Ms Power is no ingenue

Last Modified: 07 Mar 2008
By: Felicity Spector

After some very unguarded remarks to the Scotsman, one of Barack Obama's campaign aides has been forced to resign.

It hasn't been a good week for Barack Obama. Losing two key races to Hillary Clinton, looking shifty when faced with tough questions from the press, forced to go negative against Hillary Clinton, and now one of his campaign aides has been forced to resign.

It was pretty inevitable that Samantha Power would have to step down, after some very unguarded remarks to the Scotsman. Here they are in full: "We f***** up in Ohio. 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's a monster too - that's off the record - she is stooping to anything."

Now the Scotsman printed a long justification for keeping in the full version, insisting rather priggishly that it's "too late" for public figures to retract something once it's been said, and that since Samantha Power was promoting her book, everything she said was fair game.

Whatever the ethics, it didn't take the Clinton campaign long to respond - with a mass email sent moments ago: "Just one day after Senator Obama promised to begin attacking Hillary, a senior Obama advisor has called her a 'monster'. That's right - a 'monster'.

Now Ms Power is no ingenue - anything but. I knew her at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government back in '99 - along with Obama's CEO - Betsey Myers.

"At the same time, Senator Obama's aides have begun rehashing the old negative attacks of the '90's against Hillary.

"This is not the politics of hope - it's the usual attack style politics that we have seen time and time again. And it must stop."

Now Ms Power is no ingenue - anything but. I knew her at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government back in '99 - along with Obama's CEO - Betsey Myers.

She worked as a reporter in war zones from Bosnia to Rwanda. She won the Pulitzer prize for her book on genocide back in 2003. She set up a research centre on human rights at Harvard - and is now professor of global leadership there.

And she's still only 37.

No wonder Barack Obama headhunted her for his foreign policy team. But for a man who's been criticised for his lack of foreign policy experience - losing such a key aide, at such a key time, will hardly help.

And it's another sign of the hazards of the increasingly bitter attack politics between the Democratic rivals. Already there are reports of huge fallings out among the Clinton camp.

Samantha Power is team Obama's first casualty - and unless the tenor of the campaign can raise itself up - she's probably not the last.