We may or may not be closing in on Pawlenty, but we're definitely closing in on Who-Gives-a-Flying-Fuck.

McCain's trailing, what, 60-30 with hispanics? If he nominates any white male, he's screwed. Tom Ridge might pick off PA, Romney might help pick off MI if he's radical enough about s.t. like federalizing the Big 2.5's health care obligations, but these are long shots. It's time for a Hail Mary pass.

If Condi's neutral in this race, then McCain has to go with Jindal or fuhgeddaboutit.

teplukhin2you: "McCain's trailing, what, 60-30 with hispanics? If he nominates any white male, he's screwed."

Are you implying that more Latino voters might go for McCain if he picked a far-right Indian American immigration hawk as his running mate? Jindal is Catholic, but otherwise I don't see the upside. Am I missing something?

tep: Jindal helps with hispanics, how?   Choosing Jindal would simply confirm McCain's rightward slide on immigration issues, which isn't going to play all that well in the Hispanic community.

the Jindal boom only highlights one brutal fact; The GOP is so desperate and so white that anyone, even some geeky non-white guy who has only been in office for hardly a year, seems like an answer.

We Latinos may be dumb but we ain't stupid: We see Jindal as a standard issue conservative hostile to most issues that we care about and just because he is browner than almost all Republicans doesn't mean the we will see him as a compadre. Last time I checked Jindal is Spanish for....nothing.  

tep, you are aware that not all brown people are the same, right?

I can't decide if tep's post is more offensive to Latinos or Catholics.

Anyway, Bobby "The Exorcist" Jindal said this just the other day:

"I'm not going to be the vice presidential nominee or vice president," Jindal told Fox News. "I'm going to help Sen. McCain get elected [president] as governor of Louisiana."

"Let me be clear: I have said in every private and public conversation, I've got the job that I want," Jindal said.

www.cnn.com/.../veep.talk

Barnacle...

I don't know either. What a strange perspective to think that Latinos will be more inclined to support McCain because he picks an American of East Indian descent who is very conservative and is brown skinned. Man, I know that many white people think we're stupid but wow, I have never been accused of not being able to differentiate between a compadre and and East Indian conservative!

I think what this does show is just how Obama has flummoxed the GOP - and some of our talk backers - and has short circuited their thinking, for lack of a better term. JIndal is certainly a young man with a future in the slowly dying white man's world of John McCain, Phil Gramm, and all these incompetent Bushes. But why anyone would think that putting Jindal on the McCain ticket would help with Latinos is just plain incomprehensible. Unless one operates from the perspective that all these brown skinned folks think and look alike and aren't smart enough to figure out the difference...

As a non-Republican, my interest here is not in who can best help McCain get elected. (Huckabee or Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, if you ask me.) My interest is in who would be the least-bad vice president of the United States, especially during the presidency of a man who has at least a one-in-three chance of dying in office.

Judged on that score, Pawlenty is a decidedly not-bad choice. I would never want the man to be president. But compared to most of the Republicans already in Washington, he almost qualifies as an old-fashioned good-government pragmatist. There are several better potential presidents in the GOP ranks, but there are a hell of a lot worse. However, I would worry about whether the hierarchical-minded GOP would be capable of accepting Pawlenty as a natural successor to McCain. If not, then McCain would enter office with no ability to control his own party's caucus in Congress. Take the influence Bush has had over congressional Republicans in his second term, thanks to the lack of an apparent successor, and apply to McCain in his first term. Bad news for a McCain presidency, and also bad news for the nation.

In defense of tep, I don't think he's implying that all brown-skinned folks think alike.  I think that he's saying that because the cards are so stacked against McCain, especially if he's losing the Hispanic vote by such a margin, he needs to change the game.  Jindal would be as good of a game-changer as any (although apparently, he doesn't want to be veep).  Jindal would be a desparate attempt to change the dynamics of the race, which is what I think tep thinks McCain needs to do to have any shot at winning.  Whether a hail-Mary would actually help McCain is a different matter, but if he's on track to lose, he can't want the game to stay the same.