The Power herself and a personal hero of mine is going to one of the directors of American's new foreign policy along with Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates. This is real progress. Check below the fold...
President Obama's selected Samantha Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs on the National Security Council. The 61-year old NSC has a general reputation for being hawkish, regardless of the President's ideology. But that doesn't encapsulate Power, at all.
To start at the icing of her qualifications. Irish-born Ms. Power is an accomplished author, editor and journalist. Her writings have been published widely in magazines and newspapers--Time, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe to name a few. Power holds degrees from Harvard and Yale and is faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School. Before becoming a presidential candidate, Barack Obama tapped Power as his foreign policy advisor in 2005.
Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, based at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she was the founding executive director [1998-2002].
Her "media expertise" is the following:
* Foreign Policy
* Human Rights Policy
* International Law
* Non-Governmental Organizations
* Rwanda
* United Nations
It's unfortunate (though deliberate) that the media spends time fixating on outrages and not on talking about things people should say--Power is one of the brightest living foreign policy and genocide experts, yet is remembered for saying a stupid thing during the most charged presidential race in 40 years.
Her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide caught me by surprise over 5 years ago. It was one of the formative books in my political awakening as a progressive--not because she was a "political" writer but because Power took so much research going back to the very dawn of America's third stage of history, at the time of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey... and the US's complicated, awkward role as a bystander, Raphael Lempkin's coining of the term "genocide" in the wake of the Shoah, and America's post-detente policy of acknowledging genocides when it's in the elite's interest. Power lets the many documents and the citations speak for themselves--it is neither a Naderite scold or a nationalistic screed.
That she was Senator Obama and Candidate Obama's foreign policy advisor gave me hope... leave the politicking to the voters and the candidates. For a change. Rather than throwing around the term "Holocaust" to prevent us from leaving Iraq or to urge us to intervene in this or that country, why don't we have rational experts collect data and sort it out as the facts lead?
Power will not add "undue influence" from the military or industrial communities. She will be a much needed voice not because of her beliefs but because of her knowledge. That alone is a radical change from our era of multi-lingual Secretaries of State who don't really speak foreign language and make assertions without the so-called solid sources, or ideologue friends who shuffle from the beltway circuit to influential foreign policy jobs back to being hacks at conservative think-thanks.
I would take a quiet, thought-out "progressive victory" like this over a token, recognizable liberal meant for symbolically 'appeasing' the left anyday.