In his endorsement of Barack Obama, Colin Powell offered, among other reasons, this explanation for his decision:
And I’ve also been disappointed, frankly, by some of the approaches that Senator McCain has taken recently, or his campaign ads, on issues that are not really central to the problems that the American people are worried about. This Bill Ayers situation that’s been going on for weeks became something of a central point of the campaign. But Mr. McCain says that he’s a washed-out terrorist. Well, then, why do we keep talking about him? And why do we have these robocalls going on around the country trying to suggest that, because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted. What they’re trying to connect him to is some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that’s inappropriate. Now, I understand what politics is all about. I know how you can go after one another, and that’s good. But I think this goes too far.
General Powell went on to insist that McCain’s attempt to tie Obama to Ayers was “demagoguery.”
For the sake of the argument, let’s stipulate that Powell’s views are correct that raising the matter of William Ayers is a distraction and, in the way the McCain and some Republicans have done it, is inappropriate and even demagogic.
What I wonder, then, is where the moral consternation of Colin Powell was in other recent episodes that might have caught his attention? I have two in mind.
The first has to do with the effort by liberals and leading Democrats to smear General David Petraeus, then the commanding general in Iraq. General Powell will recall that Petraeus was in the midst of engineering a remarkable, even miraculous, turnabout in Iraq. He is a man of sterling character and extraordinary skill. Yet around the time that General Petraeus testified before Congress in September 2007, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic majority whip, said, “By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.” Rep. Rahm Emanuel said Petraeus’ report deserved to win “the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction,” while Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts insisted Petraeus’ testimony was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” All of this occurred during the time in which MoveOn.org ran a full-page ad referring to General Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”
Yet I don’t recall General Powell making a high-profile effort to counter these smears by influential Democrats of a man whose only “sin” appears to be that he was taking a war that America was losing — and which General Powell was a prominent advocate for – and transforming it in our favor.
The other example I have in mind has to do with some of the charges made against President Bush. Among the things said by leading Democrats against the President was that (according to Senator Kennedy) the Iraq war was a political plot hatched in Texas and that “week after week after week after week we were told [by Bush] lie after lie after lie.” Howard Dean hinted that President Bush knew in advance about the attacks on September 11. Former Vice President Al Gore charged that President Bush had brought “deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.” Gore said the President had “betrayed this country,” he called Bush a “moral coward,” and he said the Bush Administration was allied with “digital brown shirts.” Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid said the President was a “loser” and Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the President of stooping to a level that is “beneath the dignity of the office that he holds.”
And the list goes on and on and on.
My point is a simple one: John McCain is not accusing Senator Obama of being a domestic terrorist; what he is saying is that Obama hasn’t been forthcoming in telling us the extent of that relationship, and that the relationship itself is troubling. That doesn’t seem to me to approach the calumny that was directed against either General Petraeus or President Bush. Add to that the fact that McCain’s comments about Ayers have come in the course of a presidential campaign, which are normally thought to be more rambunctious and the rhetoric more heated than during non-campaign periods.
Colin Powell is obviously free to endorse Senator Obama, and if his reasons have to do with differences on policy (Powell said in his Meet the Press interview yesterday that he fears having more conservative appointed to the Supreme Court), that’s fair enough. But to pretend that the GOP and the McCain campaign has somehow crossed a line in raising the issues of William Ayers when Powell himself did not take a high profile in criticizing Democrats who said, even by the low standards of political discourse, fairly vicious things about General Petraeus and President Bush, borders on being unserious.
