Posted on 10/19/2008 7:56:13 AM PDT by JustTheTruth
WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for president on Sunday, criticizing his own Republican Party for what he called its narrow focus on irrelevant personal attacks over a serious approach to challenges he called unprecedented.
Powell, who for many years was considered the most likely candidate to become the first African-American president, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was not supporting Obama because of his race. He said he had watched both Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, for many months and thought “either one of them would be a good president.”
But he said McCain’s choices in the last few weeks — especially his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his vice presidential running mate — had raised questions in his mind about McCain’s judgment.
“I don’t believe [Palin] is ready to be president of the United States,” Powell said flatly. By contrast, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, “is ready to be president on day one.”
Powell also said he was “troubled” by Republican personal attacks on Obama, especially false intimations that Obama was Muslim and Republicans’ recent focus on Obama’s alleged connections to William Ayers, the founder of the radical ’60 Weather Underground.
Stressing that Obama was a lifelong Christian, Powell denounced Republican tactics that he said were insulting not only to to Obama but also to Muslims.
“The really right answer is what if he is?” Powell said, praising the contributions of millions of Muslim citizens to American society.
“I look at these kind of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me,” Powell said. “Over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party has become narrower and narrower.”
In an interview Sunday on Fox News, McCain said he was not surprised by the announcement.
“I’ve always admired and respected General Powell,” said McCain, who cited the endorsements he had received from former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. “We have a respectful disagreement.”
Powell, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush before becoming secretary of state in the current administration, is one of the most highly decorated military officers of modern times and an admired figure in both parties. The Obama campaign is likely to cite the endorsement as an answer to critics and undecided voters who have questioned the foreign policy credential of Obama, a first-term senator whose national experience amounts to four years in the Senate.
Powell said a major part of his decision to turn his back on his own party was his conclusion that Obama was the better option to repair frayed U.S. relations with allies overseas.
“This is the time for outreach,” Powell said, saying the next president would have to “reach out and show the world there is a new administration that is willing to reach out.”
In particular, he said, he welcomed Obama’s president to “talk to people we haven’t talked to,” a reference to Obama’s controversial pledge to hold talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“I think that [Obama] has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well,” Powell said.
I'm sorry, but ... that is just plain racially motivated.
Listening to Colin Powll right now.
Sounds like his liberalism is rising to the top.
Oops, I also meant to say that colin is right, however, about baraq being a transformational figure. Not the way he thinks, though.
“Powell...said...that he was not supporting Obama because of his race.”
Nobody will believe this.
Powell just spent what little political capital he had left. Alas, he was NEVER a true Reoublican and will NEVER AGAIN be accepted as a Republican.
Powell’s argument was that if it was based on race he could have done it two months ago. That was an absurd argument, when he did it has nothing to do with why. EXCEPT that he obviously waited till close to the election hoping for more impact, or waited to see how close it was.
I just read his statement that he didn’t want more republican Supreme Court appointments. Need to know anything else?
This is based on Powell’s socially liberal views, not his area of expertise and the reason he never ran for president.
Has there ever been as conservative of a candidate as Obama? I don’t mean politically or economically conservative. I mean institutionally.
All his youth, Obama was a object for others. Even his mother’s energy and will to have a multi-racial baby. Obama was but the political/sexual object. And after having him, she abandoned him for useless work in basket making economies in the third world, where most people would be ecstatic to be a L.A car wash worker.
So, Obama begins to make his way, fatherless, motherless, raised by white leftist grandparents that parade him around like a liberal status symbol. He enters elite, white leftist school, where he is the only black. A type of pet for the children, where whites could get their racial solidarity ticket punched. Obama the pet.
Like a cat to a crazy cat lady, he learns what it takes to get rewards and off he goes, repeating the same behavior to the same liberal stimuli for the next thirty years.
He drifts through soft, liberal schools until he colors, and fills in, with in the permissible, his warped sense of identity at Occidental, and the then usual politically conservative acts (in lefty world) of smoking marijuana and hanging with the afro-ed Black Liberationists. He doesn’t do well, but Columbia is desperate to have black males and affirmative action bubble makes them rare and hard to get, thus again the white liberal burden of Obama, and he no doubts is let known of the favor.
Obama gets, somehow, into Columbia in the fall of 1981, the same fall that the Black Liberation Army with the Weather Underground robs for the people a Brinks truck and murders two police officers and a working class Brinks guard( Power To The People ). So too at Columbia is superstar and famous Bill Ayers, fresh from a decade in hiding who is also starting his Masters, only a couple of years ahead of Obama, the Junior.
