BOBBY JINDAL came to America in utero when his parents moved from India. He jokes that he was “a pre-existing condition”—the kind of witticism that comes naturally to a health-care wonk.

Mr Jindal is obviously brainy: he was running Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, an agency with 13,000 staff, at the age of 24. Two years later he was director of a bipartisan commission to reform Medicare, the giant federal health scheme for the elderly, under Bill Clinton. As governor of Louisiana since 2008, he is known for his grasp of detail and for his warning to fellow Republicans to “stop being the stupid party”. Yet now that he is thinking of running for president, he has started to say things that sound—how can one put this?—less subtle than you might expect from a former Rhodes scholar.

Sharia (Islamic law) is “oppressive and it is wrong”. Barack Obama is “unfit to be commander-in-chief” because he won’t say that America is at war with radical Islam. The president is also waging a “silent war on religious liberty”, Mr Jindal claims, citing an unsuccessful attempt to force companies with devout owners to subsidise contraceptives they consider abortifacients. Asked if this is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, he says it is not, though he concedes that, unlike in some other countries, the war on religious freedom in America is “not a shooting war”.

Mr Jindal’s change of tone is common among aspirants for the White House. Party primaries demand primary colours. Mr Jindal has neither a famous name nor deep pockets, and he is vying with at least a dozen other plausible contenders for the Republican nomination. He has to make conservatives who have not yet heard of him fall in love with him. That means offering them plenty of red meat.

He has several qualities that will help. At 43, he is young and energetic. A Hindu-turned-Catholic, he seems comfortable talking about his faith—in a way that Mitt Romney and John McCain never were. He is also not white—an advantage in a party that would like to stop alienating minorities. His family history—of immigrants who struggled and succeeded—has wide appeal. It also makes it easier for him to say fairly tough things about immigration. He wants to let more skilled immigrants into America, but fewer illegal ones. He complains that the current system is “a low wall and a narrow gate”. “We need the opposite,” he says. Overall, he comes across as more socially conservative than Jeb Bush, more of a defence hawk than Rand Paul and more sensible than Ted Cruz.

In person, Mr Jindal is affable and smooth. He talks fast, tossing out torrents of statistics. However, he struggles to electrify a crowd or make undecided voters swoon. Polls suggest that Americans are keener on the idea of putting a governor in the White House than they were before Senator Obama first ran for the presidency—executive experience matters, they have concluded. But a small, poor, rural state such as Louisiana makes a wobbly launching pad. Mr Clinton made it from Arkansas to DC, but he was the best retail politician of his generation. Mr Jindal is not. Nor can he claim, as the Republican governors of Ohio or Wisconsin can, that he brings a home-turf advantage to a crucial swing state. It is nearly 20 years since Louisiana last voted for a Democrat in a presidential election.

Mr Jindal’s record as governor is mixed. Conservatives will applaud his passion for school choice and his zeal for cutting and simplifying taxes and shrinking the state. But his plan to abolish income tax died in the state legislature, and the recent collapse in the oil price makes his job much harder. Louisiana, a big oil-producer, faces a $1.6 billion budget shortfall this coming fiscal year—6.5% of the total. On February 27th Mr Jindal proposed slashing more than $500m in subsidies to business and putting up the state cigarette tax. He also hopes to trim state spending on health-care services by 0.3% and on higher education by 6%, saving another $171m or so. How he handles Louisiana’s money troubles will be closely watched. If he can muddle through without raising income taxes, fiscal hawks will be impressed.

Mr Jindal remains a long shot for the Republican nomination. But he could make a good running mate for a more centrist candidate, argues Bob Hogan of Louisiana State University. “The governor would satisfy and assuage the concerns social and religious conservatives would have with a candidate like [Jeb] Bush,” he says.

An edited transcript of The Economist's interview with Governor Jindal can be found here.