Could GOP have taken Bobby Jindal?

Sarah Palin in 2012?

As Republicans anticipate a drubbing on Tuesday, party leaders and strategists are already engaged in internecine warfare —- pointing fingers, casting blame and taking sides. A substantial faction, incredibly, is pinning its hopes for a GOP revival on Sarah Palin, despite her disastrous outing on the national stage. Even some conservative critics who believe she’s not yet ready think she’s a rising star, a young player who could make a credible comeback.

Surely, the Republican Party can do better than Palin, who, despite good political instincts and genuine charisma, disdains intellect, disregards ethical standards, ignores policy details and lies habitually. The more voters learned about her in this campaign season, the less they liked her. Some political strategists believe she’s done John McCain more harm than George W. Bush.

What about Bobby Jindal, the young GOP governor of Louisiana? While he was highly touted during the Republican National Convention —- he canceled a planned convention speech to stay home to handle disaster planning during Hurricane Gustav —- he’s barely been mentioned since.

Had McCain chosen Jindal as his veep, the GOP ticket might not be struggling to catch up. Certainly, the Louisiana governor would not have embarrassed himself in interviews with network news anchors.

Occasionally described as the GOP’s Barack Obama, Jindal is a brown-skinned man of Indian heritage whose parents immigrated shortly before he was born. He racked up an impressive record in state and federal appointments, mostly to health care bureaucracies, before he won a congressional seat in 2004. Elected governor in 2007, he shook up an entrenched statehouse by insisting on reform.

If McCain was looking for a rock-solid social conservative, he would have found it in Jindal, who converted to Catholicism in high school and shows up on the (far) right side of litmus-test issues. He opposes abortion as well as expanded stem-cell research; he favors the teaching of so-called intelligent design.

He’s a favorite of Rush Limbaugh. Yet, he has appeal across party lines: His gubernatorial bids (Jindal lost his first run, in 2003) were supported by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat.

Jindal’s credentials make him sound like the obvious savior for a party desperately in need of a image transplant.

But how does a party of Palinism —- elite-bashing, “real America”-loving, anti-intellectual, xenophobic and racially intolerant simplemindedness —- turn around and embrace a figure like Jindal? He could easily be smeared as “other.” His parents are Hindu. That might not be quite as incendiary among low-information voters as Muslim parentage, but it’s not Christian, either. While he took the name Bobby as a child, he was born Piyush. (To their everlasting discredit, Louisiana Democrats took to using his given name as a wedge in the gubernatorial race.)

And, as a straight-A, Ivy League-educated Rhodes Scholar, Jindal is at least as intellectual as Obama. How’s the University of Oxford for elitism?

The Republican Party has painted itself into a very small and very white corner with its refusal to give up the ignominious Southern strategy, which relies on an appeal to white voters still resentful of the civil rights movement, skeptical of intellectual achievement and, lately, hostile to dark-skinned immigrants from south of the border. McCain admirably resisted that for much of his campaign; indeed, the Republican base was not happy with his moderate stance on immigration reform.

But as Obama’s campaign picked up steam, McCain dipped into the bitter well of racially coded rhetoric. He went from describing his rival’s tax policies as “redistributionist” and “socialist” to calling them “welfare handouts,” a label meant to incite working-class whites. It probably won’t work —- at least not well enough to boost McCain to victory.

But the tactic does push the GOP further into the tight embrace of a constituency that seems, well, hostile to diversity. That hurts not only Bobby Jindal, whose appeal to such a constituency would likely be limited. It also hurts the Republican Party, which can hardly hope to forge a winning majority in a nation growing browner every day.

> Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.

cynthia@ajc.com