COLIN POWELL TELLS a funny but humbling story about his post-military life in My American Journey, his best-selling autobiography. While driving an old Volvo on the Washington Beltway during rush hour, he ran out of gas. A traffc officer happened along and squirted a half-pint of gas in his tank. So Powell drove away, looking for a gas station. Before he found one, he got caught in another traffc jam and ran out of gas again. “I told myself,” he writes, “Mr. Powell, becoming a civilian is going to be harder than you expected.”

The same applies to politics, especially at the presidential level. Powell has many gifts of leadership — commanding presence, no-nonsense speaking style, sterling character, striking likability — but these wouldn’t automatically make him an effective candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996. In fact, there’s a strong case that he shouldn’t run.