Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State under George W. Bush, publicly announced this morning that he is endorsing President Obama for a second term.

Powell backed Obama during the last election, as well, much to the dismay of his fellow Republicans. But he says he likes to get all the facts and see exactly what each candidate will do during their campaigns before making his decision on who to vote for, something which gets pushed to the wayside these days in favor of voting strictly for one’s party.

“I think I’m a Republican of a more moderate mold,” he said. “That’s something of a dying breed I’m sorry to say.”

On President Obama, Powell said the country needs to remember that Congress shoulders a lot of the blame for the deep pit of problems the country has been in over recent years, and that the president has accomplished many of the things he set out to do four years ago.

“When he took over, the country was in very very difficult straits,” he said. “We were in the one of the worst recessions we had seen in recent times, close to a depression. The fiscal system was collapsing. Wall Street was in chaos, we had 800,000 jobs lost in that first month of the Obama administration and unemployment peaked a few months later at 10 percent. So we were in real trouble. The auto industry was collapsing, the housing was start[ing] to collapse and we were in very difficult straits. And I saw over the next several years, stabilization come back in the financial community, housing is now starting to pick up after four years, it’s starting to pick up. Consumer confidence is rising….Generally we’ve come out of the dive and we’re starting to gain altitude. The unemployment rate is too high, people are still hurting in housing, but I see that we’re starting to rise up.”