Miscellaneous

"I'm a monster!"

No, Buster, turns out it's Hillary that's a monster. At least, that's what Obama aide Samantha Power said last week. If you missed the story as it played out last Friday, here's the deal. Power is a foreign policy aide for Obama, and also a rather smart Harvard educator-type (who also happens to maybe be schtupping a well-known law professor). And in an interview published in The Scotsman last Friday, she was reported as having said, among other things, that the Obama camp "fucked up in Ohio," that Clinton's recent antics "looks like desperation" and, the big one, that Hillary "is a monster ... she is stooping to anything."

The publication of this article of course led to an immediate shit storm and, hours later, Power was apologizing and resigning from Obama's campaign. The shame of it is, she doesn't seem all that wrong. I mean, I don't know that I'd call Hillary a monster, but otherwise, I agree that the Obama troops may have screwed the pooch in Ohio and that Hillary has looked a little desperate at times lately.

Of course, she really had no choice but to resign, even though she's not exactly in the Obama inner-circle. When I first heard about the article, it felt like a campaign move through and through, with an advisor slinging the mud so that Obama stayed clean and above the dirt. And I'm sure many others thought that, too. With folks thinking like that, perhaps the camp had no choice but to quickly cut her loose with a nice, clean voluntary resignation, lest her staying on board seem like tacit approval. And to their credit, it sells me that this wasn't a full campaign strategy, because I don't think Powers would've been their chosen sacrificial lamb on this one. And it certainly would've been in an interview with a bigger media outlet than the Scotsman.

Full post as published by Quiz Law on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).