The Color Coding of Colin Powell

Stereotypes, anyone? Dismissing Powell’s Obama endorsement as racial solidarity disregards reality. The Joint Chiefs Chairman who became George W. Bush’s Secretary of State and the current president differ as much politically and culturally as two men can.

Community organizers and rising four-star generals come from different worlds, and bracketing them is akin to pairing Joe Biden and Paul Ryan as embodying the values of working-class Catholics.  

Race, however, is harder to ignore and the backing of Colin Powell, a staunch Republican, has to be easily dismissed on the basis of skin color rather than values.

Fifteen years ago, Powell was the one of the most admired men in America, who might have been nominated by his party for President in 1996 if he had agreed to run. Today he is remembered for a February 2003 U.N. speech that misled Americans into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

As Secretary of State, he had spent the previous week trying to scour his presentation of “garbage” from V. P. Dick Cheney’s staff but failing to do so.

Earlier Cheney had made it clear he and Bush were using Powell’s credibility to sell the war. Poking him in the chest, the Vice President told Powell, "You've got high poll ratings, you can afford to lose a few points."

In the end, Powell lost much more--his reputation as a man of honor after a lifetime of public service. Why didn’t he just quit and tell the truth?

The reason is best summed up in a Washington Post headline about Powell’s Bush years, “Falling on His Sword.” Good soldiers don’t retreat under fire, and they don’t write self-serving, score-settling memoirs after they leave the battlefield. But they do later make presidential endorsements based on their own experiences with empty ideologues who keep distorting and/or concealing the truth.

I must admit bias here. Colin Powell started life in Harlem and the Bronx as the child of poor immigrant parents, as I did, and was given an education at the City College of New York, as I was, by American taxpayers. He spent his working life serving them with honor and valor.

In the final days of that career, he deserved better than Bush and Cheney and now, as he tries to use his experience to make political judgments in good faith, he deserves  better than to be dismissed as a knee-jerk racial ideologue by a GOP hack like John Sununu.

Romney may not miss Powell’s support that much. After all he has the backing of Meat Loaf, a prominent man of the people from the Donald Trump School of Politics.

New Clinton Shuffle?

From behind the Wall Street Journal paywall, Hillary Clinton hints she may remain as Secretary of State a little longer if the President is reelected.

Rupert Murdoch’s house organ, which regales us freely with Obama bad news, is stingy with details, but in followups, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman concedes that “she wants to ensure continuity and realizes the confirmation of her successor might not exactly line up with Jan. 22, 2013.”

Translation: GOP attacks on her handling of the Libyan misfortunes could keep the Secretary in office until exonerated. If neanderthal Congressmen like Darrell Issa keep pounding her on it, she might extend Clinton branding of Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs well into his second term.

That would fall short of the proposal here that Bill Clinton replace her as a less hands-on Obama cabinet member, but it could serve as an excellent example of the wisdom of Saint Teresa of Ávila, which served as the title of Truman Capote’s unfinished last novel: "Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered".

Not a likely source of inspiration for Tea Party religiosity, but those nuns did know a thing or two about human nature.  

Playing the Last Clinton Card

It’s been downhill since Barack Obama derailed the momentum of Bill Clinton’s rousing convention speech by sleepwalking in the first debate. Now that the President is fully awake, what can Clinton do to help him over the finish line?

Commercials, of course, but is there more? In these last days, it’s too late to quibble over whether to define Mitt Romney as “a severe conservative” or “a soulless climber who would say anything to get the job.” Either would serve.

What the former President could still do better than anyone else suits both his talent and temperament—-tie together the overarching issue of both the Presidential campaign and the battle against a Tea Party Congress. 

However it’s done—-speeches, interviews, ads—-the final Clinton message would come from the heart.

It would link Romney to Capitol Hill snakes like Darrell Issa who have tried to damage Obama with attacks over U.S. deaths in Libya and, in the process, sideswiped Hillary Clinton.

That opportunity is underscored by the Clintons’ trip to Haiti together this week. With her husband’s arm around her, the Secretary of State reminisced: “As Bill told you, we came here for the first time together just after we were married and fell in love with Haiti, and have just celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary, which is exhausting to think about."

In the final push before the balloting, Bill Clinton could do much for the President, their party and America’s most fascinating marriage, wherever it takes them in the future.

Scariest Romney of Them All

If he were alone in the Oval Office with the nuclear button, would anybody be there?

Last in the parade of so many Mitt Romneys over the past year is the most frightening of all—-the new, improved peacemaker of this week’s debate who embraced so many positions he had been denouncing only weeks or days ago.

Those who thought nothing could be worse than George W. Bush’s blinkered certitude must now confront Romney’s vast emptiness. W’s predictability could be understood in the light of his personal history and shortcomings, but how safe is a nuclear world in the hands of someone with no inner core?

As the President lectured him on horses and bayonets, Romney maintained a goofy, agreeable smile reminiscent of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neumann, who has radiated “What? Me Worry?” blissful ignorance for almost 60 years. Along the way, his creators promoted him as a write-in candidate for president with the slogan, "You could do worse...and always have!"

Now it only hurts when we laugh at the prospect of a president Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called “full of platitude and free of substance.”

At the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Harvard scholar noted: “Romney’s big foreign policy speech...illuminated the challenge he has had in making an impact in foreign policy. His back-to-the-future evocation of American leadership seems right for the Cold War but not nearly sophisticated enough for our very different 21st-century world.”

Yet, even an outdated mentality seems safer than one with no definition at all. Who knows what an Empty Head and Empty Heart would do when the stakes are nuclear survival? 

Campaign Kiss-Off

A tie, sports fans say, is like kissing your sister. Playing not to lose in the final debate, Mitt Romney ended up smooching a maiden aunt.

So much for deep analysis but, with two weeks to go, will Barack Obama’s clear victory on foreign affairs make the difference in a close election?

To avoid gaffes, Romney resorted to head-nodding as a strategy and was rewarded with Presidential lectures tinged with sarcasm.

“Every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong,” Obama told him. “Not only were you wrong, but you were confusing in sending mixed messages to our troops and to our allies.”

“Attacking me is not an agenda,” Romney replied, hunkering down.

When the GOP candidate dared point out the size of the U.S. Navy “is smaller now than any time since 1917,” the Commander-in-Chief brought his rhetorical big guns:

“Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

Because Romney was being so careful, the post-debate fact-checking this time is not as devastating as usual for him, but leaving aside the question of whether Obama’s open disdain may have turned off some undecided voters, the final debate was a rout in the contest to appear presidential.

Two weeks from today, the rest of us finally win relief from all this posturing and primping as we get to kiss the 2012 campaign goodbye.  

Update: A New York Times editorial blows off   the puckering up: "Mitt Romney has nothing really coherent or substantive to say about domestic policy, but at least he can sound energetic and confident about it. On foreign policy, the subject of Monday night’s final presidential debate, he had little coherent to say and often sounded completely lost. That’s because he has no original ideas of substance on most world issues, including Syria, Iran and Afghanistan." 

Joe Biden adds about Obama: "I was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; he was on my Foreign Relations Committee for four years. He demonstrated a grasp and a gravity. He had a worldview of where America’s position should be, how we should interact with the world, how we should rebuild alliances. Gov. Romney didn’t demonstrate any breadth of understanding.”