The Republican presidential candidates and their tricks are "belittling" the country and the presidency, and Nancy Reagan, who died at the age of 94 Sunday, would be disturbed at how her husband Ronald's legacy is being invoked, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said this weekend.
"To stand there and do junior high school tricks on one another is belittling the country and belittling the office to which they are striving," Powell, who became President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor in 1987, told NPR's Michel Martin on
"All Things Considered."
The party has to "become more respectful of each other," Powell said, telling Martin that the late president was a civil man who had a "lack of any nastiness."
"Even Jerry Springer thinks it's gone too far, and when Jerry Springer thinks you've gone too far, my friends, you have gone too far," said Powell.
His comment referred to remarks from the talk show host and former Democratic mayor of Cincinnati to
The Financial Times, last week, where he said the candidates would qualify for a spot on his show, but "we would start bleeping out some of what they'd say."
This is not the first time that Powell, who remains a Republican, criticized the tone of the Republican Party in a presidential election.
"In 2008, I spoke out against calling the president a Muslim as if that was a curse. I don't know anything in the Constitution that says Muslims are bad," Powell told Martin. And in 2012, he said, he complained that there was a "level of intolerance in some parts of the party," and he thinks there "still is."