Q. What would Colin Powell's Republican Party look like?

For a guy who publicly expressed his support for Barack Obama, Colin Powell sure has been noisy about his membership in the Republican Party. Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan hand who has been ostentatious in his criticism of the Republican Party, noticed something:

Yesterday, Colin Powell restated his continued membership in the Republican Party. But he didn’t really explain why. It seemed more like an act of defiance than a statement of fact—no one is going to tell him what part of the bus he can sit in and no one is going to tell him what political party he can be a member of. That’s fine, but if Powell is going to make a point of staying in a party that doesn’t particularly want him—former Vice President Dick Cheney has more or less told him to leave—then Powell has a responsibility to do more than give the occasional television interview criticizing the GOP’s lack of inclusiveness; he needs to engage it on a systematic basis.

While Bartlett gets Cheney wrong -- Cheney didn't read Powell out of the party so much as he suggested that Powell had already left -- Bartlett is right about what Colin Powell needs to do. It is passing strange that when the Republican standard-bearer was a moderate like John McCain, that Powell chose to support Obama instead. I'm hard-pressed to think of which Republican Powell could support these days. Powell really ought to tell us. And if the Republican he can support stares back at him in the mirror, he needs to offer himself for office.