Powell Weighs the Risks of the Political Battlefield : Campaign: Retired general mulls presidential run in a time of anxiety. But neither party passes his muster.

Facing the fateful decision of whether to run for the nation’s highest office, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell sees America as a nation adrift, having lost the sense of purpose that the Cold War provided, its people absorbed by internal problems such as crime, drugs and the breakdown of the social order, and by a general mistrust of the governing Establishment.

“There is this Angst in the country that there is something missing,” Powell said in an interview last week. Yet he appears not just calculatingly mysterious but truly ambivalent about whether he is the man to supply that missing something.

A lot of the country’s Angst “gets reflected on me,” Powell said. But, he added, “I don’t know that I want to be President.”

“What I am going to have to do is think through what I want to do with my life and whether there is something I can bring to the American people that none of the other candidates can.”

Powell has good reason for caution. As he himself notes, his current high standing in the polls largely reflects his status as a blank slate on which voters can inscribe their own hopes and beliefs.

“I don’t think the popularity I enjoy can be transferred into political” terms, he said. “It’s not apples to apples. People don’t really know who I am yet.”

Now the nation is beginning to find out who Powell is as he conducts a carefully orchestrated series of interviews and appearances designed to promote both his book, “My American Journey,” and his as-yet-undetermined political future. As he does so, potential voters are finding a man who will have a difficult time fitting in anywhere in the nation’s existing political structure.

Powell had rejected the Democrats, saying they have run out of “intellectual energy” and that he would not run on their ticket. But in some other recent interviews, including one with Barbara Walters that was taped last month and broadcast Friday on ABC-TV, Powell left open the possibility of running as a Democrat. Asked about this “movement in my thinking,” as he described it, Powell said he had concluded: “There is a limit to how coy you can be with some of these things.”

A second course, running as an independent, has been advocated by many admirers, but Powell said that the option would present “enormous difficulties.”

“Unless you can self-finance your candidacy, like Ross Perot, it is a very long shot,” he said.

That leaves the GOP, but, as Powell understands, his views on some subjects have little in common with the party’s conservative core. The gap between him and most Republican activists comes through most clearly in Powell’s passionate resentment of attempts to gloss over the continuing injustices inflicted on African Americans and other minorities.

Despite his own personal achievement in rising to the top of the white power structure, capped by his service as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the George Bush Administration, Powell’s views on the continuing level of racism in American society are blunt:

“The first thing you have to do is stop deceiving yourself by saying we have a level playing field and a colorblind society,” he said, implicitly rejecting the view suggested by such GOP candidates as Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and California Gov. Pete Wilson.

“We don’t have a level playing field or a colorblind society,” Powell said.

“Exhibit No. 1,” he said, is retired Los Angeles police Detective Mark Fuhrman, whose racist comments were revealed in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Asked about affirmative action for minorities, which he supports within certain limits, Powell responded that America “is a nation full of preferences.”

“The people in this town [Washington] who scream about quotas and preferences go right back on Capitol Hill to vote preferences which give corporations some things in the way of specific benefits that they don’t deserve. And it’s paid for by the middle class.

“Why do you think all those guys on K Street are there?” Powell demanded, referring to the Washington boulevard that houses thousands of corporate lobbyists. “They go to Capitol Hill every day to get preferences.”

If he did seek the presidency, Powell said, “I would try to change some of the rhetoric that is currently in the body politic. There is a demonizing going around” about those Americans who are caught in the squalor and despair of inner-city life. “When we say they are ‘welfare queens,’ when we say they need to ‘get out of the wagon and start pulling’ “--a key line in the presidential campaign stump speech of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.)--”we are demonizing these people.”

“I would say: ‘These are fellow Americans. Many have had a run of bad luck. Many have not had the opportunities that are available to other Americans. Our challenge, the challenge for all Americans, is to do something to help these people. So let’s not cut them off and walk away. We can’t walk away. They are part of our family, part of America.’ ”

Similarly, while he reveres the free enterprise system, Powell rejects what he calls the “Gingrichian” idea that private business and private charities can replace government in solving the problems of depressed urban areas.

“Come on, give me a break. There’s no way,” Powell said about the views he associates with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). “Government still bears the responsibility.

“I am not anti-government. I just think government ought to do things in a more efficient way. And government has to get rid of those things it doesn’t do very well.”

If Powell’s stands on social issues dismay conservatives, liberals are likely to blanch at his call for “basic” changes in entitlements--including the possibility of raising the age requirement for Social Security benefits and establishing means-testing for Medicare--and his overriding faith in the “demonstrated success of the free marketplace.”

Indeed, in his book, Powell writes that government should keep its hands off the economy beyond measures to protect public safety and curb unfair competition. In the interview, out of deference to his mother’s experience as a loyal member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, he added that government also should act “to make sure that labor is not exploited.”

