A serious threat for Dems

is Bobby Jindal, the articulate, well-informed, 36-year-old, Republican congressman who’s just been elected Governor of Louisiana.

From the AP:

Changing Louisiana's reputation for corruption would do more than just make over its image, Gov.-elect Bobby Jindal said Sunday: It could help the state attract businesses and win federal aid for hurricane recovery.

The Republican congressman, a day after his historic win in an election that featured a dozen candidates for governor, pressed ahead with his campaign pledge, saying in an interview with The Associated Press that one of his first acts will be to call a special legislative session to reform ethics laws.

"I think we're setting the bar too low when we say, 'Look, isn't it great that we haven't had a statewide elected official go to jail recently?' " Jindal said. …

The son of immigrants on Saturday won more than 50 percent of the vote in a primary election to make him Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction and the nation's first Indian-American chief executive. …

Some bio info from the NY Times:

… Piyush Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge to Hindu parents who had come to the United States six months before so his mother could pursue a graduate degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University.

His father was an engineer from the Punjab region of India, the only one of nine siblings to attend high school. The younger Jindal, growing up in Baton Rouge, was not expected to come home from school with anything less than 100 on tests.

Public high school in Baton Rouge was followed by Brown, where Mr. Jindal was Phi Beta Kappa, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism that Mr. Jindal has described in transformative terms. “I draw my definition of integrity from my Christian faith,” Mr. Jindal said during the campaign. “In my faith, you give 100 percent of yourself to God.”

“But we live in a pluralistic state,” he was careful to add.

After Oxford, a well-paid stint at the Washington consultants McKinsey and Company was followed by an interview for the job of secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals with the newly elected Republican governor of Louisiana, Mike Foster, in 1995.

Mr. Jindal was 24; it was the biggest department in state government, and it was in serious financial trouble. He got the job despite Mr. Foster’s initial skepticism, made cuts and restored the department to financial stability; Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages of uninsured, however.

More high-level jobs followed in quick succession: chairman of a bipartisan Medicare reform commission in Washington, head of the statewide University of Louisiana system, assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services under Mr. Bush.

He and his wife, Supriya, returned to Louisiana to so he could run for governor in 2003. The Jindals have three young children, Celia, Shaan and Slade.

The Democrats have lost a gubernatorial seat to the Republicans. But neither the AP nor the NYT speculate on what that might mean for ’08.

But you can be sure had Jindal lost instead of pulling an amazing 54% of the vote in a 12-candidate field, we’d be hearing a lot about “one more indicator of public dissatisfaction with President Bush and the Republicans.”

Jindal presents a very threat to Dems and their MSM allies. The last thing they want happening is a popular and successful Republican who’s also a member of a minority group emerging on the national scene.

I predict the Dems and most MSM will move early and hard to inflict what political damage they can on Jindal.

The AP story is here; the NYT story here.