I got in from my friends’ joint birthday party at about 5:30. Tried to get up to watch MTP and see the Powell appearance. To make a long story short, that didn’t work.

So I’ve seen it now. Amazingly, Powell did not endorse Obama because of hip-hop, as Fox News predicted. Don’t know how in the world they fucked that one up. What led Powell to Obama was what has led so many to him: he’s the candidate big enough to handle the series of compounding crises that the next president will inherit. Yes, Powell played his role in fomenting the biggest of them, even as he tried to rein it in, and that is not now and never will be a trivial thing. But Powell represents the sanity that the Republican Party has forsaken — and forsaken in favor of this: (via John Aravosis): 

This is what conservatism embraces and liberalism — and now, vocally, Colin Powell — rejects. Notice how Powell makes the important point that to embrace anti-Islamic bigotry is counterproductive from the perspective of the war on terror. Powell might have taken it a step further and argued that since Usama bin Laden’s goal is to convince the 1.3 billion Muslims around the world that the U.S. is at war with Islam, the piece of human garbage who’d lynch an effigy of Obama with "Husain" written on it (along with a Star of David!) is an unwitting agent of al-Qaeda. Real talk.

What the endorsement proves is that a new governing coalition is possible. Many, many right-of-center people around the country look at the Republican Party and see an increasingly unacceptable vehicle for their interests. Many good people around the country vote for Republicans out of concerns that have nothing to do with bigotry — and yet bigotry is what John McCain’s party is offering. The challenge for progressives right now is to embrace the people who are on the verge of crossing over. I don’t want to trim the sails of Obama’s liberal agenda either. But we’ve seen over the last eight years how unsustainable it is to govern based on the concerns of a minority of a bare-majority. An Obama presidency can be transformative if it actually brings along recovering Bush Republicans. Progressives should look at the Powell endorsement as a harbinger. Can we take yes for an answer?