"Righting what he's done wrong": Powell Endorses Obama

As others have pointed out, once again Neil Young comes away with being startling "prescient" with 2006's "Lookin for a Leader".

The song contains the lyrics:

"Maybe it's Obama, but he thinks he's too young
Maybe it's Colin Powell to right what he's done wrong"

And this weekend, former Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to right what he'd done wrong by endorsing Obama.

Even the New York Times makes the connection:

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama on Sunday represented his own transformative moment in a lifelong journey through war and politics.

It was not only an embrace of a presidential candidate from the other party, but also an effort to reshape a legacy that he himself considers tainted by his service under President Bush.

The endorsement, which came after months of conversations between Mr. Powell and Mr. Obama on a wide range of foreign and domestic policy issues, made clear Mr. Powell’s dismay at the Republican Party. He said he felt that the party had become too conservative under Mr. Bush, and that Senator John McCain’s campaign was not good for the country or its reputation around the world.

(For our international readers, this may help to put the endorsement in context and it's importance to the U.S. political debate.)


Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama

Earlier this year, we had remarked on another cosmic convergence in the song "Lookin for a Leader".

For sometime now, Neil has been sending us postcards from the future.

But do we understand them? Apparently, not too well.

We've been long intrigued by these often cryptic messages which eventually resonate. Take the lines in the prophetic "After the Goldrush":

"Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970's"

We might not have really gripped what that was all about back in 1970 but we sure do today with the global environmental crisis finally beginning to make an impact upon business as usual.

And then of course there is our beloved -- yet widely maligned -- Greendale. We saw Greendale as an update on "After the Goldrush" and also remarkably prescient. It was, the inconvenient truth of Greendale.

So what will Neil's next postcard from the future be? Although the new songs like "Just Singin' A Song" are not exactly resonating with many, we think there's a lot to be found in the song. Clearly, the Linc-Volt effort is the literal interpretation of the song, but how all this plays out -- who knows.

ps - You may want to read this letter on neilyoung.com.