It’s hard not to like the story of this (as the New York Times puts it) “improbable” candidate for governor in Louisiana — a Catholic convert who could could give a completely new face to politics in the American south:

An Oxford-educated son of immigrants from India is virtually certain to become the leading candidate for Louisiana’s next governor in Saturday’s primary election. It would be an unlikely choice for a state that usually picks its leaders from deep in the rural hinterlands and has not had a nonwhite chief executive since Reconstruction.

But peculiar circumstances have combined to make Representative Bobby Jindal, a conservative two-term Republican, the overwhelming favorite. Analysts predict Mr. Jindal, 36, could get more than 50 percent of the vote in the open primary, thus avoiding a November runoff and becoming the nation’s first Indian-American governor. If he fails to win a majority, he would face the next-highest vote getter in the runoff.

Louisiana Democrats are demoralized, caught between the perception of post-hurricane incompetence surrounding their standard bearer, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who is not running for re-election, and corruption allegations against senior elected officials like William J. Jefferson, the congressman from New Orleans.

Leading Democrats begged off the governor’s race, and Mr. Jindal’s opponents are from the second tier, trailing so badly in polls that Mr. Jindal has ignored most of the scheduled debates among candidates, leaving the challengers to take grumbling verbal shots at his empty chair.

The prize is not necessarily an enviable one: Louisiana is the nation’s poorest state, measured by per capita income; one of its unhealthiest; the worst in infant mortality; and the least educated. It is last in attracting new college-educated workers. Tens of thousands of people remain displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the police department in New Orleans still operates largely out of trailers, and neighborhoods are still trying to rebuild.

“The storms didn’t cause all of our problems — they revealed a lot of our problems,” Mr. Jindal said in a brief interview this week. “It’s an incredible opportunity to change the state.”

But he is not a natural fit for Louisiana. The state likes its governors to know the fundamentals of the Cajun two-step, speak some derivation of French patois, and at least get to a duck blind, regularly and publicly. But Mr. Jindal has labored assiduously to overcome the disadvantage of being a non-Cajun, Rhodes Scholar policy wonk whose given name was Piyush, and who has a penchant for 31-point plans.

He is a born-again Roman Catholic who has suggested that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution may not be out of place in public schools, favors a ban on abortion and opposes hate-crimes laws. Conservative views aside, the slightly built congressman is anything but a backslapping good ol’ boy.

He lost to Ms. Blanco in 2003 largely in places like this, Washington Parish, a hardscrabble rural area 70 miles north of New Orleans, where voters openly expressed unease four years ago about opting for someone of Mr. Jindal’s race. In areas where the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke won in the 1991 governor’s race — here and in the deeply conservative parishes of north Louisiana — Mr. Jindal lost.

But by Wednesday, three days before Mr. Jindal’s second attempt at the governor’s mansion, he was greeted here, if not with great warmth, at least without alarm. The congressman, tossing souvenir cups from a fire truck in a town parade, was met with shouts of “Hey Bobby!” from the rural whites lining the route.

Mr. Jindal picked out familiar faces in the crowd, greeted the sheriff like an old friend and posed for a picture with man sporting a Confederate flag tattoo.

For months, the congressman has cultivated the rural areas where he lost in 2003, “witnessing” in remote Pentecostal churches, neutralizing his image of being hyperqualified — head of the state health department at 24, head of the university system at 28 and under secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services at 30 under President Bush — that did not help him the last time. In one recent debate, Mr. Jindal boasted that he had made 77 trips to north Louisiana since announcing his candidacy.

Insinuations about his excessive intellectual capacity are still being made. “It’s not going to be about the smartest person in this race,” Walter Boasso, a Democratic state senator and one of Mr. Jindal’s opponents, said recently. But such remarks do not seem to be catching on with voters apparently weary of bumbling at the Capitol in Baton Rouge and at City Hall in New Orleans.

You may remember that his enemies were hurling anti-Catholic smears at Jindal a couple months ago. Looks like that didn’t work.

Photo: by Lee Celano for the New York Times