Powell For Obama

On October 19, 2008, former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced his endorsement of Barack Obama during a Meet the Press interview.  A Breitbart article about it was posted to a message board.

Someone wrote:

By coming out for The One, Powell has become fair game in the political season. I hate to say it, but it might be time to paint him as a part of the Bush Cabal that screwed over the country for the last 8 years and that his judgement is poor.

I responded with:

A caller to Fox said basically the same thing, that it connects Obama to Bush.

Someone else wrote:

He didn't like some people on the right trying to say Obama is a Muslim.

I wrote:

Powell invoked a Muslim soldier who wanted to fight against radicalism and deplores the "right" for accusing Obama of being a Muslim

He also wrote:

So basically, Colin presents a lot of positive fluff about Obama as his reasons for supporting him over McCain and he presents some negatives about McCain.

I said:

That seems to be the most compelling argument to support Obama.

He responded with:

You're kidding, right? I'll assume that's tongue-in-cheek.

Powell mentioned no negatives about Obama while offering substanceless positive fluff as reasons for his supporting him. He offers a handful of negatives about McCain, most arguably either minor, inaccurate, partisan, or exaggerated while ignoring anything similarly negative about Obama or any mitigating arguments countering his short list of McCain negatives. He has to stretch and focus on a few nut cases on the right who tried to paint Obama as a muslim as one of his handful of reasons for not supporting McCain while ignoring all of the slop thrown at McCain and Republicans by Democrats and the left. It doesn't pass my smell test.

Powell's actions are seemingly very out of character and contrary considering his past political history. He's supporting a left wing socialist extremist when he opposed Bill Clinton who is well to the right of Obama. He is in opposition to an acknowledged Republican moderate, McCain. So I guess I'm supposed to think he has become a convert to left wing socialist political and economic ideals, policies, and philosophies, two weeks before the election, after a couple of decades of supporting Republican administrations, including being Reagan's National Security Advisor? It doesn't wash with me. IMO, he's being disingenuous, at best.

Then I replied:

I meant "fluff" is about the best people can do when arguing for Obama.