Plan B is Plan A is a Retread is Fine with Colin Powell

A.B. Stoddard:

Unfortunately for Obama, Trump’s pathetic gambit failed to trump the headline that Obama is trying to pass off recycled retreads as new plans and that he was forced to do so after losing the first presidential debate to Mitt Romney, plunging in the polls and sending Democrats into a state of nauseated panic. How, they asked the campaign, could the president possibly win a second term in such a tight race without having outlined an agenda for the next four years? And so an eleventh-hour glossy appeared to answer the charge that Obama had nothing in mind for 2013-2017, with pretty pictures and pabulum to prove it. Brace yourself, the plans include a tax plan that cuts the deficit and creates jobs, energy made in America, a reminder of all that is good about ObamaCare, a pledge to stop Medicare or Social Security from being privatized, reviving manufacturing, investing in education and growing small businesses.

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But it was a good enough plan to win the coveted endorsement of Colin Powell, so take that!

More seriously, a few words about the former Secretary of State.

I could understand Powell endorsing Obama in 2008. I could understand endorsing week-old roadkill over John McCain. I mean, that whole candidacy was one giant stinkbomb. Besides, Obama was promising centrism and budget cuts and stuff, and it took an eye far more discerning than Powell’s to see through Obama’s clever ruse.

(One moment please while I find a pair of needle-nose pliers long enough to extract my tongue from my cheek.)

And then — and I do mean this part with all sincerity — there was the racial healing that was supposed to come with electing our first black President.

So here’s where we might honestly feel some small bit of confusion over Powell’s endorsement. Our post-racial President has been playing the race card relentlessly for four years. He even played it on Bill Clinton during the 2008 primary, but maybe that details escaped Secretary Powell’s rapt attention. And it’s not like Obama has rescued the economy or fixed Too Big to Fail or saved Medicaid or postponed Social Security’s looming insolvency or cut the deficit in half or made us loved around the world again or any of those things he promised to do.

Then, too, we might honestly feel some more small bit of confusion because Mitt Romney is precisely Powell’s kind of Republican. They’re both moderates, and they’re both more than a little bit squishy in that famous Northeastern Mainline Republican way.

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And yet, Powell endorsed the SCoaMF over his fraternal GOP twin.

It can’t be Obama’s record. It’s not that Romney represents the Tea Party Evangelical Knuckle-Dragging Warmonger wing of the GOP. Which leaves us just one thing.

Obama is black. So is Powell.

Forget that “content of his character” thing. Powell’s going for the black guy because he’s the black.

I thought we were supposed to be past all that.

But then Obama got sworn in.

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