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WASHINGTON - An award-winning foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama resigned yesterday after her comments in a Scottish newspaper calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" were denounced by both presidential campaigns.
Samantha Power, a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a book on genocide, apologized yesterday for her remarks and said it would be disruptive to Obama's campaign for the Democratic nomination for her to stay on as his unpaid adviser.
"I care passionately - obviously, too passionately - about the Obama campaign," Power told the Globe. "At the moment I felt I might do damage to the campaign, it was essential for me to remove myself and all the distractions that I had brought" to the campaign.
Clinton said Obama had done "the right thing" by accepting Power's resignation. But the episode "raises disturbing questions about what the real planning and policy positions inside the Obama campaign happen to be," she told reporters while campaigning in Hattiesburg, Miss.
In an interview conducted Monday and published yesterday, Power told The Scotsman that Clinton "is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything" to win the nomination.
Yesterday morning, Power issued an apology for the comments, and the Obama campaign said the candidate decried the description of his rival.
High-level Clinton supporters, however, called for Power to be fired, and Power resigned soon after the story broke in US news outlets.
"This is the worst kind of politics," Representative Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat and Clinton supporter, told reporters in a conference call.
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson noted that Bill Shaheen, Clinton's cochairman in New Hampshire, was asked to step down after discussing Obama's admitted youthful drug use, and staff members in Iowa were fired after spreading false e-mail rumors that he was Muslim.
Expressing "deep regret" for the comments, Power said in a statement: "I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months."
Power said in a phone interview she was in the middle of The Scotsman interview in London when she received an upsetting call about Clinton campaign tactics in Ohio, which the New York senator won Tuesday, along with Texas, to revive her candidacy. Tired after a red-eye flight and exasperated over reports from the field, "I overreacted in a way that was unacceptable and deeply embarrassing," said Power, who is on leave from her Harvard post.
Greg Craig, a former Clinton administration adviser who is now on Obama's foreign policy team, praised Power's intellect and commitment. "She has been damaged by this process," Craig said.
Power has previously complimented Clinton, telling TV interviewer Charlie Rose that Clinton "would be a great president," but that she was working for Obama because she thought he would do a better job in the office. "I have only met her once, and I find her very, very affable and actually very intellectually curious and not ideological," Power told Rose in October.
The Clinton campaign speedily sent out a fund-raising appeal attached to the Power remarks. "A small contribution now - even as little as $5 - will show the Obama campaign that there is a price to this kind of attack politics," Terry McAuliffe, Clinton campaign chairman, said in an e-mail to potential donors.
The Clinton campaign has used previous controversies to raise money; last year, the campaign based a fund-raising appeal on a
The Democratic nomination fight has grown testier since Tuesday's primaries, with Obama's camp raising questions about Clinton's tax returns and her records from when her husband was president - and Clinton's responding by saying Obama is "imitating Ken Starr," the independent prosecutor who led an investigation that sought to impeach Bill Clinton.
Asked the difference between calling someone a "monster" and comparing someone to Starr, Clinton at first said the media had made the Starr reference. Reminded that it was her spokesman who had done so, Clinton said, "One is an ad hominem attack, and one is a historical reference."
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