The other day I posted about a Massachusetts race (The Incredible One-Day Significance of Tsongas v. Ogonowski!) which offered some very minor insight into how 2008 might play out. Today I am going to post about a much more major race which is of real consequence for 2008-- and, in the absolutely non-partisan, bare and phalanxed fashion in which I always post here, I will show how this is good news for candidates, or at least one candidate, on both sides of the aisle.

Bobby Jindal is the first national real-life example of a Hollywood type, the whip-smart Indian kid (see Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle). He founded the Young Republicans chapter at Brown, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, joined McKinsey out of school, was an assistant secretary of HHS for the first couple of years of the Bush administration. Four years ago Kathleen Blanco narrowly beat him for governor of Louisiana, so he ran for Congress the next year and won.

Now, the national script has been that Blanco was an innocent bystander to the disaster of Katrina, sole work of the Republicans, one George W. Bush in particular. (You all remember all those speeches John Kerry gave about repairing the infrastructure in places like New Orleans. Practically the whole election was about that.) Well, whoops, turns out the people of Louisiana didn't quite see it that way. Blanco polled so disastrously that she dropped out, and Jindal found himself against 12, count 'em, Democratic candidates.

Normally that would be an easy walk to a win for anybody. But Louisiana has the rule that if no one polls over 50%, there's a runoff election. It's rare that anyone running for statewide office skips the runoff and wins outright. And Jindal was up against an especially ugly, racist and anti-Catholic Democratic campaign. Yet Jindal won 53% of the vote-- avoiding a runoff and, like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, coming back a star. (Or would a better movie reference be Rudy and Kumar Go To White House?)

Ah, but he won it because Katrina purged Louisiana of black people! you say. Well, turns out that's not so true. New Orleans is depopulated, but much of that population has moved to Baton Rouge and places like that. So they're still voting in Louisiana. Jindal may have been helped a little that way, but still, this is someone who won all but four parishes of the state, proving his appeal across all groups-- from black Democrats to white Catholics to white Protestants who once went for David Duke. Katrina elected him all right-- but not in the way lazy commentators will insist.

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So what does Jindal's election mean?

First, it means Katrina is dead as a campaign issue. It probably always was-- it was never clear why it should have affected, say, the Mayor of New York City or a senator from Arizona-- but as part of the litany of Bush's sins (HalliburtonEnronKatrinaIraq) it had totemic power for some Democrats. Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana didn't get the memo and clearly blame their own hapless leadership and history of Democratic machine corruption, especially as contrasted with, say, Mississippi's Republican governor Haley Barbour. The rest of the world may blame Bush for the New Orleans mess, but Louisianans see Republicans like Jindal as the reform faction in their politics, and rightly so. So its utility as a weapon against the Republican candidate in 2008 is officially ended.

But I said it would help people on both sides of the aisle. And it does. The other huge beneficiary of Jindal's win is one Barack Obama, Democratic candidate for president. One of the unspoken themes of Hillary Clinton's electability has always been-- "I know you're not a racist, and you know I'm not a racist, but we both know that all those red-state hicks ARE racists-- and they'll never vote for a black skin, no matter how Harvard-educated and bestselling and charismatic he might be."

I personally never believed that, and the adoring crowds greeting Obama everywhere he went demonstrated to me that he was meeting an enormous hunger among white America for a non-crazy black leader, for someone who wasn't a guilt-tripping mau-mauer/con artist like Sharpton or Jackson, but would validate their sense of being post-racist. But it's hard to argue what's in other people's hearts.

For Louisiana-- for the state of David Duke-- for the place some pundit once described by saying, "Louisiana isn't southern America, it's northern Guatemala"-- to elect a brown-skinned person because he's simply way way smarter and cleaner than the alternative proves that we really are, two generations after the dawn of the civil rights era, living in a transformed America. Is racism dead? No. Is it possible to outvote it now in virtually any state of the Union (or the Confederacy)? The conclusion now must be yes.

That's very good news for Barack Obama, a mighty blow against one of the presumptions underlying Hillary's supposed inevitability. And certainly far from the worst outcome of this election would be Obama running for reelection in 2012-- against the equally young and impressive Governor Jindal of Louisiana.