The cluelessness of Obama staff – Samantha Power update

Enough additional stuff has “moved” on the Samantha Power case since I originally posted this last night that the story line needed an update in a separate post.

Barack Obama foreign policy aide Samantha Power tried an ex post facto comment retraction of a comment about Hillary Clinton:

“She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything.”

And, a personal aside. I’ve been the journalist on the receiving end of just a gaffe myself, when a school district superintendent called the federal Title I program a “candy store” in the middle of a school board meeting, then tried to retract it.

Now, lemme see on the fallout. Tweety Chris Matthews will probably go into misogynist mode with both snafus being about women. Maureen Dowd will probably figure out a new spin on “shoulder-pad feminism” or worse, while more serious analysts will wonder if Power didn’t just prove Rice right.

Power has now resigned over the comment.

Futher tidbit: Here’s Josh Marshall’s take on the Power resignation and how it shows Clinton is inside Obama’s head right now:

Obama folks can either withdraw to a world where the “new politics” reigns or focus on the fact that here in the real world there are two “old politics” practitioners standing between him and the presidency and he needs to decide how he's going to deal with that fact..

I agree; what else is there to say?

And, how does a former experienced professional journalist shoot herself in the foot like this? (And no, I don’t think the Scotsman sandbagged her or something. Per Wikipedia: From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a journalist, covering the Yugoslavian wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. Boy, Clinton must really be inside Obama staff’s heads.

Update: Earlier, I had raised the idea of an arrogance meme. I am corrected on this; the interview with the Scotsman was not an official campaign interview, but rather part of her book tour for her new biography of the late UN official Sergio Vieira de Mello.