Dirty Tricks 101
Obama - The Samantha Power Story - Part 1

UPDATE:

HILLARY CLINTON explains why Samantha Power's description of her as a "monster" raises "disturbing questions", but aide Howard Wolfson's comparison of Barack Obama to Kenneth Starr does not:

One is an ad homiem attack, and one is a historical refererence.

From which we can infer that Ms Power simply erred in being insufficiently specific. If she had only said "Hillary Clinton is just like Hitler", everything would be hunky-dory.

(SOURCE: Economist.com, March 9, 2008)

It all depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is - right?

Early on in his campaign, Barack Obama made it clear he wanted to run a high-road campaign - without the personal attacks or "attack politics" that has come to the forefront in Hillary Clinton's campaign. Perhaps naively, he believed the campaign could be run on issues, on the cerebral issues, and on hope.

He made it also clear that anyone violating this rule would be immediately fired.

In early March, one of his top advisors, Pulitzer Prize-winning Samantha Power, regarded as an expert on genocide in Africa and the former Yugoslavia, fell from grace for an admittedly stupid blunder when, in an Irish interview (ironically, promoting her latest book, not the campaign) she called Hillary Clinton "a monster."

In an unguarded moment during an interview with The Scotsman, Obama aide Samantha Power shared some harsh words about Hillary Clinton:

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

While she should know better, she claims she thought the comment was "off the record", but Gerri Peev, who interviewed her, explains why it wasn't:

 Within minutes, across the Atlantic, the Clinton campaign demanded her resignation:

On a conference call with reporters this morning, congressional supporters of Hillary Clinton demanded that Obama force adviser Samantha Power out of his campaign.

"We're here today to ask Senator Obama to ask Samantha Power not to be part of his campaign," said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, responding to the remark by Power -- a foreign policy adviser to Obama and expert on international human rights. "It's really a test for Obama, a test of character," she said.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida called the comment and other Power remarks "a torrent of negative personal attacks."

And Rep. Greg Meeks of New York called Power's words "personal character assassination."

"Senator Obama needs to stand up and to publicly say that this person will no longer participate in his campaign," Meeks said.

Power, a policy advisor, isn't on staff."

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson also responded to a question as to whether his comparison of Barack Obama and Ken Starr wasn't equally strident.

"Ours was a reaction to the Obama campaign’s attacks on Senator Clinton post-their losses in Ohio and Texas," he said. "I did not say that Senator Obama was like Ken Starr, and I think there is a difference between engaging in the kind of ad homimen personal attack on someone's character that Samantha Power did, and talking about the kind of campaign that team Obama has been running since Ohio and Texas."

"Had I or anyone on this campaign referred to Senator Obama using the word that Samantha Power used, we would not be on the campaign this morning," he said.

Samantha knew she had screwed up royally, trying to cover her tracks almost as soon as she'd uttered them - trying to wrap the words in "this is off the record." But why on earth would an educated woman, an author who is certainly familiar with the way journalists work, ever utter such a thing in the first place?

She added, in another interview, that she was upset at Hillary's below-the-belt tactics in Ohio, she was exhausted, and not thinking clearly. Still, she took the blame and fell on her sword.

The next day, after a severe tongue-lashing from Obama, she was given the choice to resign or be fired (even though she was an unpaid consultant to begin with). She told RLE Radio in an interview before her resignation that she knew it was coming.

"She submitted the resignation," said a source in the Obama campaign. "She made this decision on her own to submit her resignation and we accepted it. Obviously, there was a lot of pressure from outside sources. "

But Power seemed to suggest in an interview with Irish radio yesterday that the decision on how or whether to sanction her would be the Obama campaign's, saying, “I think that’s coming today. I suspect the guillotine is hanging over my head.”

In her RLE Radio interview, she went into detail about how it happened:

Power told RTÉ that the remark was “a lapse of judgement”, that came after an extended period without sleep and a transatlantic flight. And she stressed that “in the cold light of day”, her opinions of Hillary Clinton haven’t changed. Power said Clinton was “a role model for me and for so many women in public service”.

Asked if she had been “sanctioned” by the Obama campaign, Power replied: “I think that’s coming today. I suspect the guillotine is hanging over my head.”

