I think I I agree with Ross Douthat that whatever one makes of the occasionally ugly and xenophobic nature of attacks on Barack Obama, there’s no particular reason to believe that brown skin would prevent Bobby Jindal from securing the 2012 GOP nomination.
But thinking about this mostly reminded me that though super-premature 2012 speculation sure is fun, it’s really, really, really dumb to be getting too involved in this. To state the obvious, who’ll be well-positioned to secure the nomination is going to have an awful lot to do with which actual events occur in the world. So I’d say rather than speculate on Jindal or Palin or Huckabee or America’s Next Bush it makes more sense to focus on what the world would have to be like for such-and-such a candidate to win.
To take Palin as an example, one possible scenario for 2009 involves big Democratic wins inducing a certain amount of panic among Republican legislators. You could see Senators Collins, Snow, and Specter plus to a lesser extent guys like Gregg, Grassley, and Voinovich agreeing to somewhat watered-down versions of the main items on the Obama agenda. That’s the kind of thing that build the anger on the base that helped fuel Howard Dean’s rise in 2003-2004, and I think it’s the kind of thing that would incline the conservative base to tune out criticisms of Palin by lumping them in with a whole goulash of selloutery. But things could also go in a very different and less Palin-friendly direction instead.
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