Politicians beware. Once you’re on the record, it can be hard to go off the record.
Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Harvard Law graduate, and now former senior foreign policy adviser to Sen. Barack Obama, learned that lesson the hard way this week.
While in London on a book tour she was candid, too candid it would seem, in her assessment of Obama’s opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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Here’s what The Scotsman published yesterday in a story by political correspondent Gerri Peev:
“She (Clinton) is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping at anything,” Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
Alas for Power, the newspaper didn’t give her a take back.
“WHEN is off the record actually off the record?” The Scotsman asked itself in a kind of addendum to the story.
“When the rules are established in advance,” it replied, stating a policy that is in force at most papers.
And so it was that her negative assessment of Clinton was launched into cyberspace and seen as an example of the Obama campaign going negative after its defeats this week in Ohio and Texas.
Obama deplored his adviser’s words. And Power quickly resigned.
“I should not have made these comments, and I deeply regret them,” she said. “It is wrong for anyone to pursue this campaign in such negative and personal terms.”
Power, 37, brought extraordinary credentials to her role as a foreign policy adviser to the candidate.
Born in Ireland in 1970, she moved to the United States when she was nine. After graduating from Yale University, she went on to Harvard Law School.
She then became a war correspondent in the former Yugoslavia, working as a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe and The New Republic.
She later wrote from a variety of troubled and dangerous places, including East Timor, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Power won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2003 for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
Her report “Dying in Darfur,” published in The New Yorker magazine in August 2004, is credited with alerting people outside of Africa to the genocide in Darfur. It won the American Society of Magazine Editors prize for reporting that year.
Power continues to report on world affairs and to write a column on foreign policy for Time magazine. She is also a professor at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which she founded in 1998. The center is based at the Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Her latest book is Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, the account of a U.N. official who died the bombing of U.N headquarters in Iraq in 2003.
Power spent from 2005 to 2006 working in Obama’s senate office.
Clinton yesterday said that Obama did the “right thing,” presumably in accepting Power’s resignation.
However, she went on to say that “it’s important to look at what she (Power) and his other advisers say behind closed doors … It raises disturbing questions about what the real planning and policy positions inside the Obama campaign happen to be.”
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3 Comments
#1. California Gal 03.09.2008
This latest amateur-hour mistake by the Obama team makes me worried. What are Howard Dean, the superdelegates, and the DNC thinking? How is this enthusiastic but woefully clue-less team going to actually win in November? Are we going to face yet another Democratic Presidential Loss? Gore-Loss, Kerry-Loss? It really stinks to face the prospects of losing yet another Presidency to the Republicans. As much as Clinton has her issues, at least they know how to ultimately WIN the Presidency. It’s time to focus on how to WIN against the Republicans and we need a proven team.
Isn’t that what the real goal is in the end?
#2. FJ Stratford 03.09.2008
Poor Samantha. Fired by Obama for speaking the truth -that Obama has no plans of following up on his promises about Iraq.
Just like his NAFTA promises.
Beware of Obama. He is a habitual liar.
#3. independent analyst 03.10.2008
Obama has made a fatal mistake. He has portrayed himself bigger than the Democratic Party itself hurting his party’s chances of winning the elections. He has created an Obama Party so to speak. 90% of the black folks and many young and inexperienced new voters are allured by his mesmerizing personality and they come out to the primaries and caucuses just to vote for Obama. But beware, they vote Obama not democratic. They vote just because he is Obama and not because he is a Democrat. Should Obana lose the DNC nomination now, those blacks and young folks will not vote Democrat.
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