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Samantha Power and Barack Obama
Monday, April 30, 2007

A commenter linked me to this Michael Hirsch piece about one of Obama's chief foreign policy advisers, Samantha Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her 600-page book on genocide. Here's how Hirsch leads his piece: "Samantha Power is a tall, rangy redhead with the purposeful gait of the athlete she once wanted to be. She has a husky voice and often speaks in excited rushes of ideas, the words tumbling over each other. What animates Power more than anything else is her Cause, her “dream of American power being harnessed for good.”

And here's the key anecdote:

Their 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?’”

Labels: Politics in America

Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM
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