Jindal gearing up for potential 2016 campaign

Jindal has said publicly he doesn’t know whether he’ll run in 2016, but at the end of 2013 he announced the creation of a nonprofit group, America Next, that will help him bolster his credentials as a thought leader within the Republican party ahead of the 2016 election. As he serves out his second term as governor, which ends in January 2016, it can also serve as something of a shadow campaign organization.

Thus far, the governor has staffed it like one. Though America Next will churn out conservative policy proposals, Jindal’s first organizational hire was Jill Neunaber, who ran the Romney campaign in Iowa during the general election and, during the primaries, served as deputy campaign manager in New Hampshire. Last month, he brought on a more traditional choice for a policy organization: former Jim DeMint staffer and Heritage Foundation scholar Chris Jacobs.

At the annual meeting of the Republican Governor’s Association earlier this week, Jindal injected himself back into the national conversation, surfacing in the nation’s capital with dramatic flair. Emerging from a White House meeting with President Obama, he got just a few steps down the driveway before calling the president’s failure to approve the Keystone pipeline tantamount to “waving the white flag of surrender” and assailing him for creating a “minimum-wage economy.”