In an interview with Politico’s Susan Glasser in which she joined former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, former Obama U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power confessed that on the night of the 2016 presidential election, she held a female empowerment party to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s expected victory.
The details are delicious.
Power recalled:
Well, I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life, but none as immortalized as this one. I decided on election night to invite the 37 women ambassadors to the U.N., many of whom face struggles in their own foreign service, or at the U.N. of a kind that, as an American, I never did. And I thought what an amazing night for them. I mean, that’s what America represents to the world, when a glass ceiling is shattered in our country, it creates a whole new sense of possibility for people everywhere.
It turns out, ironically, that Power was hoping that Clinton’s victory would not be a blowout because she was worried the party would end early and the assorted women would miss a chance to speak with Gloria Steinem:
And so, I invited them. Most of them came, and we gathered with Madeleine Albright, our first woman secretary of state; Gloria Steinem, who is not only an icon here, of course, but all around the world, and we went through the same process, if you want to call it that, that so many people did at their election parties. As the host, I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be quite the blowout that it was anticipated to be, because I wanted to make sure that people had a chance to interact with Gloria Steinem, and one of—
Glasser interrupts, “So, your concern was that actually that the evening was going to be over early.”
Power replied:
Too soon. I wanted to milk the soft power dividend of this moment, and instead, and HBO was there, I guess unfortunately or fortunately, to capture it all, but instead, you really see what so many people went through, which was all of that sense of promise and excitement, and frankly, a dose of complacency. And then, it slowly dawning on us that not only was this going to be much closer than anybody anticipated, but that it was not going to end well.
Then, as Democrats are wont to do, Power uses children to evoke the emotions of her listener, and in a purple prose sort of way:
And for me, every time I see that, I am haunted most, actually, by the images of my children, who were running around the apartment for much of the night, but when the election is called, my daughter, who at that time is four, is just lying in my lap, kind of like this pale, Irish statue, and there’s something about the way she’s lying, I don’t know, that just makes her look like she’s the one who’s going to inherit—
Glasser, obsequiously, “The image is extraordinary.”
Power, from her lofty perch:
She’s going to inherit this—what he does is on her, right? It’s like we’ve somehow collectively landed in this place, but the people who are going to feel this, and be affected by this are these innocents. And as it happens, I was looking at a young child, but there’s so many other innocents who are being subjected to the cruelty, as we speak here today.
Speaking of innocent children, Power neglected to mention her own role as the Obama Administration fecklessly let Bashar al Assad indiscriminately murder children. As Lee Smith wrote in Tablet Magazine in February 2016:
Power is a handmaiden to war crimes. And no number of righteous tweets or broadsides against Russian diplomats can hide how the White House has used her monumental 2002 classic, A Problem From Hell, as a how-to manual in how to enable genocide and still maintain your soulful cred. … The entire White House, from the president on down, is complicit in the crimes that Power tweets about. As the person who quite literally wrote the book on how the American superpower must stop genocides when it has the power to do so, why hasn’t she resigned?