Gop Needs Powell’s Moderation
It is not clear Colin Powell can save the United States or, for that matter, that it needs saving.
It is just possible, however, that the retired general might be able to save the Republican Party, and Lord knows, it does need saving, though many in the party don’t seem to know it.
Most of the GOP candidates are kowtowing to a primary electorate now so dominated by the Christian right that the difference between the Republican Party and a theocracy-in-waiting is fuzzy.
Powell remains a bit of a political enigma, but since he has been on his book tour/campaign trip, some of the mystery has been wearing off.
He has all but scrapped the Democratic option, and funding as an independent is hard to come by unless you’re Ross Perot and can charge the household account.
Too, an “independent” president would have congressional Democrats and Republicans ganging up on him. It’s difficult to get much through Congress even when your own party controls both houses. Ask Bill Clinton.
So for Powell, it’s either run as a Republican or buy a second recliner and become an armchair politician as well as an armchair general.
Powell describes himself as a fiscal conservative with a social conscience. If skeptical of big government, he is not an enemy of government per se. He would keep abortion lawful, allow some affirmative action, not actually nuke the environment.
All these positions put Powell solidly in the broad American middle and would have fit comfortably with the Republican Party of Richard Nixon. They are strikingly awry, however, from the current GOP.
A Powell candidacy, then, would present GOP activists with a nice little problem.
Powell would offer the party a potential nominee many Americans might actually want to see as president, but one unamused by the reactionary agenda that is precisely the point of the GOP push to regain the presidency.
The way politics has been going lately, the party ought to romp into the White House next year, veto-proofing the policies of a Congress perhaps even more right-wing than the current one.
But Clinton is hanging tough, and the GOP has not cast up a potential nominee who excites voters. Dole? Gramm? Wilson? Buchanan? Please. That lot is as dour and forbidding as an Inquisition court. Caring parents hide small children when they come around.
Powell might be more electable, but would be less genial to the zealots’ wants.
It is far from certain Powell could best the established GOP figures, though the fact that 26 states have open primaries might let him get around the far right that has ensnared most of the others.
Even if nominated, he would have to survive the brutal gantlet modern presidential politics has become - and survive, too, the fact that white voters talk a far better game of electing black candidates than they deliver.
But even if he stumbles in the long run, Powell, just by declaring for the Republican nomination, might help pull the party back toward the center and loosen the right’s hammerlock. That, alone, would be worthy political work.
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