aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Samantha Power in The Chronicle
The Chronicle had a piece on Samantha Power yesterday that put her slip of the tongue in kind context. It’s behind a paywall so here’s a fairly long excerpt:
Even for a prominent intellectual cum foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power has been keeping a punishing schedule.
When she arrived in Europe at the beginning of the month, she had spent the previous few weeks crisscrossing the country on a frenetic hybrid book tour and campaign junket for Barack Obama, for whom she served as an unpaid adviser. In the middle of an interview to promote her new book, the adjunct professor of public policy at Harvard University told a Scottish-newspaper reporter, in an arguably off-the-record moment, that Hillary Clinton was a “monster.”
Power quickly apologized. But within hours, the story exploded across the American news media, and she resigned from the Obama campaign.
Last month, before Power’s Europe trip, I interviewed her. She was a nervous wreck even then. Perched on a stool in the corner of a bustling Washington cafe, leaning close, she confided: “I can’t sleep, and I can’t eat.”
It was a surprising admission. After all, Power seemed to be living a charmed life. One journalist had likened the attractive auburn-haired author (who was recently featured in a glamorous spread in Men’s Vogue) and human-rights activist turned academic to a latter-day Joan of Arc, out to save the world. Another scribe had suggested that Power possessed just the right combination of dynamism and “cerebral bona fides” to make her an appealing presidential candidate. In short, she was the epitome of the academic celebrity.
Pretty heady stuff for a 37-year-old who never claimed to be on the receiving end of direct orders from God or to have given any thought to running for elected office, much less the highest office in the land.
And she seemed to find love on the campaign trail: The Boston Globe reported on Tuesday that Power was dating the fellow-Obama adviser and prolific University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, soon to join her at Harvard University.
So why the frayed nerves? Simply put, Power is wildly popular. At a recent talk about her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press)-an admiring biography of the charismatic Brazilian-born United Nations diplomat who was killed in the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad-she was inundated with well-wishers, autograph seekers, and stargazers.
With charisma and ease, she responded to a plethora of questions that included, for example, Obama and the prospect of U.N. reform. Unfailingly polite and personable-and presumably not wanting to alienate potential Obama voters, she went over her allotted time on her tightly packed schedule. She would be playing catch-up for the rest of the day, and she had been operating at that frenetic pace for weeks on end.
When we finally got to sit down and talk at a favorite tea shop of hers, she took a deep breath and explained her frenzy. “In order to do these really big ambitious books you kind of have to stay out of the daily news cycle a little bit, out of the blogosphere,” Power said, fingering her BlackBerry. But, referring to her work for Obama, she added, “I am in that now, and it has been hard to make sure I am ... being an adequate surrogate for a guy I care about so much.”
Power has spent the last 14 months advising Obama on foreign policy. Though she has always been quick to play down her role, according to The Washington Post, she is-make that was-one of the “most influential” figures in the candidate’s brain trust-"part of a group-within-the-group that he regularly turns to for advice.”
The prominently displayed Obama button on her jacket, as well as the way in which her answers to disparate questions always culminated in praise for the Democratic senator from Illinois, made plain the extent to which Power was consumed by Obama’s bid for the White House. “I have always taken my work very, very seriously, but I have never taken anything quite this seriously,” she said. “When you are out there, you just want to do right by him.”
Power had certainly been out there, campaigning for Obama across the country. And in a previous interview with The Chronicle, Power-who is unscripted and forthcoming in conversation—expressed some trepidation that her blunt style would land her in hot water. “That’s the one thing that terrifies me,” Power acknowledged at the time, “that I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate.” How prescient.
Power and genocide:
Power rose to fame in 2002 with her book A Problem From Hell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America’s impotent response to genocide in the 20th century-from ignoring Turkey’s deportation and slaughter of its Armenian minority during World War I to the long-delayed effort to halt the Bosnian Serbs’ mass murder of Muslims in the 1990s.
Born out of Power’s experience as a novice freelance reporter covering the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, A Problem From Hell is less a pure history than it is an impassioned meditation on America’s role in the post-cold-war world.
The decade following the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a period of great ideological ferment, particularly among liberal foreign-policy intellectuals who believed that, with the defeat of Communism, the United States could begin to make human rights and democracy promotion priorities. But those ideals rubbed up against the grim reality of genocide and ethnic conflict: Eight-hundred-thousand Rwandans were murdered by their compatriots over the course of 100 days in 1994; thousands of Bosnians were herded into concentration camps, where they were starved, raped, and murdered.
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica, where 40,000 Muslim men, women, and children had sought refuge. Power was in the area at the time. She recalls seeing NATO’s F-16s flying overhead, doing nothing to halt the assault. She was outraged. She remembers thinking that the tails of the planes seemed to be drooping in humiliation. Over the next few days, more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered.
Srebrenica was a watershed moment for Power, who believes earnestly in the mantra “never again.” The U.N. proved toothless, while the world’s sole remaining superpower was unwilling to use its military might to defend human life.
“The very qualities that made liberals prone to care about evil seemed to make them incapable of coping with it,” Power wrote with thinly veiled contempt in an article in The New Republic a few years later. “Liberals resisted black-and-white characterizations, sought nuance and understanding, and dithered.”
Though liberals have been allergic to the use of military force since the Vietnam War, many scholars and activists have concluded that America has a moral obligation to protect the victims of mass slaughter-especially if nobody else will do so.
“Given the affront genocide represents to America’s most cherished values and to its interests, the United States must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers in the service of stopping this monstrous crime,” Power wrote in the conclusion to A Problem From Hell. That view, which has become known as humanitarian intervention, was put into practice by NATO in 1999-when a two-month air campaign led to the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo. Its champions have become known as liberal interventionists, or “liberal hawks.” And Power has emerged as one of the creed’s most eloquent proponents.
