Samantha Power: Obama and Me [View All]

[Bread and Circus]

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Samantha Power: Obama and Me

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"And then I went and met with him. We were supposed to meet for an hour. One hour gave way to two, then three. Entering the fourth hour, I heard myself saying, 'why don't I quit my job at Harvard and come and intern in your office and answer the phones or do whatever you want?' It was literally that spontaneous."

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What was it about that three-hour conversation that changed her mind? "It was the rigor of the interrogation that I was subjected to," she said. "He really pushed me. Barack is incredibly empirical and non-ideological. He's very aware of the tectonic plate shifts in the global order - the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, the loss of influence by the US -- and how those affect your ability to get what you want, on anything from global warming to getting out of Iraq to stopping genocide. I thought, if you're interested in helping change the world in your small way, grandiose as that sounds, even if I was just answering his phones, I would have more impact than writing these big books that I put out ever half decade or so."

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I pointed out that a lot of people say Clinton and Obama are pretty much the same on foreign policy. She disagreed. The biggest difference, of course, is "not wanting to go into Iraq in the first place." But beyond that, she said, Obama has "a plan to get out of Iraq responsibly. He is willing to make the Iraqi people central to his plan: to think about moving people from mixed neighborhoods to homogenous neighborhoods if that was required; creating a war crimes commission; giving two billion dollars in aid to Iraq's neighbors who are sheltering these refugees."

Cuba presents more differences. Obama, she said, "was the first person to come out and say there has got to be a statue of limitations on a failed policy, and surely five decades is enough to know that this isn't working. So he favors allowing family travel and family remittances as the beginnings of a pathway to normalization.

She pointed to one other difference: "this question of whether we talk to our adversaries without preconditions. Obama said, I'm not afraid of Ahmadinejad. He's a Holocaust denier, he supports Hamas and Hezbollah, he has infiltrated Iraq, he's enriching uranium- and by being in the room talking to him, it's actually being tougher than lobbing these verbal grenades that Bush and Cheney toss from 5,000 miles away. Even if we fail to make progress on any of these issues, we will then have the international wind at our back, and we will have the capacity to mobilize a global response to his regime."

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