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What brings Colin Powell to tears
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Colin Powell - the retired military general who was a professional soldier for 35 years and who served as President Bush's secretary of state, trying to sell the idea of an Iraq war to the United Nations - has been brought to tears.
Powell, who made headlines a few weeks ago when he crossed party lines to endorse Barack Obama, sat for an interview with CNN today. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he's not ashamed that the grown-man tears flowed - and still do - when he thinks about what an Obama presidency means for America as a country.
“As I watched it [the election returns], as I watched, finally one of the newscasters cut to the chase and said ‘he’s won, it’s over' – very moving moment. Everybody cried," Powell said, tearing up.
“I’m not ashamed of it …whether you voted for Mr. Obama or not, you have to take enormous pride in the fact that we were able to do this."
“President-Elect Obama did not put himself forward as an African American president. He put himself forward as an American who happened to be black,” Powell said.
He added: “We’re very, very proud to have a new American president who also happens to be an African American and that very fact moves us so far along the continuum that African Americans have been traveling for the last 230 years of our nation and for the last 400 years of existence of colonies in America.”
Another prominent African American, Whoopi Goldberg, wrote today that with Obama's election, she realized that for probably the first time in her life, in thinking about herself as an American, "it occurred to me that this is really our arrival in the country that said everything was possible."
"We have finally become part of the fabric of the United States of America," Goldberg wrote. "This is just strictly speaking as a black person. It would be very difficult not to talk about the thrill of that part of it because 160 years have gone by and we have finally come to the place where we are ready for leaders and ready to look at leaders as men and women and perhaps not by their color. But it is the first time it has happened so folks should not be surprised that black folks are really, really happy about this. "
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