Did they meet? Maybe. Obama is very quiet about Columbia, not having released any of his records, at all.
Obama does or does not graduate; it’s not clear from Columbia and goes into the lefty equivalent of working in McDonalds, community organizing in Chicago. Is there a reason even Obama, the rare, nice, clean, lefty articulate Black object couldn’t get into a prestigious lefty law school? Odd that he would go back to Ayers home town, where the Ayers family is wealthy and influential and he takes a intern at a Ayers family law firm. Just a coincidence.
After time, somehow, Obama gets into Harvard Law, where he is again objectivized, and petted up to the head of the Law School. Oh, how happy were the many of the anointed left. They looked and had seen they had done well.
I had read that Obama was a bit disappointing, in not being ethnic enough, left enough, but what the heck, if you are a lefty you got to go with the stereotype that you got.
Obama goes back to Chicago, with his liberal promotion as a Harvard lawyer, slowly climbing the party steps, doing the proper things, behaving the way proper lefties want all their black people to behave. Not all Afro and raised fist like those blacks from the ghetto, but clean, quiet, non-threatening, studious. Something to be proud of and worth all the support. Proof that leftism is the road for blacks and that lefty whites were right. Obama, the classy black. Watch him speak.
How Obama must of enjoyed Wrights anti-white, anti-Semitic sermons. All his life, being an object of whites, their pet. How Obama and bitter clinger, Michael, must of enjoyed every slam against the insufferable patronization of the liberal whites and Jews, whom schooled them.
I feel that Obama is a very cynical man. Long practiced in maneuvering though white liberal delusions and the thin, weak, prison cell deep thinking of the Black grievance industry. And industry that makes late night community access channel preachers seem like MIT lectures in Physics by comparison. There is nobody that he has even had decades even of comradeship, that he hasn’t thrown under the bus. Stalin would be proud. Even Nixon kept friends for decades.
But, Obama isn’t a motherless, fatherless pet, living in the soft bigotry of elite leftists anymore.
Since his conception, people have been waiting for Obama, and Obama has done what lefties wanted. But like Michael’s lobster and Iranian caviar lunch, now it’s Obama’s turn. Now it is him who will have his wants and it is others that will conform.
He’s never had to be an executive, always operating in the predictable, elderly pattern of late stage leftistism. Even Jimmy Carter, at least, had a governorship under his belt and an education in the physical realities of nuclear submarines, and we know how detached ersatz sweater wearing Jimmy was, and still is. At least he had a family. Obama doesn’t have any of that, save the smoldering Michael, who reminds me of a female Nixon.
It will all be for the best. Honest. Trust Obama.
Colin Who?
transformational figure = Black Elmer Gantry
One liberal, washed-up former general and failed Secretary of State, endorsing a radical socialist for president.
That’s about the size of it.
Apparently Powel has been a closet socialist. And conservatives almost fell for this guy’s act and would have supported him for president. Thank God his wife saved us from that.
Powell is a racist and supports another racist based on the color only.
Consider this evil and stupid man screwed up the state dept and Iraqi and then let Libby take the fall for comments he knew his empolyee made says it all about this disgusting
racist fraud !
Thank God he didn’t endorse him because of race. It must be the ‘Chosen One’s’ remarkable military knowledge and background that would make him a great Commander in Chief. I am happy to know that my grandson who just joined the USMC might have the privilege of serving under a great warrior like Obama. Now I can sleep at night knowing how safe he will be with such leadership.
Wow. I'm shocked that Powell is spewing the exact, tired old line the Obama camp and other 'conservative' pundits are. Yeah, not really.
Its all about Palin, and if McCain loses, the MSM is going to have a field day blaming Sarah. I hope she's ready.
I’m sure the media will hype this, but does anyone really care what Powell thinks? He showed his colors a long time ago.
I sure don’t.
Voting for someone because they’re black is 100% as racist as voting against them for that reason.
Powell is not only a racist, but by supporting someone whose inexperience and arrogance makes him completely unqualified to run this country - you’d think, in a time of war, some small nugget of common sense would TELL the man that.. but, no... race trumps all.
If I ever had any respect for Powell, it just evaporated.
Yep, I do think the timing of this is to distract people off the Joe the plumber and Ayers issues, they do seem to be hurting That One. Powell is a washed-up figure anyway - not newsworthy in my book.
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