Former Secretary of State Colin Powell isn’t backing down from his assessment that the GOP is biased against minorities.
Powell doubled down on his claim that there is “this vein of intolerance within the [Republican] Party” on the “O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday evening.
In an interview earlier this month Powell argued that there is this alleged “dark vein of intolerance” in the GOP and criticized several high-profile Republicans for using speech he felt was racially charged.
Powell clarified on Tuesday that he doesn’t consider the two Republican leaders he originally criticized for their racist language racists, though.
Powell originally attacked Sununu for calling Obama “lazy “ after the first presidential debate during the 2012 election, explaining that to African-Americans the word is “shiftless.”
But he said on last night’s show that he “would never call John [Sanunu] a racist.”
The former Secretary of State also admitted he doesn’t think Palin is a racist, despite his earlier attacks on the former governor for using a “racial-era slave term” in reference to Obama.
“You have to avoid this kind of language which can infuriate people and cause them to go vote,” Powell explained to the show’s host, Bill O’Reilly. “I think they have to speak to a larger group of people for the Republican Party to get back in the right track.”
But while Powell bailed out Sununu and Palin in this interview, he did take a jab at the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, listing his “47 percent” comment as an example of why there is a so-called “dark vein of intolerance” in the Republican Party.
