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Joe Hallett of The Columbus Dispatch reports that Ohio Senator George Voinovich recently approached former Secretary of State Colin Powell and tried to get him to run for the GOP’s nomination.
Sen. George V. Voinovich visited former Secretary of State Colin Powell about a month ago and urged him to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2008.
Powell, who resigned after President Bush’s first term, balked.
“He said he had given his service to this country, and his wife’s a little bit reluctant about doing it,” Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, said Wednesday during an interview in his Capitol Hill office.
“I told him it’s time to re-up.”
Voinovich, who is given to public displays of emotion, then paused and got teary-eyed as he continued speaking about Powell.
“I said, ‘You have a moral obligation and I have a moral obligation, and this country is running out of time. And if you’re running out of time, then I’m running out of time, and I think we have a moral obligation to try to leave a better legacy than it looks like we’re going to leave to our kids.’ ” [Emphasis added]
Voinovich’s concern about how he and Powell’s rubber stamping of the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan will reflect on their personal legacies is truly touching [/ world’s smallest violin]. I agree that he and Powell do have a moral obligation to leave a better legacy for America than the string of failures via lack of principle in their opposition to the disasters their party has brought America to. Barring any of Powell’s actions during tenure as Bush’s Secretary of State who sold the Iraq War to the world, he might even make a better candidate than the dozen-odd hacks and has-beens that make up the Republican field now.
But Voinovich and Powell are deluding themselves if they think now’s the time for Powell to save his legacy and fix the problems facing America and the Republican Party stemming from Iraq and Bush’s war on terror. Powell owns these failures just as much as Condi Rice, George Tenet, Don Rumsfeld, and the raft of other neocon administration officials. It’s not exactly a prime platform for saving your reputation by launching a presidential campaign.
I don’t know if Powell will do well as a candidate. He once noted, though, that he was picked to sell the war because the only person who polls higher than him in America is Mother Teresa. So who knows. I just don’t relish the thought of this man trying to make himself into a saint to save America from a problem that he helped create.
