My point has less to do with general Powell and more to do with a deplorable tendency among us conservatives to flit from personality to personality in a desperate quest for a conservative who can carry us to victory. Donald Trump taught us the need to scrutinize with a cold and sober judgment the conservative bona fides of any pretender to conservative leadership. Regrettably, our tendency in the past has been to seize upon African-American conservatives as the personality who will win the day by holding onto conservative votes and poaching African-American votes away from Democrats.
In this quest we have had conservative boomlets for ColinPowell, Candi Rice, Herman Cain, Ben Carson and Alan Keyes of whom the latter two might be said to be reliably conservative. The most conservative, Alan Keyes, probably received the least support in this forum.
Beyond seizing on skin color as the litmus test which will yield us a winner, we ought to question whether our practice of substituting personality for policy has so often led us in pursuit of false prophets. This is a human failing not limited to conservatives but rife in the Republican Party that has produced candidates such as Mitt Romney. The virus is even more advanced among Democrats, but their cancer should not be ours.
We are now in an era in which the Republic faces existential threat from which we can be extricated, in my judgment, only by the firmest application of conservative policy. At the moment we are fortunate that we have Trump as the putative leader and probable nominee but we are also deep in the bench: Cotton, Cruz, DeSantis and Pompeo, any one of whom would do because every one of them is plainly conservative.
I hope this election cycle will prove different in that we refrain from vicious ad hominem attacks and confine ourselves to examining what is important: the candidate's actual commitment to conservatism.
