thursday afternoon was to swiftly, deftly, and without the slightest hint of insincerity or effort, make a few dozen important and seasoned New Hampshire Republicans say to themselves, “I like that guy.”
Jindal warmed up the crowd with jokes about being a politician from a state famous for its corrupt politicians. But his jokes weren’t barbed or insulting. Mitt Romney jokes a lot about being a Republican from Massachusetts. The jokes work with Republican crowds that aren’t from Massachusetts, but to some they come across as insulting to his home state. They can be taken as expressing the general thought: “Can you believe the fools I have to put up with back home?” There is none of that in Jindal’s jests. They are directed at politicians, not the people who elect them. So they not only break the ice, but they instantly establish him as a political outsider, a normal person thrust into a corrupt world by the calling of public service.
There’s more at the link. I still think, with grassroots support, Jindal’s re-election bid wouldn’t be much of a hindrance to a Presidential run. He’s going to win re-election. George W. Bush, a less popular politician in a bluer state, won re-election in 1998 despite the fact that everyone and his mother knew he was running for President. Despite the fact that he’d made very obvious moves in that direction. He won easily, historically. Jindal could gradually ramp up out of state events, avoiding Iowa and NH, staying mum on his future plans, and then leap into the fray in mid-November with a skeleton operation if none of the major players had closed the sale. It’s worth thinking about.
