Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor, resigns after making disparaging remarks about the former first lady during an interview in London. She apologizes to both Democrats.
By Michael Muskal and Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
11:44 AM PST, March 7, 2008
The battle for the Democratic presidential nomination took a sharp turn away from the hunt for delegates this morning after an advisor to Barack Obama was forced to quit the campaign for making disparaging remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Samantha Power, a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, was quoted in a Scottish newspaper calling Clinton "a monster" who would do anything to win the presidency.
The campaign, which had earlier distanced itself from Power, this morning announced that she had resigned.
"With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an advisor to the Obama campaign, effective today," Power stated.
"I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Sen. Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Sen. Clinton, Sen. Obama, and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months," she said.
Power, who did not return e-mails or telephone calls, made the comments in a London interview as part of a book tour.
In the especially heated race for the nomination, where Clinton and Obama are about 100 delegate votes apart, the kerfuffle took on a life of its own, fueled by the Clinton campaign. In a conference call for the media, some Clinton supporters attacked the comments and called for Power's resignation.
Within hours, the campaign said she was gone.
Power, the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, is the noted author of "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New Republic Books), which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. She is a widely known and respected journalist, having covered civil wars and humanitarian crises across the globe.
Touring to support her latest book, "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World" (Penguin Press, 2008), a biography of the U.N. envoy killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2003, Power told
the Scotsman that the Obama camp was disappointed with Clinton's win in Ohio, one of three primary victories that revived the New York senator's campaign this week.
"We f------ up in Ohio," Power said in the interview posted on the newspaper's website. "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," Power said, trying to withdraw her remark.
"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."
michael.muskal@latimes.commaria.laganga@latimes.com After ‘Monster’ Remark, Aide to Obama Resigns
By Jeff Zeleny
Updated | 11:45 a.m.: CHICAGO – A senior foreign policy adviser and close friend of Senator Barack Obama said today that she was resigning from the campaign, after she apologized for referring to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as “a monster.”
Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, made the comment during an interview in London with The Scotsman, a Scottish newspaper. She derided Mrs. Clinton as a desperate candidate who is “stooping to anything,” according to the newspaper’s account.
“With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an adviser to the Obama campaign effective today,” Ms. Power said in a statement released by the campaign. “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.”
Ms. Power was an unpaid adviser to the campaign, but a member of Mr. Obama’s close inner-circle of academic advisers. She worked for a year as a fellow in his Senate office, advising him on Africa and other foreign policy subject areas.
Ms. Power’s resignation was announced today as Mr. Obama was boarding his campaign plane in Chicago for a flight to Wyoming, where he will spend the afternoon and evening campaigning. He did not speak to reporters and aides said they did not expect him to address the matter.
The swift resignation was designed to contain the story and the fallout.
The derogatory remark violated Mr. Obama’s often-repeated pledge to run a hopeful political campaign, free of gratuitous negativity and name-calling.
The comments came as feelings intensify and harden between Clinton and Obama loyalists in the protracted fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. And her misstep came on the heels of the controversy involving another Obama adviser whose remarks to Canadian officials about Nafta drew heated criticisms from Senator Clinton’s campaign for days before the Ohio primary.
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