Letters to the Editor
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This woman is magnificent
which is why it's such a shame that she's no longer advising the Obama campaign. I wouldn't care if she threw herself at the mercy of the Clinton campaign and got hired there, just so she's on somebody's team and becomes the next Secretary of State.
What she says is so obvious that it defies further deconstruction. It's what many of us--Obama and Hillary supporters alike--said when word came out that a military advisor to Clinton suggested the same thing (that Clinton would not be able to stick to her "campaign plan.")
Surely we have not gone so far down the cheer-for-our-own-team-only road that we don't see the wisdom of this woman's words. David Brooks wrote several weeks ago that the undoing of the Democratic Party, even if they win, will be the disconnect between what they promised in Iraq (or, perhaps more accurately, what people believe they promised) and what either candidate will possibly be able to deliver. I've complained before and at the risk of sounding like a broken record: Gotcha questioners in debates have forced these candidates into straitjacketed positions on policy that they will now have to try to live up to. This kind of post facto (is that the right Latin expression?) policy making is crazy. (Whatever I get cornered into promising in the debate will now have to become U.S. policy.")
It's unconscionable that either candidate should use this kind of thing against the other--on the war or NAFTA--as both of them have essentially the same position on those issues and both want NOT to be tied to their fuzzier "campaign positions." All this does is further curtail their natural speech in public and debate forums and bring us (back) to the age of completely scripted candidates.
It would be nice if both candidates could say what Power herself said, that it would be silly to be tied to a position crafted during a campaign before all of the information is in the candidate's hands, but it's awfully hard to maintain that level of nuance when you are being pointed and shouted at by Tim Russert, who's demanding a precise hour of troop deployment and a blood-oath. When anyone tries to remain vague for the purpose of preserving complexity, s/he is inevitably hammered the next day, as happened in several debates when some of them refused to play the moderator's game.