Colin Powell to endorse Sen. Obama?
Has anyone read yesterdays Lawrence O'Donnell's post on The Huffington Post stating that Colin Powell is ready to endorse Sen. Obama? How credible is this? www.huffingtonpost.co/lawrence-odonnell/colin-powell-is-ready-to_b_13477... How credible is The Huffington Post as a reliable source?
Wouldn't that be the big October surprise --- for Sen. McCain! Wouldn't that just seal it for Sen. Obama and the Democrats?
O'Donnell cites the ugliness of the campaign, the 14 point lead in the NY Times poll and his explicit rejection of the Bush-McCain approach to the Iraq, Iran and the rest of the world.
Most of all this would be pay back time for the Bush-Cheney deception he suffered. IMO, that just has to be grinding at his soul.
Let us pray that this distinquished servant to this nation sees his next duty and musters the courage to follow thru.
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Powell did it this morning!
Bill,
It's no longer speculation. He did it this bright sunny Sunday morning. Now the questions are; what difference will it make? And, how will McCain spin it?
To me, it's large in importance, not only for all the reasons stated by others, but that now the Republicans have their "Willie Norton" bogey man (just in time for Halloween!) in Bill Ayers, the Republican robo calls are in full force. For whatever it's worth, Obama's lead is now down to 3% in this mornings Zogby poll.
The Dems now need to exert a full court press for her on out. I plan to start making calls for him, via MoveOn, today.
Rich
A powerful endorsement
I don't usually get to see Meet The Press in the morning, but I wasn't up to going to church today. So I saw Colin Powell really delivering the goods for Obama. Aside from his later comments about the military, our position in the world, and his judgment that Bush had some success in his "Freedom" agenda, all of which I profoundly disagree with, Powell couldn't have handled the immediate campaign and competence -- and race -- issues better. And one can't really expect him to throw Bush, or McCain, completely under the bus -- though he certainly shredded Palin with the faintest of faint praise and the utmost of dismissiveness.
And Powell was really beautiful on the Muslim issue: "I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America."
And then he went to describe, touchingly, a photo of a mother mourning her 20 year old son who was killed in Iraq. The tombstone she was leaning against didn't display a cross or a star of David. It had a star and crescent carved into it.
Whatever criticisms I have of Colin Powell, I gotta love him for that. We should give him a Progressive Christian salute of some kind.
One thing could have been handled better in supporting Obama: in his dismissal of the Ayers issue as being tangential and unsubstantial, Powell perpetuated the spin that Ayers is still despicable for having said in 2001 that he wished he had done more bombing to stop the Vietnam War.
Actually, it appears that he said he wished he had done more to stop the war in other ways, not by more bombing. Even so, it's fine to respond, as Obama and Powell have, that whatever he said, it was "despicable", but Ayers' words could also have been justly dismissed as coming from someone who has truly been rehabilitated but is trying to justify his past mistakes just as many of us routinely due.
There's a smashingly good indication of the extent of his rehabilitation that no one on the campaign trail has mentioned. In addition to what's been said about his (Distinguished) Professorship at the University of Illinois, and the funding by conservative, Republican-oriented foundations of the boards on which he and Obama had met, there's the wonderful fact that Ayers was honored by the Chicago establishment as the Citizen of the Year in 1997. Yep, the City Club of Chicago, a 1000 member aggregation of business leaders, investment bankers, university presidents, lawyers, and leading political figures saw fit to honor a "washed-up terrorist". How terrible can he be?
I haven't been able to find a list of the City Club's awardees, but in 2003 it was a leading Chicago lawyer, Joseph A. Power of Power, Rogers & Smith. In 1987, it was the president of the Chicago Sun-Times, which was owned by Rupert Murdoch at that time. Another Citizen of the Year, but I don't know which year, was a venture-capitalist, J. B. Pritzker, an extremely prominent figure in Chicago who's on private and governmental boards and commissions and who won the Humanitarian Award from the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. So we're not talking about some cheesy little bauble of a rinky-dink award here. Ayers is in certified Respectable Company.
For a bit of overkill, take a look at the City Club of Chicago's corporate members: http://www.cityclub-chicago.com/corporate_members.asp. And their "President's Club" members: http://www.cityclub-chicago.com/presidents_club.asp. Wikipedia has informative articles on the two foundations, the Annenberg Foundation and the Woods Fund of Chicago, and the Annenberg Challenge, where Obama and Ayers first met. (The Annenberg family is also a contributor to McCain's campaign.)
To top off the case for rehabilitation, there's a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times from the chief prosecutor of Ayers and the Weather Underground in the 1970s, William C. Ibershof. He wrote that he is "amazed and outraged" that "Obama is being linked to William Ayers' terrorist activities 40 years ago..."
His words: "Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased . . . that he has become a responsible citizen....I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of 'prosecutorial misconduct.' It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director."
My apologies for running on so long with this, but I try to live in the reality-based world as much as humanly possible and the shoddy handling or disregard of facts like these drives me nuts -- even though I know that lies, spin, and side-stepping are also a part of political reality.
Bill
re: HuffPo, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Colin Powell
Rich: Many 'reliable' commentators think Colin Powell will endorse Obama, or at least praise him while saying nothing positive about McCain. Two "inside sources" say he will, according to Howard Fineman, and another "didn't flatly deny it." Back in August, William Kristol predicted that he would. So have Brzezinski and Robert Novak. So it's somewhere between speculation and informed deduction.
Of course, for some people, Powell's endorsement isn't all that delightful. He has a lot to live down concerning our going to war.
As for the Huffington Post, it's as reliable as its many writers, who generally are pretty reasonable liberal partisans. There's a brief descriptionof HuffPo at Wikipedia. For what it's worth, they won Webby Awards in 2006 and 2007 for Best Politics Blog. I read it frequently and find it generally informative and amusing.
Arianna Huffington was a conservative who wrote a little for the National Review and then got liberal in the late 90s after being featured as the conservative foil to the liberal Al Franken in a Comedy Central spoof of political commentary, Strange Bedfellows, during the 1996 presidential campaign. That's when I first became aware of her. Now she's on TV a lot and has a syndicated column. She's sharp and funny, with views that are well within the standard range of liberal Democrats.
Interesting -- I just checked out Wikipedia -- I hadn't been aware she also moved away from the Religious Right. She wrote a book on spirituality, The Fourth Instinct, in 1994.
The writer of the brief article in question, Lawrence O'Donnell has rather good credits and connections.
From 1989 until 1992 he was a "Senior Advisor" to Senator Moynihan, after having been his Director of Communications in Moynihan's 1988 re-election campaign. Then he was Chief of Staff for the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works for a year, and Chief of Staff for the Senate Committee on Finance for 3 years. He says he was out of his depth, but he did get connected.
He does some TV political commentary and is sometimes loud and rude, noted for an anti-Mormon outburst.
His political knowledge is reflected in the tv series The West Wing, for which he got Emmys as executive producer and writer, and in another political series which he created and produced and which quickly flopped. He also does some tv acting (Big Love on HBO , which I don't get and which is about a polygamous Mormon family; The West Wing, which I sometimes couldn't bear to watch because President Bartlett so outshone President Bush; and Monk, which, I have to admit, is one of my foolish addictions). And before politics, he was a writer, with a lot of credits for articles and essays, and one book, Deadly Force, which was made into a movie for CBS.
He's 'knowledgeable', at least. I don't know how 'reliable' that makes him. We'll know later today....
Bill