Power Resigns Obama Post

Samantha Power, a professor at the Kennedy School and human rights advocate, has resigned as a top foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” in an interview with a British newspaper on Friday.

Power’s statement, which she made to a reporter for The Scotsman, led to swift condemnation from the Clinton campaign and a disavowal from Obama.

Power has since apologized to both campaigns, saying that the remarks were “inexcusable” and “at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor and purpose of the Obama campaign.”

After spending 2005 and 2006 advising Senator Obama on foreign policy issues, Power continued working as a top foreign policy advisor in Obama’s presidential campaign team, publicizing issues including United Nations reform, the genocide in Darfur, and American detainment camps. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School.

Power’s slip also drew attention to other comments she made to the BBC, in which she said that Obama’s campaign trail promise to bring troops home from Iraq within a year was a “best-case scenario” to be revisited if he was elected. The Obama campaign continues to call the Iraq plan “a rock solid commitment.”

Earlier this month, retired four-star general Jack Keane, an advisor to Senator Clinton, made similar remarks to the New York Sun suggesting that Clinton would not immediately remove troops from Iraq either.

Yoseph S. Ayele ’11, a student this past semester in Power’s freshman seminar “The United Nations, Past and Present: Can the UN Be Fixed? Is the UN the Problem?” said that Power was a greatly inspiring professor who “cares a lot about humanity.”

“She would be an excellent foreign policy advisor for any President, and she really does care about international cooperation,” Ayele said. “I don’t think that anyone should judge her simply by her slip-up.”

Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” explored America’s response to and understanding of various genocides in the 20th century. As a journalist, she helped to cover the genocide in the Yugoslav wars.

Although Power is continuing to support Senator Obama, she has been quoted in The Nation as saying “if he doesn’t get the nomination I will be backing Senator Clinton with the same enthusiasm.”

—Material from the Associated Press was used in the reporting of this story.