Bobby Jindal's announcement that he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 was received in political circles as a pragmatic recognition of the electoral calendar rather than a retreat. The Louisiana governor, who had been touted as a potential future president since his election in 2007 as the first Indian American governor in the United States, had watched the 2012 field take shape and concluded that this was not his moment.

The calculation was straightforward. Jindal was in his first term as governor of a state that had recently emerged from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and still required intense political management. Running for president while governing Louisiana in that context would have meant either sacrificing the governorship or running a campaign that lacked the full commitment the race required.

There was also the question of the field. The 2012 Republican primary was shaping up as a crowded competition among candidates appealing to a Tea Party movement that Jindal needed to court but whose relationship with him was complicated. As the son of Indian immigrants, as a Catholic convert, as an Ivy League-educated policy wonk, he embodied qualities that the Tea Party base respected in principle but sometimes found difficult to translate into the kind of gut-level enthusiasm that primary campaigns require.

Jindal had also delivered the Republican response to Obama's first address to Congress in 2009 — a performance widely assessed, including by his own supporters, as stilted and damaging to his national profile. Recovering from a poor national debut while simultaneously running for president would have been a difficult task.

He declined, positioned himself as a possible future candidate, and continued building the gubernatorial record that he believed would eventually provide the foundation for a serious national run. The relationship between that plan and subsequent events is a different story.