EDMUND BURKESpeculation about who Romney will select for his vice-presidential running mate has shifted from Marc Rubio to Condoleezza Rice – and now to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
There’s not a snowball in hell’s chance that Romney will select Jindal. Such an announcement would drown in howls of laughter.
What’s so funny?
In 1994, Bobby Jindal wrote an article titled “Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare” that describes how he performed an exorcism on a friend. No, I’m not making this up. It was reported by Mother Jones magazine; you can access that piece here.
Bobby Jindal was in college when he drove the “strange evil force” from his friend’s body with a crucifix and Bible readings. Many of us – well, actually, all of us – have done weird things during that stage of their lives. Jindal was still only 23 when he wrote about the experience. But for two reasons, the Romney campaign is not going to say “full steam ahead and damn the torpedo” on the assumption that voters will overlook Jindal's beliefs as a very young man. Both of those reasons may be unfair. But they are real political perils nonetheless.
The first reason is Christine O’Donnell, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate seat from Delaware in 2010. O’Donnell
was a lightweight who won a surprise upset in the GOP primary over moderate Congressman Mike Castle during the tea party storm, and she never had much of a chance in the general election. But whatever chance she did have went up in flames when she appeared in a television commercial and announced, “I am not a witch.I'm you.” O’Donnell had previously become fodder for late-night comics because she said she had “dabbled in witchcraft” in high school. She ran the commercial to try to end the laughter. Suffice it say, it didn’t work. Jindal would become O’Donnell redux.
Moreover, Romney can’t afford to have his running mate’s interviews veer off into questions about whether he once believed – and still believes – in demonic possession. Nor can Romney afford to have the reporters plague him with questions about whether he knew that Jindal performed an exorcism when he selected Jindal as his running mate. (There are only two bad answers to that question.)
The second reason is that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, a religion about which some Americans are not fully comfortable, and he cannot afford a running mate with any kind of religious issue. If Romney chose Jindal as his running mate, cable shows would inevitably wind up discussing whether the Church of Latter-Day Saints believes in demonic possession. (The answer may be a simple no, but asking the question does the damage all by itself.)
Though regular readers of this blog may be getting tired of hearing me say it, assuming that he didn’t practice animal sacrifice while at Dartmouth College, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio will be the GOP vice-presidential nominee.