Governor, You're No Sarah Palin

David Adesnik is flirting with a flirtation with (sic) Bobby Jindal (link) (link). "Jindal the Wonk," he calls him,and from a guy like Adesnik, that's a compliment. He's certainly right: Jindal is no Sarah Palin: even though he may appeal to the same base, he is a thousand times better informed and likewise more resourceful on his feet. Adesnik adds:

... I would expect all those conservative columnists who condemned Sarah Palin as lacking substance to fall in love Jindal the same way that liberal columnists fell in love with Obama.

It's not easy to suss out exactly what Adesnik has in mind here, but he seems to be advancing two propositions, neither of which will bear close scrutiny:

• Jindal will be able to maintain his more-or-less coherent body of conservative doctrine once he gets caught up in the maws of the national Republican party.

And:

• Conservative commentators have been pining for an honest and coherent conservative candidate and will toss their hats in the air when they see one.

The first is the more problematic of the two: it maybe that the national Republicans will forgive him a reasonable amount of policy coherence as long as he retains a commitment to core principles like exorcism and general religiosity. Although I wouldn't count on it: the only guy in the last round who had anything like an intelligible economic platform was Mitt Romney and look what happened to him.

The second point is, I think, just laughable. The idea that there is a cadre of "conservative commentators" who are just waiting for an honest and responsible Republican candidate to embrace is just laughable. Or rather it is a club of one: Bruce Bartlett. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any self-styled conservative commentator who wasn't willing to get in bed with the devil if it looked like elective office for his team might be the prize. So if they take him, it will be because they think he can win, and his "program" will be just an incident.

[And while I'm at it--scoring against David Gregory may not be that big of a deal anyway. Gregory interviews strike me as pretty limp, although it may be a question whether that's a weakness in Gregory or in his customary opposiition.]

Update: Brad DeLong believes that Jindal shows disloyalty to his electorate by rejecting unemployment spending. But this is hardly disloyalty: the money in question would go mostly to blacks who didn't vote for him anyway.