Samantha Power’s worst nightmare may have come true.
The Harvard University professor resigned on Friday as foreign-policy adviser to Sen. Barack Obama after the newspaper The Scotsman quoted her as having called Sen. Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, “a monster.”
In an October interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. Power worried about a similar scenario: that a student might post one of her classroom comments out of context and create a news-media frenzy that could embarrass Mr. Obama.
“That’s the one thing that terrifies me,” Ms. Power had said at the time. “That I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate.”
In fact, it was a reporter, not a student, that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide should have worried about.
According to the The Scotsman, Ms. Power interrupted an interview to take a telephone call from another Obama adviser. When she returned, she reportedly volunteered that the call had been about the Obama campaign’s missteps in Ohio over the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“In Ohio, they are obsessed [with Nafta], and Hillary is going to town on it because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win,” Ms. Power had told the reporter before the results of the state’s Democratic primary were known. “She is a monster too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything.”
Cue news-media frenzy.
The Scotsman ran the quotatation, which was picked up by American newspapers, and Ms. Power’s fate was sealed.
“Off the record,” as every eager young journalism student knows, is a contract of sorts: The interviewer must agree to the arrangement before the interviewee proceeds. Under no circumstances can someone make a comment and then declare it off the record.
In her October interview with The Chronicle, Ms. Power said she sometimes must fight the urge to make unkind statements about other candidates.
“That’s just not Obama’s style,” she had said. “Left to my own devices, I’d articulate my frustrations in a much harsher way.” —Don Troop
