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Samantha Power on How To "Frame" Withdrawal

AUSTIN, TEXAS—Samantha Power has kept a low profile ever since leaving the Obama campaign. But she resurfaced Saturday to appear on a panel about “war pundits” at Netroots Nation.

Power no longer speaks for the Obama campaign, at least not officially. But her answer to one question about the “human costs of withdrawal” from Iraq captured the same nuanced view of the war that, in part, forced her resignation. (She left after referring to Obama’s withdrawal plan on British television as a “best-case scenario.” Well, that and calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.”) It also captured a potential split between Obama, who would agree with Power on this one, and his supporters on the left.

During her presentation, Power had spoken about the need to acknowledge that withdrawal could get ugly. Tom Matzzie, former Washington director for MoveOn.org, objected to her “framing.”  Here’s the whole exchange (cleaned up a bit for readability):

Tom Matzzie: The question is really about framing, and about building the story about what withdrawal means. The human consequences are something you have to consider, but we can’t help the right build the frame that disengagement is going to have negative humanitarian consequences. … The war’s already a tragedy, you know? That’s why you don’t want to get into them, they’re tragedies. So I’d be interested about how you can revise your language to help not build that right-wing frame. ...

Samantha Power: I don’t feel inclined to revise my frame out of deference to this manifestly moribund discourse that the administration and its supporters inflicted upon us in the course of the last few years.

By avoiding addressing John McCain’s apocalyptic claims about what will follow a U.S. withdrawal, we have allowed his claims to hang above the Iraq debate. When he says, as he said last year, that when we leave Iraq it’s going to make Srebrenica and Rwanda look like a Sunday school picnic—those were his analogies that he used on multiple occasions—and we say, No no, it’s going to be fine, because we don’t want to address that there could be any downside at all to withdrawal, I think we’re giving him a free pass.

I think we can instead say, [look at] all the costs—to Iraqis, to the region, to Afghanistan, to the military readiness, to U.S. national security—of staying, and address that head on, and then say the costs of leaving are unknowable. You, who predicted we’d have a cakewalk, are now to be trusted to tell us it’s going to be like Rwanda when we leave? How’s that? …

[Then we say], there are always risks, there are always consequences that are unknowable. Here’s what we’re going to do to address the concern. I think that’s a much more effective approach than to say, Oh , just because all the violence followed us into Iraq it’s going to follow us out of Iraq. I think it’s insulting to the American voter, the American people who know that certain things are unknowable. … That kind of belief that it’s all or nothing is in its own way analogous to the old one that was in this administration.

It makes you wonder how much of this Obama can say. Acknowledging the costs of withdrawal is one thing. Convincing people that the costs of leaving will be less than the cost of staying is different, especially when the costs of staying—at least in terms of human lives—appears to be decreasing. It’s a minefield Obama may have to navigate soon if Prime Minister Maliki’s endorsement of his withdrawal plan carries as much weight as people seem to think.

Power Outage, Part 2

It’s been a rough day for Samantha Power.

The flap over her “monster” comment was just brewing when another, slightly more substantive charge emerged. In an interview with the BBC, Power said that Barack Obama’s plan to pull out of Iraq within 16 months isn’t a commitment but a “best-case scenario” that Obama will have to revisit when he becomes president.

The Clinton camp is all over this one, saying it shows Obama isn’t actually serious about quick withdrawal. In a conference call today, a Clinton surrogate compared the remarks to what Austan Goolsbee allegedly said to Canadian officials about Obama’s commitment to NAFTA.

He’s right—this is like the NAFTA flap. But not how he means it. As with NAFTA, both candidates have been much more strident in their campaign rhetoric than they can possibly be as president. Obama and Clinton have condemned the free trade agreement but stopped short of saying they will scrap it. The only “commitment” they’ve made regarding NAFTA is to “renegotiate” it, without specifying what parts they would renegotiate. (Both say they would reform the deal’s labor and environmental standards, but that’s not the part manufacturing workers in Ohio are concerned about.) 

Similarly, both candidates are playing chicken on the subject of withdrawal from Iraq. Obama promises to “remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” Clinton’s stance is less decisive: She promises to convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to start bringing troops home within 60 days. But neither candidate has presented a definite “timetable for withdrawal,” let alone explained the logistics of pulling out such a massive force in such a short period.

The fact is, Power is exactly right. Whoever becomes president will be confronted with a much messier situation than the candidates acknowledge. “Best-case scenario” might not have been the ideal choice of words—“goal” sounds a little more optimistic— but Power was correct to say that “you can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009.” Essentially her point was that things change—a fact that neither candidate has been willing to admit. It’s disappointing that the first person to do so gets sacked.

Power Outage

No sooner did the Clinton campaign demand Samantha Power’s resignation for calling Clinton a “monster” than she submitted it.

“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,” Power said in a statement. 

Power, a top foreign-policy adviser to Obama, originally told the Scotsman newspaper that Clinton “is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.” Apparently she and the paper had different definitions of “off the record.” She later apologized, declaring her admiration for Hillary Clinton. But for the Clinton campaign, that wasn’t enough—a surrogate called the decision of whether to keep Power around “a test of character” for Obama. Presumably he has passed the test.

The resignation matters symbolically, but that’s about it. Power has called herself an “informal adviser” to Obama, and she wasn’t exactly part of the regular campaign entourage. (She did travel with the campaign in Iowa and South Carolina.) Her stepping down doesn’t mean she and Obama can’t talk. It just means they can’t appear together in public. Plus, keep in mind that Obama has already rolled out his major foreign-policy initiatives. Power could have been useful given Clinton’s latest attempts to bring Afghanistan front and center, but again, this is a resignation—not a restraining order.

Yet again we see how Obama’s talk about a “new kind of politics” opens him up to charges of “same old, same old.” Power’s words were nasty, sure, but hardly as offensive as Bill Shaheen and Bob Johnson’s winking hints about Obama’s cocaine use. Their charges had political weight, whereas Clinton was never, in fact, a giant, rampaging Cloverfield-style she-beast. But because Obama has sold himself as Mr. Clean, his opponents can point to any dirt as evidence of hypocrisy.

At the very least, Power’s transgression—coupled with Susan Rice’s recent slip-up and the Austan Goolsbee flap—will make the Obama campaign more careful about which surrogates they put out front.

Click here for Part 2 of the Samantha Power saga.