There are a lot of rumors swirling around that John McCain will announce Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as his running mate on Thursday. A lot of it is being driven by Bob Novak, but it is also being driven by the mere fact that McCain is deviating from his swing-state focus to travel to Louisiana that day. I’m very skeptical of this speculation.
From an historical perspective it would be unprecedented to name a running mate more than a month before the party convention. The selection of a running mate offers a prime opportunity to seize control of the media narrative for the better part of a week. And the timing of the announcement is usually reserved for a week where you will get the most bang for the buck. In McCain’s case, the perfect time is immediately after the Democratic National Convention. With Obama, presumably, riding high off his nomination in front of nearly 80,000 adoring fans in Denver, McCain can use his announcement to cut short the love-fest and refocus the media’s attention on the upcoming Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.
The media is increasingly bored by the parties’ conventions and they keep trimming back the amount of coverage they provide. If the vice-presidential pick has been known for six weeks already by the time the Republican convention gets underway it will be hard to get the press to even cover anything more than McCain’s acceptance speech.
And this Thursday seems a particularly inopportune time for McCain to make such an announcement. It might be the only day of this election cycle when the announcement of a running mate would not be the number one story on the nightly news. That is because Barack Obama will be in Berlin on Thursday addressing a crowd that could approach a million. If McCain thinks he can short-circuit coverage of such an historic event by announcing that Bobby Jindal will be his running mate then his mind is lost in either Czechoslovakia or the Iraqi-Pakistan border region.
However, I won’t be totally shocked if Bobby Jindal is eventually nominated as the vice-presidential pick, or even if the decision is made official (but not publicly announced) on Thursday. McCain’s choices are few. Most seasoned politicians have little interest in joining a race that looks increasingly doomed. But some younger up-and-comers would see it as an opportunity to raise their profile for a race later on down the line. Gov. Jindal fits that profile. Jindal is only 37 years old (two years older than the Constitutional minimum age requirement). He’s Indian-American (Asian, not Native). His political experience is mostly in the House of Representatives, but he has seven months experience as a state executive.
McCain would make news by selecting an ethnic minority and it would help in states like Virginia and New Jersey that have heavy Indian populations. On the other hand,
