Bobby Jindal hasn't held any office long enough to show us a real track record. He is very good at running for office, however; he's able to inspire confidence in a pretty broad spectrum of voters as an obviously brainy technocrat who is also a Hindu convert to Catholicism with solid "social conservative" credentials.

His tenure as state director of health and hospitals in Louisiana lasted longer than either of his forays into elected office ~ his so-far-brief governorship and his single term in Congress. Fiscal conservatives gave him high marks for tightening up the health-department budget; poor folks (and many social-worker state employees) were dismayed by the dimished availability of public health facilities.

The first session of the Louisiana legislature came to an end a few weeks ago. Governor Jindal let a record number of bills become law without his signature, for whatever reason I'm sure I don't know. One of the very few bills that he did make it a point to sign was one mandating the teaching of "intelligent design" in the public schools. Several of his professors at prestigious Brown University, where he studied biology as a pre-med student, expressed shock and disappointment that he would so obviously pander to the anti-science crowd.

If I sound a little harsh, I don't really mean to. Gov. Jindal offers a lot more hope to Louisiana than most other politicians of both parties, because he IS intelligent, and quite young to boot. As a Republican in the South, I suppose that he has to meet certain expectations. If he truly manages to bring about the ethical reform he promises, it'll be worth almost anything else he does ~ but the odds are against him; he wouldn't be the first reformer to ride to the Governoer's Mansion on a white horse only to find the pervading culture of financial corruption impossible to displace.