The “New Age High Priestess” returns from under the Obama bus

^{President-Select with foreign policy advisers Greg Craig, back to camera, Susan Rice, Anthony Lake, Scott Gration, Samantha Power, NYT 11/4/08}
Back in May 2008, Ed Lasky introduced us to Samantha Power as the New Age High Priestess who described Barack Obama as a “globalized being”.

In his November 16, 2008, blog post Senator White House, John Batchelor included a photograph of Obama seated with Power and other members of his foreign policy transition team. Within the hour we learn from the Associated Press that Power, who was forced to resign March 7, 2008, after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a “monster” in an interview with The Scotsman, is “now working on the transition team for the agency Clinton is expected to lead.”

Power told the Scotsman newspaper that Clinton would stop at nothing to defeat Obama. “She is a monster, too,” Power said in the interview. “She is stooping to anything.” Power added that “the amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

The AP informs:

State Department officials said Friday that Samantha Power is among a group of foreign policy experts that the president-elect’s office selected to help the incoming administration prepare for Clinton’s anticipated nomination as secretary of state. The Obama transition team’s Web site includes Power’s name as one of 14 members of the “Agency Review Team” for the State Department.

Clinton’s role at State is expected to be announced after the Thanksgiving weekend. Power’s apparent rehabilitation is another sign of that impending move.

Clinton’s office declined to comment on Power’s inclusion in the State Department transition, but an official close to the Obama transition team said Power had “made a gesture to bury the hatchet” with Clinton and that it had been well-received.

Power has been given an official State Department e-mail address and has been seen in the building, said the State officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the transition. A State Department spokesman referred questions to Obama’s transition team, which later declined to comment.

The Politico comments “Power was close to Obama personally, so her return is not particularly surprising. Many of her friends thought it was a case of ‘when,’ not ‘if’.”

Power on Obama

In a March 6, 2008, interview with the New Statesman, following her resignation, Power said:

“Obama has talked a lot about the importance of moving away from electocracy,” she says, trying to move on to more comfortable territory, and suggesting that the way people actually live is more important than the “reification of elections”.

“In terms of how radical the shift will be, I think it’s very hard. There’s going to be a huge foreign service and civil service that he will inherit, senators and congressmen who have already been elected. So I think he is one guy, trying to steer this ship of cacophonous agendas into a new place.”

In other words, promising to shut Guantanamo Bay, ban extraordinary rendition and pull troops out of Iraq within 18 months is fine. So is striking at al-Qaeda positions in Pakistan without the government’s consent, an Obama line widely thought of as a gaffe when he delivered it last August.

“There will be situations where the priority is self-defence,” she says, indicating that a preference for multilateralism only goes so far. “President Obama, like every other leader on earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don’t cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.” But it is politically impossible for Obama to talk to Hamas, even if he wants to. She can’t say that, though, especially when vicious internet smears are making lurid allegations about his “Muslim past”.

Power also managed to get in another Clinton dig when asked about Obama’s relationship with convicted political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko, whose trial began on March 3rd:

Why did Obama have anything to do with Rezko? “We’ve talked about Rezko as a phenomenon in politics,” says Power, “but I’ve never said to him, ‘Why did you do this dumb thing?’ I’m all for tough love, but that just doesn’t seem constructive.” It’s difficult to keep an eye on all the sources of financial donations, she says, adding evenly: “I don’t think it’s a good idea for the Clintons to get into a competition over who’s got the most unsavoury donations, you know what I mean?”

More about Power: Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky provided an extensive profile of Samantha Power in the February 19, 2008, American Thinker:

Senator Obama’s supporters have uniformly ignored the role and the views of Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Samantha Power, who is very problematic regarding Israel, Iran, and for that matter, American supporters of Israel. Power left her position at Harvard to work for Obama for a year after his election to the US Senate. She is now identified as a “senior foreign policy advisor.”.

In the case of Power, it was Senator Obama who made the initial contact with her after reading her book on genocide. Power is now actively working for the campaign. She cannot be casually dismissed as one of Obama’s many advisors, with no particular assigned role.

It is not at all hard to imagine her having a senior foreign policy role in an Obama administration, perhaps as US Ambassador to the United Nations, an organization she views warmly. The problem for those who favor a strong US-Israel relationship is that Power seems obsessed with Israel, and in a negative way. Much like the authors of the Baker-Hamilton report, she believes resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to solving other problems in the Middle East. And it is clear that her approach to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for the US to behave in a more “even handed” fashion, which of course means withdrawing US support for Israel, and instead applying more pressure on Israel for concessions. [...]

Power is not just assenting to the Walt-Mearsheimer view of American foreign policy, but is also arguing that Israel had something to do with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003: an appalling slander, and a telling one.

Also of note is a recent opinion piece Power wrote for TIME, titled “Rethinking Iran,” the thrust of which rethinking involves the need to engage diplomatically the mullahs and pretend that the Iranian nuclear program is a figment of the paranoid imagination of the Bush administration. [...]

Does Power actually believe that the NIE put to rest concerns about the Iranian nuclear program? If she actually thinks that — and it appears she does — she deserves voluminous ridicule from thinking people everywhere.

Power also advocates that America send armed military forces, “a mammoth protection force” and an “external intervention”, to impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. This directly contradicts her criticism of the invasion and “occupation” of Iraq and her call for the removal of American forces from that nation. [...]

Power’s views on the problems caused by the US-Israel relationship also place her in the same camp as Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Soros (an influential supporter of Barack Obama’s), who also oppose the so-called “Israel lobby” and reject the participation of American supporters of Israel, including Christians, in the foreign policy discussion.

Final item: The New York Post’s Page Six reported May 9, 2008:

THERE is passion in politics. Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who had to quit Barack Obama’s campaign after calling Hillary Clinton “a monster,” is secretly engaged to Cass Sunstein, the University of Chicago Law School prof who might be a Supreme Court pick if Obama becomes president. AboveTheLaw.com quotes a source: “Apparently it’s all secret because Cass hasn’t told [ex-paramour] Martha Nussbaum yet.” Neither lovebird responded to inquiries. They’ve been an item since January.

Obviously, AboveTheLaw.com had good sources. As they subsequently reported, Power and Sunstein were married July 4, 2008. What they did not report was, in February 2008, Sunstein left UoC to join the Harvard Law School faculty as director of its new Program on Risk Regulation.

The Program on Risk Regulation will focus on how law and policy deal with the central hazards of the 21st century. Anticipated areas of study include terrorism, climate change, occupational safety, infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other low-probability, high-consequence events.

Unless RBO misses this guess, sounds like another Obama administration adviser-in-waiting.