The Race Card Is Busting Out All Over…
… in response to Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama for president.
Michelle Malkin is having nightmares about rappers, hip-hop, and terrorist fist bumps.
Quite a few bloggers on the right are going with the “affirmative action” meme:
- Andrew Bolton at RedState fumes that Obama would not be where he is now, and Colin Powell would not have endorsed him for president, if he were white.
- George Will tells George Stephanopoulos that “if we had the tools to measure” we would find that Obama “gets two votes because he’s black for every one he loses because he’s black.” Why? Two reasons: guilt (no one wants to look like a racist) and resignation (at least Obama is not Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson).
- Rush Limbaugh: It must be about race, because Powell never endorsed any inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates for president. Limbaugh is silent on any support Powell might have given to inexperienced, very right-wing, white candidates for president.
There are a couple of right-wing bloggers who retain some class:
- Ed Morrissey thinks this endorsement would have helped Obama more if it had come earlier, but he does not stoop to pulling the race card:
I’m not going to impugn Powell’s motives here. He served his country honorably in every task assigned to him, and he’s earned the right to participate in the political process. Unlike endorsers like Christopher Buckley, Douglas Kmiec, or Michael Smerconish, Powell has never publicly identified himself as a conservative activist. He’s mostly stayed within the military and foreign-policy realm and could easily have served as Secretary of State in a Clinton administration as much as in a Bush administration. This doesn’t represent any hypocritical apostasy, and it doesn’t come as much of a surprise, either.
- Donald Douglas focuses on the gravitas Obama gets from Powell’s endorsement, especially in the area of foreign policy:
There’s tremendous importance to Powell’s move, and folks can sort though the former secretary of state’s possible motivations. The main political implication is to give Obama considerable legitimacy where he needs it most: in foreign affairs.
[…]
If there’s someone who personifies mainstream values, it’s Colin Powell. He’s the non-threatening black that Americans long for. It’s not unlikely that we would have had similar race-baiting smear campaigns in the event of a Powell presidential run, but the former secretary of state’s history as a soldier and public servant in previous presidential administrations would have made any attempt to “otherize” him positively ludicrous.That’s not the case with Barack Obama. At this point in the campaign, the opportunity for the Illinois Senator to roll the Powell endorsement off his lips is the most important mainstreaming push he could possibly have gotten. With the huge round of newspaper endorsements now lining up behind the Democratic nominee, it’s going to be very difficult for John McCain to consolidate his recent improvements in the polls over the next few days.
Well, for the ol’ Chief, it has nothing to do with race and it has nothing to do with guilt. It has everything to do with values.
The good Senator and I are each still married to our first wives. We both value education, he at Columbia and Harvard Law, me Summa Cum Laude at Franklin University and Southern Illinois University School of Law.
I wonder who Sec. Powell’s endorsement will swing to Obama??