It's been interesting to watch the Right attack Colin Powell for endorsing Barack Obama; it reveals in what low esteem they actually held Powell even as the Republican Party used him as a shield against accusations of extremism. Last night on Hardball, Pat Buchanan expressed confusion at the idea that Powell would be opposed to a Republican agenda, given that Powell is a Republican. Rush Limbaugh emerged on a Sunday to basically accuse Powell of being racist:
"Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race," Limbaugh wrote in an email. "OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with."Limbaugh has a point, but it isn't the one he thinks he's made. The question isn't why is Powell endorsing Obama, but rather why hasn't Powell endorsed any liberals before? As Pat Buchanan put it in 1995, when Powell was reportedly considering making a run for the Republican nomination:
"If Colin Powell got into the race and became the nominee and tried to make us a pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-affirmative action party which celebrated New Deal and Great Society programs, then there will be an explosion in San Diego and I would fight him with everything I had to keep our party a conservative and principled party. I think I would win that battle at the convention."
So in 1995 Buchanan was threatening "explosions" at the Republican Convention if Powell ran, based on his liberal policy positions, but in 2008 he doesn't see why Powell would be opposed to more conservative justices on the court. The answer, that Powell is pro-choice, would seem to be an obvious one.
This really just begs the question of why Powell is a Republican to begin with. On Hardball, Buchanan suggested that Powell was "ungrateful" for what the party had done for him. The racial undertone, that Powell deserves his rise not to his own talent but to the generosity of the whites around him, is par for the course with Buchanan. But whatever the Republican Party did for Powell, he repaid by hiding their extremism and their outright and growing hostility to people of color. He put a moderate, black face that hid the nativist, warmongering, dittohead base of the party. I think people like Buchanan and Limbaugh resent him as much for having needed him as they do for his defection to Obama.
I suspect that Powell's loyalty to the Republican party was based atleast partially on the fact that he came into his own under Reagan and Bush.It also may have had to do with his feeling that Democrats take blackvotes for granted, but I don't know. It certainly has nothing to dowith how Powell feels about social issues.
In the context of Powell's policy positions, his decision to back Obama isn't an embrace of an irrational, tribal loyalty so much as it is the abandonment of one.
--A. Serwer
