IS IT JINDAL? ABC NEWS ALL BUT SAYS SO

The clip isn't online, but ABC's Ron Claiborne reported this tonight:

McCain will travel this week to several key swing states -- Maine today, New Hampshire tomorrow, Pennsylvania and Colorado. He will also stop in solidly Republican Louisiana on Thursday. The campaign says it has an event it won't reveal that is supposed to capture some of the spotlight the same day Obama delivers a major speech in Berlin.

Rod Dreher watched the same story and says, "Yep, it's Jindal." I think that may be right.

On the other hand, Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post says McCain plans to meet with Jindal Wednesday, not Thursday. ("McCain's trip to Louisiana on Wednesday was the cause of much head scratching in the political world as it was not in keeping with a week of planned stops in battleground states," Cillizza adds.) And Robert Novak claims insiders are saying McCain will announce his VP pick this week, but Novak suggests it will be Mitt Romney.

I think Jindal would be a really problematic choice for McCain. As Cillizza says,

McCain would essentially cede one of the main pillars of his argument against Obama: experience. Jindal is a nearly a decade younger than Obama and, although he served in Congress before being elected governor, his foreign policy resume is at least as thin as Obama's.

And that really matters when much of the electorate imagines that you might not live through your term in office.

And, to be frank, Jindal would also mitigate the race issue for Obama -- if you think voters who shun Obama because he's African-American will simply shrug off Jindal's lineage, you've obviously never seen an AMERICAN OWNED sign at a motel.

But I think the McCain campaign really may not be ready for the reaction to the story of the exorcism Jindal participated in in his youth. And his doubts about evolution and the separation of church and state wouldn't help McCain with moderates, either.