Samantha Power Speaks Out on "Monster" Controversy [VIDEO]

Posted by Adam Howard, AlterNet at 5:17 AM on March 8, 2008.

Samantha Power speaks out to Irish news outlet RTE:

Of course I regret them, I can't even believe they came out of my mouth. The campaign was getting very tense, and I -- in every public appearance I've ever made talking about Senator Clinton, I have sung her praises as the leader she's been, the intellect. She's also incredibly warm, funny. I've spent time with her. I think that I just had a very weak moment in seeing some of the tactics, it seems, that were getting employed. I was just afraid really that the campaign would not stay at the level it had been on and I let out in a wave of frustration.

UPDATE: Obama supporter and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski disagrees with Power's decision to resign: "I think an expression of regret for using an inappropriate description of Senator Clinton should have sufficed. And I don't think she should have resigned."

UPDATE: Sam Stein has written about the story of Power's rise --and subsequent fall -- in the political arena:

That Obama could bring her on board -- he was, Power said, the first government official to have ever called her -- was emblematic of the different style of politics that the Illinois senator was promising to represent. Far from a down-the-line liberal on international affairs, Power was known for her innovative (if not self-reflectively painful) analysis. On the Rwanda genocide, she concluded that U.S. officials had worked to ignore the problem, not failed to address it. On the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, she once advocated (though later recanted) spending billions of dollars and sending a military force to help create a Palestinian state next to Israel.

The whole piece is worth a read.

h/t The Huffington Post

Tagged as: clinton, obama, samantha power

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.