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Hillary Clinton: Monster?

You will have heard by now that The Scotsman reported that a Barack Obama supporter called Hillary Clinton a monster:

In an unguarded moment during an interview with The Scotsman in London, Samantha Power, Mr Obama’s key foreign policy aide, let slip the camp’s true feelings about the former first lady. ... “She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,” Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark. ...

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

Who, you may be wondering, is Ms Power? ATL has the scoop:

That statement was made by Samantha Power, a top foreign policy aid for Obama and new-ish love interest of Professor Cass Sunstein. Sunstein recently accepted a position at Harvard Law, leaving behind in Chicago his ex, philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Bossman David Lat posted all the gossip about the academic love triangle here.

In the earlier post, ATL informs that:

It appears that Professor Sunstein may be part of a new “power couple”—in the most literal sense. Rumor has it that he’s romantically involved with Professor Samantha Power -- a beautiful, brainy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who is roughly 15 years his junior. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner who has also been profiled in Men’s Vogue (see glamorous photo, at the top of this post). What’s not to like?

... Our Chicago sources informed us of the following, widespread gossip: (1) Professor Sunstein and Professor Power are dating / seeing each other / romantically involved; (2) they met through the Obama campaign, which they are both advising (he on domestic policy, she on foreign policy; see here); and (3) he took the HLS job so that he could spend more time with her in Cambridge, where she teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Okay, so what do we make of all this? First, Power was surprisingly stupid to say such things to a reporter whether on or off the record. It’s especially stupid for an Obama aide to do so. As David Brooks observes:

Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.

With some in the press calling this episode “a major embarrassment to the Illinois senator who promised voters he wouldn’t engage in the politics of personal destruction,” has this episode made Obama look conventional?

Second, the outrage coming from the Clinton camp is over the top. In every political campaign in which I’ve been involved, we campaign workers routinely used words much worse than “monster” to describe the opposition. I’m morally certain some Clinton aides have called Obama some nasty names. They just had the good sense to do it in private. Third, the journalism gotcha by the Scotsman was pretty shoddy. If an interviewee is “clearly rattled” going into an interview and immediately tries to retract something, it’s pretty sleazy to go ahead and report it. Finally, truth is a complete defense.

Update: Apropos my third point, Kevin Drum’s singing a different tune:

Power called Clinton a monster and then immediately afterward tried to claim “that is off the record.” A few commenters have been crying foul over this, but that’s not how it’s done: something is off the record only if the reporter agrees beforehand that it’s off the record. There are certainly some reporters who would have cut Power a bit of slack here and some who wouldn’t, but the Scotsman reporter who published Power’s remarks wasn’t doing anything wrong. Cozy beltway conventions often seem to dictate that remarks are off the record by default, but we bloggers has long complained about that, and rightly so, I think. Nobody broke any rules here.