News item: Obama aide calls Clinton "monster"

Samantha Power, the able foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama who referred to Hillary Clinton as a "monster," has quit her role with the Obama campaign.

Power's comment about Clinton was a rough one: "She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything... 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."

But let's be a little serious here: What Power said is no different from what campaigners say about their opponents on a daily basis -- except perhaps for the use of the rather sophisticated word "monster" as opposed to the usual explicatives. It's just that Power said it in a setting where her attempt to take the word back with a "that is off the record" grasp was not going to work.

No good comes from sidelining frank and outspoken "rookies." Obama and Clinton both need more aides like her. And we all need to accept that campaigns and campaigners can make honest mistakes -- indeed, the mistakes are what tell us these are human endeavors, as opposed to mere spin machines.
John Nichols, The Nation

O.K., Samatha Powers has now apologized, something I do not think she need have done. And she has quit the Obama campaign as unpaid foreign policy consultant.

Well done, Mainstream Media! Bravo! You've done Hillary's bidding and you've done it well. You've kneecapped Obama's campaign. And you've looked to other way as Clinton staffer Howard Wolfson likened Barack Obama to Bill Clinton's nemesis Kenneth Starr, chief semen-sniffer of the Lewinsky affair.

And of course no one in the upper echelons of the Clinton campaign have apologized, publicly at least, for this:

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A Kenyan elder who presented Barack Obama with a traditional outfit that fueled false rumors he was Muslim says the garb was cultural, not religious — and that had President Bush visited he could have "dressed him the same."

Pictures of the Democratic presidential candidate wearing the robe and turban over his Western-style clothing spread on the Internet.

The gossip and news Web site The Drudge Report said the photo was circulated by the campaign of Obama rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. But Clinton aides said the campaign had never sanctioned its distribution.
AP, march 8, 2008

No word if the "volunteers," who slipped the offending photograph the way of Internet sleazemeister Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, have resigned. The Clinton campaign does acknowledge that unnamed "volunteers" who sent e-mails alleging Obama's adherence to Islam have quit though.

What unsubstantiated smear on Obama will slide from the Clinton campaign? Will be the above mentioned Samantha Powers--author, lawyer, human-rights activist and "professor of practice and founding executive director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG)"Harvard Crimson, July 29, 2005--, often described as one of Obama's closest advisors and friend, be rumored as the "other-woman" in Obama's life? She is, after all, 38, tall, pretty and, most importantly, white.

And a cheating husband is something Hillary Clinton has experience with.