Samantha Power, a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, recently made the headlines when the Scotsman newspaper quoted her saying that Senator Clinton is “a monster . . . stooping to anything”. Although Ms Power tried to withdraw the remark in mid-sentence, Gerri Peev, her interviewer refused to allow this. Soon after the article was published, Ms Power, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, resigned. She spoke of her “deep regret” for” inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance for my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor and purpose of the Obama campaign.” Speaking to the political journalist Tucker Carlson, Peev defended her inclusion of the remark by saying that “If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that [US] journalists are not doing a very good job of getting to the truth.”
Leaving aside the ethical question of when journalists should allow someone to retract remarks that are technically on-the-record, Ms Power’s fate is curiously harsh when considered in the context of the Clinton campaign’s recent attacks. For several months, despite Obama’s resolve to eschew ad hominem criticism, most of the American media has made little effort to get at the truth of the atmosphere within each camp. In fact, very few have been willing to acknowledge that the Clinton campaign has tried to smear Obama almost from the start. A few months back, there were heavy-handed hints about his self-confessed youthful drug use. When those failed to catch on, the “opposition research” turned towards his “electability” and “experience”. When a string of victories made nonsense of that, the Clinton camp seems to have decided that it would rather hazard its future on the “politics of personal destruction” rather than allow Obama the dignified victory he seems to deserve.
