Powell's change reflects GOP failures

A column, like a good movie, should have an arc - start here, end there and somehow connect the two. So this column will begin with the speech Condi Rice made to the Republican National Convention in 2000 in praise of George W. Bush and end with Colin Powell's appearance last week on "Meet the Press" in praise of Barack Obama. Between these lie the ruins of the GOP, a party gone very, very wrong.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush and now John McCain have constructed a mean, grumpy, exclusive, narrow-minded Republican Party. It has the scent of Barry Goldwater's GOP - the 1964 angry one, not the one perfumed by nostalgia - that is home to those who think Obama is "The Madrassian Candidate." Karl Rove, take a bow.

It is worth remembering that both Rice and Powell spoke to that Philadelphia convention. And it is worth recalling, too, that Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" and had compiled a record as Texas governor to warrant the hope, if not the belief, that he was a different sort of Republican. When he ran for re-election as governor in 1998, he went from 15 percent of the black vote to 27 percent, and from 28 percent of the Hispanic vote to an astounding 49 percent. Here was a coalition-builder.

Now, all this is rubble. It is not merely that Barack Obama was always going to garner the vast majority of the black vote. It is also that the GOP, under Rove and his disciples in the McCain campaign, has not only driven out ethnic and racial minorities but a vast bloc of voters who, quite bluntly, want nothing to do with Sarah Palin. For moderates everywhere, she remains the best reason to vote against McCain.

But the GOP's tropism toward its furiously angry base, its tolerance and currying of anti-immigrant sentiment, its flattering of the ignorant on matters of undisputed scientific consensus - evolution, for instance - have sharpened the division. Red is the color of yesterday.

Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills - lest reality be called racism. Sometimes, they criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.

Still, a Democrat can remain a Democrat - or at least vote as one - without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values. That, though, is not what Colin Powell was saying Sunday about his own party. "I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years," Powell said. "It has moved more to the right than I would like." He cited McCain's harping on Bill Ayers to exploit fears that Obama is a Muslim (so what if he were? Powell rightly asked) and mentioned how Palin's presence raised grave questions about McCain's judgment. In effect, Powell was out of the GOP. S'long, guys.

Those of us who traveled with Bush in the 2000 campaign could tell that when he spoke of education, of the "soft bigotry of low expectations," he meant it. Education, along with racial and ethnic reconciliation, was going to be his legacy. Then came 9/11, Afghanistan and finally the misbegotten war in Iraq. His legacy is not merely in tatters. It does not, as he intended, even exist.

In the end, Powell was determined not to be one of the GOP's useful idiots. Those moderates willing to overlook the choice of Palin, those capable of staying in a party where, soon enough, she could be an important or dominant force, retain the intellectual nimbleness that enabled them to persist in championing a war fought for duplicitous reasons and extol cultural values they do not for a minute share. Powell walked away from that, and others will follow - the second time that a senator from Arizona has led the GOP into the political wilderness.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group