By IANS,
Washington : John McCain is to meet Bobby Jindal during a trip to New Orleans this week, reportedly over selection of a running mate by the Republican presidential candidate, The Fix politics blog of Washington Post said quoting sources close to the McCain campaign.
Stating that McCain’s trip to Louisiana Wednesday was not in his earlier schedule, Chris Cillizz commented on The Fix, that the meeting with Jindal, the state’s Indian American governor since 2007, suggests that “McCain himself is deeply engaged in the process of picking his second-in-command and that the youthful Jindal is under serious consideration”.
Cillizz goes on to quote political pundits to say that McCain is expected to make his vice-presidential pick known by the end of this week.
Jindal, 37, is widely regarded within the Republican party nationally as one of its rising stars and has been touted as the best choice for vice president by a variety of party luminaries ranging from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to talk radio celebrity Rush Limbaugh.
Gingrich has called Jindal “America’s most transformational governor.”
And in a recent profile of Limbaugh, New York Times wrote: “As for politics, Rush has already picked his candidate for the Conservative Restoration: Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 37-year-old prodigy whom Limbaugh considers to be a genuine movement conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold — ‘fresh, energetic and optimistic in his view of America.'”
The blog goes on to say that picking Jindal, an unorthodox choice, has both pluses and minuses. On the minus side, McCain would then essentially cede one of the main pillars of his argument against presumed rival Barack Obama: experience. Jindal is nearly a decade younger than Obama and, although he served in Congress before being elected governor, his foreign policy resume is as thin as Obama’s.
On the positive side, naming Jindal would be a major symbolic step in fundamentally re-branding the Republican party. Jindal, an Indian American, would put a whole new face on a party that is widely seen by voters as controlled by old white men, the blog concluded.