Colin Powell Getting Ready To Endorse Obama?

From Lawrence O’Donnell, who has shown signs that he has good info about former Secretary of State Colin Powell in the past, a prediction: Colin Powell is on the verge of making an endorsement:

When Colin Powell turns off his TV after the final presidential debate, he will have learned everything he is going to learn about the candidates vying to succeed his former boss, George W. Bush. Powell has made it clear that he has been thinking about an endorsement for a long time but wanted to hear more from the candidates before making his choice. It now seems beyond doubt that Colin Powell will endorse Barack Obama and thereby hammer the final nail in the coffin of the Republican campaign to hold onto the White House.

Read the post in its entirety.

If Powell does endorse Obama, it will mean that Republican candidate Sen. John McCain will wind up having turned out to be a candidate who, in the end, mainly appealed to the GOP’s partisan base rather than someone who lived up to his advance billing as someone who could expand the Republican Party or even hold onto the winning 2000 and 2004 coalition. It would be the ultimate irony and cannot be blamed on the economy alone.

Center-right and moderate Republicans more in tune with the first President George Bush, traditional conservatives who are ideological descendants of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, independent voters, and many moderates (some 60 percent according to one poll) have been moving towards Obama partially because the McCain campaign has become highly-personal and veered away from a serious discussion of issues at a time when voters are worried about the economy and a shocking number of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track.

Will tonight’s debate be a game changer that could mean Powell and others will have second thoughts and move back to McCain? Nothing is impossible BUT…

If McCain goes on the attack against Obama on the Ayers issue or questions his patriotism or even indirectly suggests Obama is a fellow traveler or enabler of terrorists it won’t win most defecting voters back (and some have probably voted already by early balloting). A negative attack (particularly with some new revelation) could push McCain’s numbers up. But there is a craving for more than personal attack politics on the part of many voters who want to hear about proposed solutions — and the 2008 version of McCain has so far not filled it because time spent in personal attack mode means less time making the case on serious issues.