Furthermore, Powell scoffed at President Clinton’s hopes of rebuilding America through public investments in infrastructure and education as simply “more government spending,” preempting decisions that should more properly be made “where the best judgments are made--in the marketplace.”

Those sorts of ideas illustrate what is wrong with Clinton’s Democrats, in Powell’s eyes: They don’t stand for much “except for more spending, big government and ‘let’s get a program.’ I can’t identify with that.”

Powell also criticized much of the rhetoric that comes from politicians of both parties about “values.”

“There is a lot of chitchat about ‘You have to go back to good old American values,’ or as President Clinton is fond of saying, ‘We have to go back to middle-class values,’ ” Powell said. “For a black person, this is not an unmixed blessing. There is a lot of rhetorical nonsense and demagoguery about the word values .

“What we all want is an America where everybody has an opportunity to pursue [their ambitions] as far as their ability and dreams will take them. But it is not that nation yet.”

Such comments, along with Powell’s support for the right to abortion and for some gun-control measures and his opposition to school prayer, are bound to stir resentment among conservative elements in the Republican Party. Indeed, as Powell noted in the interview, early reports of his positions “have already caused some consternation on the [Republican] right wing.”

“I respect their views, and I hope they respect mine,” he said.

Powell added that he is alert to the possibility that Republicans might try to exploit him by pressuring him into taking the party’s vice presidential nomination in the hope that he would draw African American voters away from their customary home in the Democratic Party.

“That thought has occurred to me,” he said. The party nominee’s position on racial issues would be key to his decision if offered the No. 2 slot, he added. “I would only consider it if I was convinced that I was being the vice president for somebody who was willing to deal with the issue in the way I just described. I wouldn’t allow myself to be used.”

Race is also central to the impact that a Powell candidacy might have on the nation. Weighing the meaning of his candidacy for black Americans, Powell said it would demonstrate that “the mold has been broken.”

His running “as somebody not from the civil rights movement, not as sort of a token candidate, but as someone looked at by all parts of American society as perhaps a serious candidate, should give encouragement to all minorities,” he said.

Just over six feet tall, still lithe and muscular at 58, Powell carries himself with the confident demeanor of one who, during his service to the country, has confronted both physical danger and large bureaucracies and emerged with his health and dignity intact.

Not the least of Powell’s assets is the same imposing presence that commanded the nation’s respect during his televised Persian Gulf War briefings, when he bluntly offered his strategy for dealing with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s army: “First, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”

Powell’s career was aided by two tours in Vietnam, where he earned the Purple Heart and later the Soldier’s Medal, when, after breaking his ankle in a helicopter crash, he limped back to the wreckage to rescue his commanding general and three other men.

Selected as a White House fellow in 1972, Powell caught the eye of Caspar W. Weinberger, then-President Richard Nixon’s budget director. There began a series of promotions culminating in his being picked as national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush.

Marking him in a way as much as his soldierly background is his upbringing in the South Bronx, now a blighted neighborhood, but in Powell’s youth a bustling slice of the Big Apple’s cross-cultural Babel. There he acquired, among other things, a working knowledge of Yiddish, which he still uses when in a storytelling frame of mind.

Like most New Yorkers, for whom surviving any given day takes on melodramatic aspects, Powell has a thespian flair, reminiscent of the storytelling gift exhibited by another Gotham native once considered prime presidential material--former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

Thus, in making a point about the virtues of the free market, Powell re-enacted for the benefit of an interviewer a vignette from his youth when his mother urged him to train in college as an engineer. “Ollie, that’s where the money is,” Powell declaimed in the role of Arie Powell. “You go and become an engineer and you’ll make $100 a week.”

That gift has served him well on the lecture circuit, where he earns up to $60,000 per speech. At times, as he teases audiences about his presidential prospects, he displays a sense of timing so refined that it recalls the immortal Jack Benny’s routines about his miserliness. Those showman skills, of course, could potentially serve him well as a political stump speaker.

But Powell knows that it will take more than stagecraft to fill the nation’s leadership vacuum.

“I’m not sure that any President can totally restore a sense of noble purpose that existed in the time of the Cold War or in the brief time during Desert Storm,” Powell said. “The problems now are more vexing.”

“People are looking for a Reaganesque type of person,” Powell said. “Somebody with simple, straightforward aims, who can create confidence that this person is going to march in that direction. I’m not talking about ideology but a sense of conviction and a sense that the President is above” partisan bickering.

Clinton, he added, “too often seems a part of it, not above it.”

Meanwhile, Powell is looking forward to the next few weeks and his time of decision, which will hinge on whether he can formulate a vision for the country--”something I feel strongly enough about so that I am prepared to devote my life, fortune and sacred honor and sanity and privacy to it.”

He will weigh the pros and cons, but even the ever-prudent Powell conceded that some things cannot be calculated in purely pragmatic terms. “At the end of the day, I’ll probably go on instinct.”