So, it turns out Samantha Powers, my hope for Obama's foreign policy, has resigned her position with the campaign. To be sure, she wasn't even a whisper for SecState or NSA (as far as I know, at least), but she was certainly a high profile adviser on foreign policy. I have my doubts about Obama's FP credentials and having Powers on the staff went a long way to assuaging those concerns. After A Problem from Hell, I've started tracking down quite a few of her previous writings, and I gotta say, I've developed a bit on a wonk crush on her.
But this... I'm not at all impressed with how Clinton and Co. is handling this either. Yelling at her about "off-the-record" (which was clearly stated in the interview) is just petty and petulant. To me, this has reflected much poorer on Clinton than on Obama, and Power seems to have acted honorably throughout. This, as well as how the Clinton campaign has handled a lot of their attacks on Obama (the talking with dictator's comment from the YouTube debate last July) end up really depressing my opinion of her and her campaign.
As a person and a candidate, she's shown some very interesting sides and has made some very astute comments, but as a politician and as a campaigner, she's gone for the knees in some ugly ways. And when you're trying to steal a youth vote who seems to idolize a candidate whose platform is based on avoiding such personal attacks, who are repulsed by the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and who think Bush's/Rove's tactics in the 2000 primaries were despicable... going after Obama in this way really sounds like a way to cripple your appeal to that group. The backlash is worse than letting the comment out there. It's dumb politics and it's petty. And it couldn't have happened to a better person.
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