Karin Cooper/CBS News, via Associated Pres

Former Secretary of State General Colin Powell appeared on the CBS talk show "Face the Nation" on Sunday. 

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirmed on Sunday that he remains a Republican while asserting that his party should become more inclusive. He also rebuffed his party’s relentless criticism of President Obama’s decision to close the detention base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

 “Rush will not get his wish, and Mr. Cheney was misinformed,” Mr. Powell said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” “I’m still a Republican.”

Mr. Powell was responding to a jab from former Vice President Dick Cheney, who two weeks ago had said, “If I had to choose, in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh.” Mr. Cheney, then speaking on “Face the Nation,” added that he thought Mr. Powell had left the party when he endorsed Barack Obama for president last October.

But on Sunday, Mr. Powell noted his long support of Republican candidates and service to Republican-led administrations, including his role as secretary of state under former president George W. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

“For the previous 20 years I voted solidly for Republican candidates,” Mr. Powell said. “I served Ronald Reagan for two years. I spoke at the 1996 convention and I spoke at the 2000 convention.”

He added that he had voted for several Democratic presidents: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and “even” Jimmy Carter. Mr. Powell called it “unfortunate” that Mr. Limbaugh said he supported Mr. Obama because he, too, was black.

“I’d like to point out that in the course of my 50 years of voting for presidents, I have voted for the person I thought was best qualified at that time to lead the nation,” he said. “Last year, I thought it was President-now Barack Obama.”

Mr. Powell, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who identified himself as a Republican only after leaving the military, said he felt that the Republican Party should be more inclusive than it has been. Noting the party’s substantial losses in last fall’s elections, he said: “You can only do two things with a base. You can sit on it and watch the world go by, or you can build on it.

“In almost every demographic indicator, the Republican Party is losing. North, South, East, West. Men, women, whites, blacks, Hispanics.” “Are we simply moving further to the right,” Mr. Powell asked, “and by so doing opening up the right-of-center and the center to be taken over by independents and to be taken over by Democrats?”

Bucking the party’s push to court the most conservative elements of its base, Mr. Powell said he hoped his party could adopt a more centrist message, one that he said was embodied by Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman who died of cancer on May 2.

“Jack was as conservative as anybody,” Mr. Powell said. “And Jack also was a man who believed in inclusiveness, reaching out to minorities, reaching out to the poor, sharing the wealth. Which became a bad term last fall, but sharing the wealth of the country not only with the rich, but with those who are least advantaged in our society. It’s that kind of Jack Kemp Republicanism that I like, and I would like to see the party move more in that kind of a direction.”

The Sunday talk shows capped a week of public debate on Guantánamo, including dueling speeches delivered by the president and Mr. Cheney. Republicans seized on an issue as the Democratic-led Congress refused Mr. Obama’s request for funds to close the base.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who, like Mr. Cheney, has made repeated media appearances in recent weeks, criticized Mr. Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo.

“I think the president made a very big mistake,” Mr. Gingrich said. “It was a campaign promise. It is not a national security plan. I think, frankly, they should keep Guantánamo open. Whatever things that are wrong with Guantánamo they would fix by moving them to somewhere else, fix them at Guantánamo.”

When pressed to say when he thought the base could be closed, Mr. Gingrich said, “When the terrorists disappear.”

Democratic Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois claimed that Republicans were continuing to stoke Americans’ fears to drive their party’s agenda.

“If you step back and take a look at history for a moment, you will find the message we just heard from Mr. Gingrich, from Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Rush Limbaugh to be the same,” he said on “Meet the Press.” “It’s a message of fear.”

Mr. Powell also disagreed with the flurry of criticism, especially from fellow Republicans.

“I felt Guantánamo should be closed for the past six years, and I lobbied and presented reasons to President Bush,” Mr. Powell said.

He added that Mr. Cheney’s disagreement with Obama administration is also a disagreement with the Bush administration’s policy.

“President Bush stated repeatedly to international audiences and to the country that he wanted to close Guantánamo,” Mr. Powell said. “The problem he had was he couldn’t get all the pieces together.”

This past week, Democrats in the Senate broke with the president and joined a 90-6 vote against Mr. Obama’s $80 million funding request to close Guantanamo, demanding that the administration first come up with a plan.

Mr. Powell said that he has had discussions with President Obama about the base’s closure and acknowledged the complexity of the problem in deciding how to handle the approximately 240 detainees still held at Guantánamo.

While he said the Obama administration should reach out to Congress and the judiciary to create a framework for dealing with the detainees, Mr. Powell criticized the president for “going up to the Congress and asking for $80 million without a plan. And by, frankly, giving enough time to opponents of it to marshal their forces as to why we shouldn’t do this.”

But he also criticized suggestions that moving the detainees to prisons on American soil would endanger communities around the prisons and that the United States should deny detainees rights to legal counsel.

“We have got two million people in jail in America,” he said. “The highest incarceration rate in the world. And they all had lawyers. They had all had access to the writ of habeas corpus and they’re all in jail.”