Up until he did that bullshit dog & pony about Iraq’s "WMD"s at the UN, he was a fast-rising entity in the GOP.
Had he maintained his integrity and reputation, maybe the GOP would have backed him for a Senate seat, or, just suppose: President Powell, Republican.
Yes, (in some alternate universe, perhaps) Colin Powell becomes the first black President.
Would the racist loons in the Tea Party have shown up with their N**** placards, the GOP would revolt, creating the unthinkable: one Pubbbie criticizing another?
Or would he have just been a token VP candidate in an election they figure they’ll lose anyway?
I think he’d already decided he didn’t want to run for office, so it’s a moot point. He accepted the Secretary of State position thinking he’d be an important part of Bush’s foreign policy team and pretty soon he found he was no such thing. He was picked to help assuage concerns that Bush didn’t know anything about international affairs, but his actual input wasn’t really wanted. Cheney and Rumsfeld dominated that area, and it wasn’t until Bush’s second term that he started turning away from them and toward Rice (Powell’s replacement).
I’m not quite sure what the OP is picturing, but even if Powell himself hadn’t put aside his doubts and made that presentation at the UN, as Secretary of State he still would have been very closely associated with everything that went wrong in Iraq and he still would have been harmed (had he run in 2008) by his association with Bush.
Powell could have run for President in 2000, and considering how wide open the field was initially there’s a good chance he could have been the Republican nominee and won. He decided he didn’t want to then. Considering that, I was surprised that he decided to accept the Secretary of State position under Bush at all.
??? Cite that his star started to fade in the GOP after that.
What makes you think his integrity within the GOP was compromised by anything other than his distancing himself from Bush and his repudiation of the Iraq war?
How many “racist loons” are there in the TP which, btw, didn’t even exist prior to 2009?
Seems to me your thesis, such as it is, is littered with false assumptions.
It would have been brilliant, and he could easily have won. It would split the Democratic lock on black voters. (And, yeah, it would lose a few die-hard racists. Good riddance…) He had it all, and could have been a contender…nah, a winner. Best of all, he’s moderate enough that he wouldn’t have posed a major threat to liberals. He could actually have worked with the loyal opposition to get things done.
Pretty much all of them - and the same goes for the Republican Party in general. Racism, especially a hatred of blacks is a central feature of the Republican party.
First of all we’re talking about a RINO President. Which affects many more than just Republicans. And second, not being Republican does not preclude one from disliking RINOs. They are causing damage to the Republican party that I want to see exist.
Hardly. The Republicans have spent literally decades recruiting racists and catering to them. Of course they are full of racists; they are the White Racist Party of America, like it or not.
There are racists in both parties. I’d guess the percentage is higher (probably much higher) in the GOP, but who cares?
One thing is very very clear to all but the willfully ignorant: The huge irrational hatred of Obama is driven in large part by racism.
Recall this analysis which concluded that 3 to 5% of Kerry voters switched to McCain in 2008 because Obama was Black. (Obama won anyway, due to higher Black turnout and Bush voters tired of GOP switching to Democrats.)
Most Black-hating voters would never vote Democrat anyway, so that 3 to 5% switch is very significant. The irrational anti-Obama craziness among GOP, both followers and leaders, is unprecedented. Anyway who denies that racism is a big part of the explanation is in bizarre denial.
Certainly appealing to racism against black people has been a central tenet of the Republican Party’s efforts to get votes since 1968. They call it the Southern Strategy. However, there are a lot of Republicans who don’t care about racism other than using it to get votes, just like religion and abortion. They will cobble together a coalition of the ignorant to serve their real masters, huge corporations.
