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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (428604)	10/20/2008 5:23:07 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572942

From President Bush's White House team, Colin Powell hears ... nothing Colin L. Powell, the former mud soldier, hurled his political grenade in defense of Barack Obama, but the collateral damage hit the Bush White House. To be sure, he was opting for Obama, but the undercurrent of his message was a strong rejection of the direction the Republican Party -- and the nation -- have taken under President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. We won't even get into his quiet dis of Sarah Palin. And 24 hours after President Bush's former secretary of State said he would vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, he has been given a cold shoulder, so to speak, from the Bushies. "He's not heard anything from the White House types," said a close friend who spoke with Powell before and after his appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sunday. On the other hand, he's heard from just about everyone else, this Powell friend said, and response has been "overwhelmingly positive."<?b> The friend added: He feels very good about what he said yesterday. He's very comfortable with it. The White House non-reaction, so far, is not too surprising when you consider what Powell was saying in this mildly worded but devastating sentence from Sunday's TV performance: "I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years." Or the rejection of the impact of the recent Bush years when he said that the next president would have to "fix the reputation that we've left with the rest of the world." And when did the U.S. standing turn sour? As Countdown to Crawford reported Saturday, the polls abroad are pretty striking in the rejection of U.S. policy under Bush. Come to think of it, considering the efforts of the White House team to maneuver around Powell when he was in office, their response to the distance he is putting between himself and the president may not be that strange. The picture of Bush, Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2002 notwithstanding, they really weren't that, well, close. Characteristically, Powell on Sunday used very forceful, deliberate -- but polite and toned-down -- language, choosing a course that would leave little room for anyone to pick it apart and suggest he was in any way hedging his bets. But we know, from personal experience, that although adept at using nuanced language, he can make his point strongly, with no room for doubt, when he so chooses. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush 41 and Bill Clinton has been a friend of John McCain for a quarter-century, but he decided that friendship could not be the determining factor. Rather, he wanted to nudge the Republican Party away from its current course -- one that he sees as having turned rightward particularly during the second Bush-Cheney term, which of course would be the period when he had already left the administration. But in the end, the Powell friend, bursting out in a broad chuckle as he played off McCain's campaign theme of "Country First," said of Powell's decision: "He put America first." latimesblogs.latimes.com