On Our Side
There’s surprisingly little talk about vice presidential candidates these days. I remember more interest expressed in my childhood, when I didn’t follow the news closely, and when the vice president didn’t really matter. The power and presence of Dick “fuck you” Cheney should wake us all up to the fact that veeps can matter, and matter a great deal, even if the president doesn’t die in office. But nothing stops political junkies from speculating, any more than sports junkies can stop predicting next year’s lineup, so you can find the predictions if you bother to look.
All the likely choices have their ups and downs. One of the names to watch is Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. The theory goes that, while the Katrina debacle hardly covered him in glory, he’s a fresh young face (which could work for or against the aging McCain), a committed neocon who could reassure a party leadership unsure of McCain’s patrician credentials, and also an outspoken Christian who could energize the religious wing of the party disappointed to see Huckabee’s ejection. The kind of Christian who feels the separation of church and state should operate in only one direction.
Jindal was born into a Hindu family, which might cast him under suspicion among the True Believers, but is more likely to work in his favor: Americans who “vote Christian” are likely to eat up his story of conversion as a young man, a lost soul drawn by the undeniable light to find his way to Jesus. To be sure, his Christian branch of choice is Catholicism—a sect only recently superseded by Islam in the minds of fundamentalists as a threat to America—but, given his account of exorcising a demon from a fellow college student (a function Catholic dogma reserves to priests), it’s a less-threatening pick-and-choose sort of Catholicism. Like Catholics who practice homosexuality or birth control, but far more agreeable to the fundies. Jindal is a real success story by the Christian right’s lights.
Which has me wondering: how many of the same people who are delighted at Jindal’s brand of religion and politics continue to believe Obama is a crypto-Muslim. The evidence, such as it is, that Jindal is a crypto-Hindu is the same, if not stronger: both were born to non-Christian parents, although only Jindal was raised outside Christianity, and they both are (gasp) sort of darkish-colored. Yet I don’t doubt that the True Believers would have little trouble convincing themselves that only one of these men can really be trusted by protestant fundamentalists to infuse the White House with proper Christian values. Perpetual war, disenfranchising the poor, and hating fags.