Had Colin Powell sat down with Tom Brokaw on Sunday morning and announced that he was supporting John McCain’s presidential bid, the Republican apparatus would have feted him as a semi-prodigal son come home again.


To hear them tell it, it would have been a ponderously important thumbs-up for the .struggling McCain candidacy, a green light to queasy independents and wavering others, a permission slip to support a man who is neither who he used to be, nor what many in his party want him to be, and, therefore, a man who needs all the help he can get. Colin Powell’s endorsement would have been a lot of help.


Instead, Powell’s visit to the set of NBC’s “Meet the Press” raised a different headline. He spoke 1,961 words before flipping the script, but there it was -- that amazing declaration, “I’ll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.”


Thus, with those seven words, did Colin Powell -- former secretary of state, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former national security adviser, former prince of the Republican Party -- become a pariah in the eyes of the GOP.


Not Republicans who are reasonable, rational and more patriotic than partisan -- not the ones who, like Powell, are willing to own up to reality when it stares them in the face -- but, the ones who get a kick out of hating on Democrats generally and Obama particularly. You know, the ones who take Sarah Palin seriously. She’s probably cooking up a mess of new insults just for this occasion. Her acolytes will lap them up.


Subtler slights at Powell are in the offing. For instance, hours after Powell made his news, one conservative pundit portrayed him as something of a traitor who had turned on the party that “made” him. Powell’s endorsement of Obama “smacks of ingratitude,” said the pundit, who happened to be none other than Pat Buchanan, the three-time presidential wannabe whose chronic bigotry keeps cropping up like a bad rash (Apparently, Buchanan has a fixation about black people and gratitude or what he sees as the lack thereof. Remember his where’s-the-thanks jeremiad after Obama’s famous Philadelphia speech on race?).


If Republicans were fair and sober-minded about this, they would at least consider Powell’s compelling rationale for supporting Obama, whom he credited with  “steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge;” and with “showing intellectual vigor.”


“Mr. Obama,” Powell said, “has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people,” while McCain’s vision and outline for the country has “become narrower and narrower.”


No rancor. No zingers. No winks and you betchas and doggone-its from Powell. Just a distinguished, experienced, grown-up man laying out his case.


And, might I add, how much more gracious can you get than Colin Powell? Who, other than a true-blue gentleman, could refer to Palin as “a very distinguished woman and she’s to be admired” in the same breath that he pronounces her unfit for the job she is trying to jive her way into?


Rather than curse him for his choice, Republicans should be thanking him, if not for his superb public service, then for having not gone full brother on them.


Other men might have let them have it long ago for making a liar out of him over weapons of mass destruction, treating him dismissively when he dared to throw in words of caution and concern just as the war party was warming up in the White House, and showing him the door when they realized he was not going to go along to .....

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