Vice President: Bobby Jindal?

For our May issue, the Townhall editorial team compiled a list of the hottest vice presidential contenders out there and made the case for their selection. We had a a few criteria when crafting the list: a statesman (or woman!) who has led on conservative policy, is politically viable, inherently marketable and appeals to America’s imagination.

Here's one of the top eight candidates and four honorable mentions that made the cut. Agree or disagree? Read the full article, and then voice your opinion in our veepstakes poll!

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From Townhall Magazine's EXCLUSIVE May feature, "Who Will Win the Veepstakes?":

Bobby Jindal: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal would make an attractive choice for a GOP running mate for several key reasons. A relatively young, Southern politician with an ethnic background and experience in both the private sector and the public sphere, Jindal, despite a poorly received national State of the Union rebuttal in 2009, is a popular state executive, having won re-election to Louisiana’s governorship in October of 2011 with more than 65 percent of the vote. Jindal also has direct personal knowledge involving several of the issues most important to Americans today.

One of these is ObamaCare. Having spent much of his career in the health care field—as the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, where he rescued the state’s Medicaid program from bankruptcy, and later as the assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush—Jindal has a particularly powerful voice in the health care fight, and he’s been adamant in insisting ObamaCare is unconstitutional.

As governor of a Gulf state, Jindal has been highly critical of Obama’s energy policy, repeatedly referring to it as a “radical environmental ideology.” After having managed the BP oil spill crisis and overseeing his state’s economic recovery, he has been a strong proponent for more domestic oil and gas drilling. His employment credentials are a strong selling point, too: by introducing more business-friendly measures, decreasing the size of the state bureaucracy and cutting back on the state’s deficit by 26 percent during his first term alone, Louisiana had an unemployment rate below the national average—a solid 6.9 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—as of January 2012.

Jindal is also proving that conservative solutions can work for education reform on the state level. Louisiana has one of the most market-based school systems in the country after expanding school choice and seeing an explosion of charter schools, as well as offering low-income students a tuition voucher to attend the school of their choice. Currently, Jindal is taking on the teachers’ unions with plans to shift away from teachers’ lifetime security and seniority rules and to create the largest vouchers programs in the country—and the controversy that’s already brewing there may boost him to national attention.

Read more about Jindal and other potential vice presidential candidates in the May isssue of Townhall Magazine.