Doing The Colin Powell Bounce

In the last twelve hours, I've heard Chris Rock advise white people on when it is appropriate to use the word "nigger" in public, come across a very recent photo of Colin Powell doing the "Colin Powell Bounce" on stage in London, watched the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin replace her own alter-ego in a cameo appearance on a comedy show AND sing along to a rap song that makes fun of her own candidacy, all capped off by the announcement that Barack Obama's campaign raised $150 million dollars in September.

Whew!

Then "The Last Boy Scout", Colin Powell, decides to finally announce his presidential election endorsement, after shaking up his image this week with an impromptu performance on stage with a hip-hop group.


Powell commented at the Africa Rising Festival on Tuesday in London, ""I stand before you tonight as an African-American. Many people have said to me you became secretary of state of the USA, is it still necessary to say that you are an African-American or that you are black, and I say, yes, so that we can remind our children.

"It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn't just drop out of the sky, people came from my continent in chains."

Colin Powell was back to his stone-faced self this morning, though, as he praised Barack Obama, criticized John McCain, and then looked into the Meet The Press camera and said "I'm voting for Barack Obama." His announcement got the cable news pundits atwitter, with some of them, especially the ones on CNN, reading so much into the phrases he used that you thought they were fortune tellers instead of journalists.

Watching Newt Gingrich on the George Stephanopoulos show, I had to force myself to remember that he had been a college professor before entering politics, because the stuff coming out of his mouth this morning was more ridiculous than usual as he recited a laundry list of "leftist" and "liberal" policies that were about to be unleashed by Obama and Congress on the American public.

To hear Gingrich say that Democrats wanted to "redistribute" the hard earned money of ordinary Americans almost made me fall out of my chair. We just gave the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the country to the smallest, most personally financially secure sliver of citizens EVER, a "redistribution" that will dwarf anything coming down the pike for years, and people who can add "2 + 2" are supposed to react to smug faced sound bite?

The thing all the Democratic pundits missed was an opportunity to hammer home Powell's endorsement. The reality of Powell's decision is that he threw his support behind the most conservative candidate in the race. If you can see beyond the rhetoric of the hot button issues, what you've got is what you always get when a black guy rises to a high level in America - someone who does their homework and is prone to act out of an abundance of caution.

I need to go practice my dance steps - looks like Powell might have a few moves on me.