The Popularity of Colin Powell Essay -- Colin Powell Governmental Poli

The Popularity of Colin Powell everywhere he goes, Colin Powell is besieged. Bicycle messengers in spandex tights stop him on the streets of capital of the United States and urge him to run for President. Waiters at restaurants advise the retired general to aim for the black-and-blue House. CEOs quietly pledge money should Powell decide to run. Political operatives of both parties would handle to ignore Powell--but cant. I dont think about it a lot, claims a senior(a) sporting House official, before admitting, If Powell does run, he will be a significant player. Another in the White House is more fatalist If he runs, were dead. Says William Lacy, Bob Doles top strategist If he jumped in the track today, he would be the principal competitor for us. Everywhere he goes, Colin Powell is applauded. In the hall in San Diego where the republican Party will nominate its presidential candidate about a year from now, the crowd is instantly on its feet as his presence is announced and he bounds down to the podium. He speaks for 50 minutes, without notes, taking the crowd through the cold war, through Korea, Vietnam, the sicken of the Berlin Wall, Operation Desert Storm and the occupation of Haiti. Powell, 58, tells moving tales of his upbringing in Harlem and the South Bronx, of sitting in the Hall of St. Catherine in the Kremlin, where he perceive Gorbachev declare that the cold war was over. And when Powell has delivered his set speech, the inevitable question rises from the traumatise When are you acquittance to announce that youre running for President? The rapt auditory sense carefully weighs the well-rehearsed answer, word by word. Thank you very, very much. And Im very, very flattered. Im esteemed and humbled. Its a question I receive regularly, and I dont know what Im going to do with my life after my book is finished. The book is out this fall, and wherefore Ill have to make some choices. I tell people that Im not a professional politician. I was tru ly a soldier. Another quiver of applause washes over him. Even after working two geezerhood in the West Wing, there isnt a single one of my White House friends from those days who could tell you today whether they think Im a Republican or a Democrat. That was part of the code I lived with. Now Im no longer protected by my uniform. As I go well-nigh the country, Im trying to develop a policy-making philosophy, just to be a good citizen, not n... ...black votes taking away the most reliable shopping center of the partys electoral support and vacuuming up votes Clinton needs if he is to win in 1996. And how could a nonparty President actually govern? It is likely both parties in Congress would be plenty angry with President Powell for having broken up their games. Would there be a proliferation of parties, turning American democracy into a version of Italys fractured, shifting coalition style? Friends counter that Powell could form a bipartisan government of national reconciliatio n. But he has known umpteen Third World coup leaders who say they have interpreted power to achieve national reconciliation. Powell, by his own admission, has always been a supremely cautious calculator of risks and rewards. He succeeded as a political general by knowing where the boundaries were, knowing what was possible and what was not. There is nothing in the life of Colin Powell to suggest he would be the man to crack a grenade into the entrenched positions of American politics. On the other hand, Powell has bounded up the career ladder two and three steps at a time. He is a very determined man. Meanwhile, he is thinking, calculating, weighing his choices.