Obama Sneaks Power Back Into the Mix

Barack Obama’s national security team seems to consist entirely of people known for speaking their minds, observes Ben Smith of Politico, and none moreso than new NSC staff member Samantha Power, best known for calling Hillary Clinton “a monster.” She was booted for the incident, but that was just a “political convenience,” says Smith. “She wasn’t some political operative who had played a dirty trick, but an academic who tripped up.”

More interesting than the Clinton gaffe was a BBC interview in which the Pulitzer Prize winner made the “grave error of speaking the truth,” saying that Obama’s Iraq timetable was a “best-case scenario.” And more interesting still is that Power, like UN ambassador Susan Rice, was shaped by the failure to act in Rwanda, and is more afraid of staying silent than anything else. (More Samantha Power stories.)