Black Republican

I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
-George Bernard Shaw



What if Barack Obama wasn’t the first black president? What if he was the second?

What if I told you the Republican Party had a universally-respected, erudite black man courting them for their nomination who enjoyed a razor thin edge over Clinton and was ahead of all his opponents? They’d be crazy not to pick him, right?

(Remember, we’re still in hypothetical.)

This black man was just young enough to project vigorousness, but with wisdom that far exceeded his years. He served with distinction in Vietnam. He had national security experience in the deified Reagan White House. He usually had something generous to say and when he didn’t, he kept his mouth shut.

Sounds bulletproof, right? It is, so long as you’re not being shot in the back.

He wasn’t far enough to the right on abortion, gun control and civil rights for the newly minted Faustian contract with America, so he had to be taken down. But how? You can’t assault him to his face and you can’t question his patriotism. This is a man who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest rank one can achieve in the Armed Services.

Instead, the fix was in like this: Purple Heart, Bronze Star and multiple Distinguished Service medals (2 for the Army, 4 from the Defense Department) notwithstanding, Colin Powell was deemed a “milicrat”, that is to say, a paper-pusher, just with a different color suit. I wonder how it felt to be Colin Powell, to hear from people that had multiple draft deferments with no military experience that he was a glorified middle-manager.

To be fair, that charge has the élan (sorry, wrong elan) of the chicken-hawks. It’s factually, intellectually and truthfully wrong, but what takes it over the top is not what the slur is, but how it’s expressed. It’s dismissive in a way that utilizes a populist and class-ist rhetoric that hides just how sanctimonious and silly the statement is.

Colin Powell wasn’t a man who served in Vietnam, winning multiple citations for bravery and dedicated his youth to the service, he’s actually like your narcissist corporate shark boss, so went the line from the religious right.

The real despicable thing was the allegation of mental illness. But wait, you say. I’ve never heard of Colin Powell ever having a mental illness. That would have come up again, like when he was Secretary of State, right?

Well, yes. But it wasn’t Powell that was being accused. It was his wife.

His wife, who was not out on the campaign trail, not hustling for attention. His wife, who was raising two kids at the time. His wife, who takes medication for depression. To keep Colin Powell out of the race, the rightest of right wing, back in 1996, sent the message that if you keep going, we will make it personal and we will make it bloody. Powell would drop out of the race soon afterwards, claiming “he didn’t have the stomach” for politics and he was right.

It still begs the question, though. What if?

How would the political landscape in 2009 be different if the self-proclaimed Party of Lincoln was the first one to nominate a black man for POTUS? How would the political landscape be different 20 years from now when little kids grow up and the party animal they affiliate with is the elephant and not the donkey?

It’s not that the Republicans or the Democrats (or any party, for that matter) is the party of the future, but that in 1995 and 1996, the Republicans revealed their commitment to be the party of the past, which in a bit of black humor, would carry them surprisingly far into the future.

Cue 2008. Powell, after having his legacy and professional reputation destroyed by Bush’s War on Terror, had stayed quiet during the presidential campaign, not stumping for anyone and keeping a low profile. And then it’s announced that he’s going on Meet the Press, most commentators speculating he’s finally going to make an endorsement in the race.

He endorses Obama and as soon as he does so is branded a traitor to the Republican Party by the blogs, but the blogs were just in the numbers game anyway, they’re tangential at the moment. They missed the part where Powell speaks generously about McCain, a friend, and says that it’s lack of respect for the people surrounding McCain that led him to endorse Barack Obama, whom he believes is the right person at the right time to become a transformational figure in American political history. I wonder, though, when Obama was elected did he think, hell, it’s about time, or hell, it’s 12 years too late?