About a year ago, Dan Drezner
predicted that Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States. In the comments section, one commenter (Bill Kaminsky) made an observation that has turned out to be remarkably prescient:
Samantha Power probably needs to be more reticent when talking to reporters. Assuming Hirsch didn't misquote her, I think she does Obama no favors by sharing that Obama, sitting down for a 1-on-1 dinner with her, initially and quite visibly seemed neither to know nor care who she was. (Also, she probably shouldn't appear in print using "F#@k" too many more times.)
Fast-forward right up to the moment when everything's on the line, when such conjunctions are going to be most damaging to Obama's campaign,
and:
We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win. She is a monster, too.
Here is the bit, from a Washington Monthly piece, that caught the commentator's eye:
Their [Obama and Power's] first meeting, several months later at a D.C. steakhouse, did not begin auspiciously. “His body language was not good,” says Power. “He had no desire to be there at all. It was, ‘Who the fuck is this person, this lily-livered Harvard softy, and tell me why I am meeting with her again?’” Still, Obama warmed up—it was supposed to be a forty-five-minute chat, but they ended up talking for three hours. “We sat down, and we started dinner. I was on my best behavior: I didn’t, like, order my trademark Jack Daniels. And then we just started talking. It was vintage Obama: question after question after question, starting with, ‘Who are you? I don’t get it. Bosnia? Whaaa? That’s weird.’ It ended up being a very personal discussion, oddly enough, but everything led to policy. That’s the way he comes to policy: What’s your story, and why do you tick the way you do? ... He’s what everybody says he is.” Before long, Power says, she had “drunk the Kool-Aid” on Obama. “At the end of the dinner, we’re walking out, and I said, ‘I’d love to help you in any way I can.’ He said, ‘That’d be great, maybe we could do some big think on a smart, tough, and humane foreign policy.’ I heard myself saying, ‘Why don’t I take a year off?’”
Now that she's heard herself saying the phrase of the political week,
the genocide chick is getting to watch herself take some more time off, this time from the campaign. As Ari Fleischman said, people need to watch what they say.
