I've seen the young Powers on television many times, mostly on alternate television programs like Democracy Now, and all of them prior to her work on the Obama campaign. She is well known among human rights and peace advocates and has often risked her life to witness and report on human rights abuses. She has more courage in her little finger than Clinton could muster in a lifetime. And now she has become a victim of the Clinton campaign's whining and fake outrage. But perhaps she was targeted for more than this simple off the record comment.
Marc Cooper, Nation magazine and Huffington Post contributer, offers insightful commentary on this story.
In the pungently hypocritical game of American politics, this is just something outside the rules. Whether it's true, or not, matters little. Nor does it matter that the object of Power's derision has just finished spending millions on TV ads implying that Obama would be responsible for the countless deaths of millions of American children sleeping at 3 a.m. Tut, tut. Nothing monstrous about that.
Then, Cooper tells me something I didn't know. Power was
awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book A Problem From Hell which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered. The red phone rang and rang and rang again. I don't know where Hillary was then. But her husband and his entire experienced foreign policy team -- from the brass in the Pentagon to the congenitally feckless Secretary of State Warren Christopher -- just let it ring.
Powers goes on to compare Hillary Clinton to Samatha Power:
Therein resides the richest and saddest irony of all. Samantha Power has actually lived the sort of life that Hillary Clinton's campaign staff has, for public consumption, invented for its candidate. Though not quite 40 years old, Power has spent no time on any Wal-Mart boards but has rather dedicated her entire adult life rather tirelessly to championing humanitarian causes. She has spoken up when others were silent. She took great personal risks during the Balkan wars to witness and record and denounce the carnage (She reported that Bill Clinton intervened against the Serbs only when he felt he was losing personal credibility as a result of his inaction. "I'm getting creamed," Power quoted the then-President saying as he fretted over global consternation over his own hesitation to act).
I just saw Samantha Power comment on her resignation and the damage her comment caused. She was gracious and genuine, full of horror that her words did any harm to Obama or Clinton, and took full responsibility for her actions, which is something the Clintons simply don't do.
She is a hero, in my book, and will probably go on to do great things in the causes she believes in. She will probably also sell more books and perhaps win more Pulitzers. But the Obama campaign has lost a brilliant analyst, all because the Clintons had to destroy another of their many enemies, someone who told the truth about Bill Clinton's indifference to the genocide in Rwanda.
