Noemie Emery: Obama can thank Mrs. Colin Powell
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
September 23, 2009
If you are unhappy now with the way the public debate is being handled, you might try to call up the residence of retired Gen. Colin Powell, and ask to speak with his wife.
By all accounts, it was she who effectively spiked the possibility in 1996 that he might run for president, and opened the way many years later for the town halls, the tea bags, "you lie," Jimmy Carter, and all of the rest.
With the end of the Powell "campaign" (or was it the book tour?) went the best chance we had that our first black president would have a harmonious tenure, unmarked by hysterics and culture-war posturing. Instead, we have what looks in retrospect like a preordained train wreck, in which arrogance, folly, suspicion, and grievance collide.
Deceptively, President Obama and Powell have key things in common, that make them seem two of a kind. They have charisma, and calm, soothing temperaments; appealing stories of having risen from modest beginnings, and transcend race in that they appear less as ethnics than as generic American types.
They are not descended from slaves, but from her majesty's subjects; their black forebears arrived here in the 20th century; neither lived in a ghetto or had much to do with the civil rights movement; and their run-ins with bias appear to be slight.
Obama was raised by his mother's white family largely outside the American mainland; Powell grew up in the Bronx in mixed-ethnic neighborhoods, and went into the Army, whose record on integration has long surpassed that of the country at large.
Nonetheless, if the ethnic salience seems to be similar, the ideological difference is vast. Powell was raised by immigrants, who came to this country and chose to adapt to its mores; Obama by a mother who was born here, and left, married two men who were not Americans, and showed no great interest in home.
In cultural terms, Powell was raised with the values of a white-ethnic immigrant; Obama with those of a white intellectual; which are at the opposite ends of the scale. Powell went to City College of New York before such schools had become overtly political, Obama to Ivy League colleges after the rot had set in.
Between the faculty lounge, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Illinois politics, Obama matured in a liberal bubble; Powell worked in the White House with conservatives who didn't quite share his views.
Temperate himself, Obama has a tolerance if not an affinity for marginal and/or outrageous figures. Powell pals around with former Reagan White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, not with Bill Ayers.
Obama stands now with the 20 percent at the liberal edge of the spectrum; while Powell is a tick or two to the right of dead center, plausible as a GOP moderate or a Scoop Jackson Democrat, the personification of the vast middle ground.
The first black president should have been a Republican general, boringly stuck at the center of the center, not an all-too-exciting tax-and-spend Democrat, trying to weaken the country's defenses, and push through an expansion of federal power that almost looks to be crafted on purpose to produce spasms of wrath on the right.
Given all this, it was also a given that there would be a fierce and loud pushback; a given that the Democrats, who for 30 years had screamed "race!" every time the GOP said "gesundheit!" would quickly scream "race!" almost by reflex; and a given, too, that the GOP would scream back that the left had abused all its presidents; slandered all blacks and Latinos to the right of the center, and snickered when union goons at a rally beat up the black Kenneth Gladney, for handing out stickers reading "Don't Tread On Me."
If you don't like all this, you can call Mrs. Powell. Does she ever suspect she was wrong?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
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