HILADELPHIA - The idea that retired General Colin L. Powell is addressing the Republican National Committee tonight makes most of the delegates here deliriously happy. The actual words he will speak tonight may make many of them immensely uncomfortable.
For General Powell - the self-made man of destiny who had the courage, character, and, above all, the stubbornness to defy expectations and insist on his own destiny - has come to town to tell the delegates what they do not want to hear.
Powell, reared in South Bronx by parents from Jamaica, is a Republican by choice, not by birth. He is, moreover, that most unusual breed of partisan: He believes in the big concepts that have animated the party throughout its history, but he is skeptical of many of the small, contemporary ones that have won it office and power in contemporary times.
And so tonight he will tell the delegates that he believes in affirmative action, that he believes in abortion rights, that he disapproves of some of the harsh words and harsh actions that often issue forth from the Republican Congress.
But he has not come here merely to scold, which a lesser man could do. He has come here to challenge, which is what only a hero can do.
In a convention with no plot lines, no antagonists, no confrontations, and, of course, no drama, the GOP scriptwriters nonetheless found room for a hero. Tonight Powell, a graduate of New York City's public schools and of City College and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will challenge the party, every bit as vigorously as he has challenged the barriers that he did not permit to contain him and the stereotypes that he did not permit to define him.
He will tell the party that it needs to live up to its heritage as the party of Abraham Lincoln. He believes, according to those closest to him, that he has a special role: conscience of the party. But he believes that he must play that role differently from the way the Democrats' conscience, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, plays his. Jackson has sought votes. Powell never has.
Powell is known by the role he has chosen - and the one that he has refused.
He will not be president, or vice president. (Maybe secretary of state, but that is another story.) He will, however, be a symbol of American opportunity and achievement, of American military prowess, of integrity not only in theory but also (and this is the difference the military made in Powell's life) in action.
Powell, who oversaw American military response to 28 crises including the Persian Gulf War of 1991, believes above all in the idea of leadership, and he believes that the responsibility of a leader is to challenge the accepted tenets of his time, and of his party. It would be easy to talk about voluntarism - one of his biggest themes - and say that voluntarism is enough.
Instead, he will say that prosperity is not enough, especially when it is unevenly distributed.
Now, as head of a service organization called America's Promise, he is pursuing action in a different sphere. He has concluded that young people - you can expect to hear this very line tonight - are ''America's promise,'' and he's said that American society owes children the presence of caring adults in their lives, safe places for non-school hours, healthy starts, marketable skills, and opportunities to serve.
It can't be done by government alone. It can't be done by charitable organizations or faith-based organizations alone.
He has borrowed the metaphor Dwight D. Eisenhower used for war - ''crusade'' - and has applied it to a war of a different sort. In a season in which all the parties are talking about children and the future, Powell has undertaken what he calls ''a crusade for youth,'' and he's brought to it the passion that George W. Bush and Al Gore have applied to politics.
It has placed him where Bush and Gore (and Ralph Nader and Patrick J. Buchanan) would like the voters to believe they are: above politics.
''Colin is a soldier, but he is also a statesman,'' said Kenneth Duberstein, a onetime White House chief of staff under Ronald Reagan and a close friend of Powell's.
So tonight Powell will be a soldier in the Republican army; he believes, after all, in less government and less taxation, which plants him firmly in the embrace of the GOP. But he will also be a statesman; his rhetoric will be firm but gentle. He will not let the delegates feel above reproach. And he will not let them conclude that the hard work of helping the poor and the striving is beneath them.
