Better Take A Powder

"Powell spent far more time saying what he didn’t like about McCain than he did identifying what he liked about Obama.

...While everyone is asking why Powell is backing Obama, perhaps the more interesting question is: why does Obama welcome his endorsement? Obama responded to the news by saying he was ‘honoured and deeply humbled’, and indicated that Powell would be an adviser of some kind in his administration. It may seem obvious, given the potential electoral benefits already mentioned, why Obama embraced Powell’s support. But one of the central arguments Obama deploys during his campaigning is that he had the foresight to oppose the Iraq war, and yet Powell was intimately involved in that war and the entire Bush foreign policy. Powell is the one who put forward the case for war to the United Nations with his speech on bogus weapons of mass destruction.

Obama’s welcoming of Powell’s endorsement – and suggestion that he would use him as an adviser – indicates that he really will not represent a decisive break from Bush, as he claims. Obama’s main criticism of McCain is that he follows Bush, and yet here we have Obama aligning himself with one of Bush’s main lieutenants. In fact, with regard to Afghanistan, if anything Obama outdoes both Bush and McCain in bellicosity.

...During the interview in which he announced his support for Obama, Powell said a key objective for the next president is ‘restoring a sense of purpose, a sense of confidence in the American people, and in the international community in America’. But it was notable that, in his brief list of Obama’s attributes, Powell did not elaborate upon the new ‘sense of purpose’ Obama would introduce, or how Obama would go about restoring a ‘sense of confidence’. He could not, because Obama has not."

— Sean Collins, giving a "there there" to liberal illusions, in Spiked!