10:32 pm
The Fake Controversy over Samantha Power
Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell is the definitive study of the shifts in U.S. policy toward genocide over the last half of the 20th Century. Her most recent book, Chasing the Flame, looks at the career of the late Sergio Viera de Mello, who was killed by a 2003 suicide bomb attack on the UN Compound in Baghdad.
Power is one of the smartest, most able thinkers out there when it comes not only to human rights issues but aso foreign policy in general. She was one of Obama’s earliest foreign policy advisors and she is is an excellent choice for his transition team.
God forbid that any of that actually would be reported by the MSM. Noooo — all they want to talk about is that she once said something mean about Hillary:
Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who was forced to resign from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last spring after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “a monster,” is now advising the president-elect on transition matters relating to the State Department — which Clinton is slated to head. . . [S]he is part of a team that is likely to work directly with Clinton, a potentially awkward situation for the two women.
Okay, let me get this straight: Obama is smart and pragmatic in asking Hillary, who said plenty of not-so-nice things about the next President when they were rivals, to be Secretary of State. But Hillary is supposedly incapable of acting in the same way when one one person working on the transition at State happened to say something unfortunate about her six months ago.
This is ridiculous. If Hillary is who Obama thinks she is, she will pick the best and brightest to be on her team. In the case of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, she would be hard-pressed to find someone better than Power to serve as Assistant Secretary (assuming, of course, that Power wants the job). But even if she does pick someone else, it doesn’t mean she won’t rely on Power to advise her during the transition.
One other thing: they at least could understand how the transition works. Power is a member of the Agency Review Team for the State Department. There are two team leads (Tom Donilon and Wendy Sherman), and twenty-three people on the team (including some working out of USAID). In addition, there is a separate Policy Review Team, of which Power is not a member. So she is one out of something like 100 people working on national security issues, and one of roughly 30 or 40 working on State and USAID issues.
Yes, she is likely to be in the room with Hillary, particularly during briefings. But this isn’t High School Musical — it’s not like they’re going to have lockers next to each other or something. Does WaPo think they’re going to see each other in the cafeteria and reenact the gang fight from West Side Story? They’re adults, for crying out loud. They got over this a long time ago.
But in Washington — or at least the Washington found only in the MSM’s fevered fantasies — the titillation of potential conflict matters more than policy expertise. This is the Washington that reports on Rahm Emanuel’s “dead, dead!” monologue as if no one has ever seen the Godfather movies. This is the Washington that assumes that the old Obama-Hillary rivalry means that they can’t work together. This is the Washington that would rather remind the world of something someone said (and almost immediately apologized for) six months ago rather than focus on her record as an analyst and thinker.
This isn’t news, it’s gossip and speculation. The entire story is predicated on the possibility that Hillary might find it awkward to have Power on her team. There’s not a single shred of evidence that there’s any tension, or even if they’ve met (now or earlier). As such, it belongs in WaPo’s “Reliable Source” gossip column, not in the front section.
Photo: Angela Radulescu via Flickr, using a CC license.