Earlier in the interview Power seemed eager to address the issue, volunteering that Senator Clinton is “extraordinary” and “impressive” and hinting that she’d made her “share of mistakes”. But presenter Pat Kenny apparently didn’t want to go there - or wasn’t aware of his interview subject’s position at the centre of a transatlantic political firestorm that threatens to tarnish Obama’s image of civility - “to disagree without being disagreeable” is one of his most-used lines about how he thinks political discourse should be conducted.

When the subject did come up, she tried to explain that she was speaking in the context of defending her longtime friend and campaign colleage Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist and Obama adviser who, she said, was “dragged in the mud” when Canadian diplomats said he had told them Obama’s recent turn to the left on the NAFTA trade agreement was “political positioning” for Ohio voters. The subsequent controversy and poor PR handling by the Obama campaign was a contributing factor to the loss to Clinton on Tuesday.

Goolsbee, she said, never made the remarks attributed to him and the Clinton campaign had “run with” the story.

Since the Tuesday primary losses, it emerged that senior officials in the normally leak-free Canadian government had heard much the same kind of “take this with a grain of salt” noises from the Clinton campaign. And there have been suggestions that the centre-right government in Ottawa was trying to tilt the election against Obama.

Weirdly, the deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal party is Michael Ignatieff, who apparently was Samantha Power’s “soulmate” at Harvard. (SOURCE: Richard Delevan)

"With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an advisor the Obama campaign effective today. Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months," Power said in a statement.

"It is wrong for anyone to pursue this campaign in such negative and personal terms," she said. "I apologize to Senator Clinton and to Senator Obama, who has made very clear that these kinds of expressions should have no place in American politics."

Obama's campaign also issued a statement from Bill Burton, the campaign's spokesman, who said: "Sen. Obama decries such characterizations which have no place in this campaign."

Before the announcement was made, several reporters on a Clinton campaign conference call noted that there had been personal attacks from the Clinton campaign as well, including references to Obama's youthful drug use and the argument, made on Thursday, that the Illinois Senator's tactics were similar to Ken Starr's.

In response, Clinton's spokesperson Howard Wolfson denied that he had directly compared Obama to Starr, a despised figure in Democratic circles. He also argued that those Clinton surrogates who had "crossed the line" had been asked to leave the campaign.

"Had I or anyone on this campaign referred to Senator Obama using the word that Samantha Power used, we would not be on the campaign this morning," he said.

In the aftermath of yet another Obama Bad Day, the resignation itself ignited yet another firestorm from Obama supporters who called him "weak" and naive, unable to stand up to Hillary, despite the scores of personal smears her own campaign had launched with no more than shrug in most cases. The tremors even went all the way to another top Obama advisor, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Bzrzenski, who strongly disagreed with getting rid of Power.

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski seems to think that departed Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power got a raw deal.

In response to a request for reaction to her resignation earlier today, the office of Brzezinski—another of Obama's foreign policy advisers—relayed the following statement: "I think an expression of regret for using an inappropriate description of Senator Clinton should have sufficed. And I don't think she should have resigned." (SOURCE: The New York Observer)

David Corn, D.C. Bureau Chief with Mother Jones, reported that several Clinton staffers and advisers had made just as bad comments to him, if not worse, about Obama - but always "off the record."

Aides to presidential candidates routinely refer to the competition in harsh terms, particularly when they talk to reporters off the record. More than once, a top Clinton person has told me that s/he believes Obama is a self-righteous fraud--or worse. It was, of course, always off the record. But if I had reported any of these remarks, I could have gotten the pop The Scotsman has received for disclosing Power's comment.

The Clinton people do deserve chutzpah points for trying to turn this nothing-burger into a full-course feast. During a conference call with reporters yesterday, Clinton's top spinner, Howard Wolfson, compared Obama and his aides to Kenneth Starr because they dared to question Clinton's refusal to release her income taxes. (In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank credited me with asking the question that prompted the Ken Starr remark --a quip obviously locked and loaded before the call.) The comparison was ridiculous. But in Democratic circles, there's not much of a bigger slur than, Hey, you're Ken Starr! For Democrats, Starr is the functional equivalent of a monster.

So the Clinton crowd does not have the moral high ground in this round. Yet what was the net result? Power, a talented journalist and thinker who gives a damn about genocides (certainly more so than Bill Clinton did during the Rwanda nightmare), was forced off Obama's campaign. (SOURCE: MoJo Blog)

Read Part Two