Louisiana politics is never dull, and rarely conventional. And we're seeing a fresh example of that in an ad being run by the state's Democratic Party criticizing Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal for his hostility towards--you'll never guess this one--Protestants.

The ad, part of a series aimed at cutting into Jindal's lead over the gubernatorial field heading towards the October 20 open primary, focuses on a 1996 Jindal article published by the New Oxford Review, that hardy outlet for Catholic "traditionalist" polemics. According to the ad, Jindal called Protestants depraved, selfish and heretical. It directs viewers to a web page offering links to that and other Jindal writings on religion, much of it also from NOR.

The 1996 piece basically reads like a first draft of Catholic Apologetics For Dummies. Relying heavily on scriptural citations, Jindal trudges through a defense of Catholic teaching on such topics as justification-by-faith, tradition-versus-scripture, the sacraments, the papacy, the apostolic succession of bishops, and Rome's claims to universality. Other than its leaden, pre-Vatican II writing style, the only jarring thing about the article is that a guy like Jindal--at the time the wunderkind secretary of health services for Louisiana--is the author.

Unsurprisingly, the Democratic ad is running in three Northern Louisiana media markets. This is a heavily Protestant (especially Baptist and Pentecostal) region, and also where Kathleen Blanco exceeded expectations in her upset win over Jindal in 2003. Indeed, Jindal and other Republicans are probably screaming bloody murder over the ad in order to make sure the heavily Catholic population of southern LA knows he's being attacked for his fidei defensor scribblings. Since Louisiana Democrats knew they couldn't really microtarget the ad, you have to figure they calculated that many Catholics ain't that jazzed about old-school Catholic-Protestant polemics, either.

My own feeling is that having forced some poor grad student researcher to read back issues of the New Oxford Review, the state Democratic Party might have done better to contrast that publication's--and for that matter, the Vatican's--chronic hostility to the Iraq War and Bush foreign policies generally with Jindal's thousand-percent support for same. But perhaps the whole thing is just an effort to suggest that Bobby is, well, just a strange dude, because of, not despite, his remarkably precocious career. We're talking about a twenty-five-year old running a Medicaid program in one of America's poorest states, who apparently has enough spare time from his day job to pen a 16th-century style theological tract for a publication considered a extreme even by other right-wing Catholics.

Louisiana Democrats are clearly trying to suggest Jindal's "not one of us" without getting into the vieled racial issues that likely played a role in Bobby's loss in 2003. I'm skeptical that this latest tack will work, but Jindal had best be careful that in reacting to such criticisms, he doesn't reinforce the larger point.