Twenty years ago, shortly before the senior President Bush announced the selection of Dan Quayle for Vice-President, I had lunch in the Pennsylvania Capitol cafeteria with Joe The Republican State Legislator, a friend of top Bush campaign strategist Drew Lewis.
"Who do you think would be the strongest Republican Vice-Presidential nominee?" he asked me.
"Colin Powell," I said. "Who?" he replied.
A generation later, just about everybody in politics knows who Colin Powell is, and his endorsement is major news. A friend of our family told my wife that he was waiting to see who Colin Powell endorsed before deciding who to vote for, and he is likely far from alone. Powell's endorsement could influence many thousands of Americans, perhaps even over a million.
Powell is a Republican because of his agreement with Republican defense and foreign policy strategy, which he helped forge. He deserves some of the credit for the general success of American foreign policy from the last years of the Reagan Administration throughout the first Bush Administation to the early years of the Clinton Administration.
As early as 1995, Powell was considered to be a strong candidate for the Presidency as he published his memoirs and went on a nationwide book tour.
A widely discussed poll had Powell, as the Republican nominee, defeating President Clinton among every group of voters except one--African Americans, who stuck by Clinton by a 2 to 1 margin. This poll may have contributed to the Clinton camp's underestimating the Obama challenge among black voters.
Powell declined to seek the Republican nomination both because his wife had fears of his own physical safety if he did so, and he concluded he could not win it because he was pro-choice and pro-affirmative action. He didn't need the negative ads; he just anticipated them and announced there would be no Presidential campaign.
During his years outside the government (the vast majority of the Clinton Adminstration), Powell was the beneficiary of numerous opportunities for corporate board memberships, lecture fees, consultancies, and other lucrative sources of income. When he joined the second Bush Administration as Secretary of State, he had accumulated a net worth of over $25 million.
His independence in private arguing against the current war in Iraq, and his independence in public in signing on to a friend of the court brief supporting the continuation of affirmative action in opposition to the position of the Bush Administration showed his independent strain of thought. He clearly feels badly tarnished by his yielding to the Bush team's entreaties that he advocate for the policy he had privately opposed before the United Nations.
Powell is a team player whose loyalty was badly abused by the stupidity and stubbornnessof his colleagues. There are many such people around the country in and retired from Republican party organizations and Republican dominated governments. At what point will they say, enough is enough? It is clearly a painful individual decision for many, but Powell sends a clear signal that now is the time to break with the past and end the continuation of tragically wrong policies.
Powell's formulation is a persuasive one. Both McCain and Obama are qualified to be President, he said, but Obama best meets the needs of this particular time.
Who meets the needs of the particular time was an issue in the 1996 general election, when Republican nominee Bob Dole pledged at the Republican National Convention to be a "bridge to the past" and Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton gleefully promised to help "build a bridge to the future."
The bridge to the future defeated the bridge to the past then, and increasingly looks like it will do the same in November--given, of course, continued mobilization by the Obama campaign and its ever-growing number of workers, contributors, and loyalists.