The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Obama had been long-winded in the early primary debates. Privately, he had described debating—with its emphasis on camera-ready putdowns and sound bites—as a “trained seal act.” But once he started connecting with Iowans themselves, he sounded punchier and less professorial. He also grew more motivated, becoming livid at the Clinton campaign’s failure to crack down on campaign staffers who had circulated emails casting doubt on his Christian faith.

  When I sent him positive feedback after the final debate before the Iowa caucus, he wrote back “Just gimme the ball.” For the first time since I met him in 2005, he seemed to be exactly where he wanted to be.

  As the day of the Iowa caucus approached, Obama’s entire network seemed to be descending on the state. Senior policy advisers and high-powered donors were spotted helping shovel snow from driveways and committing to babysit so that Iowan parents could participate in the evening caucus. I sat in a cubicle, dusting off my Serbo-Croatian as I placed calls to those with Slavic names on the campaign phone list, hoping to make the very specific case for why Obama was the right candidate to manage ongoing divisions in the Balkans.

  Economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, Cass, and I were handed a list of likely caucus-goers who lived an hour or so from Des Moines, and told to go “get out the vote.” At the outset, we were proud of the fact that, together, we could answer questions from voters about even obscure economic, legal, and foreign policy issues. But most of the people on our list had already been contacted dozens of times by the campaign and wanted to be left alone. When they actually did come to the door, they most commonly asked for the address of their local caucus site—the one question that sent us scrambling for answers from headquarters.

  Although we were ineffective canvassers, Cass and I still managed to have a blast together. He was exactly sixteen years older than me—we happened to have the same birthday. He had once been married (to his college girlfriend) and they had a daughter named Ellyn, who was in her late teens. As soon as Cass knew he was interested in me, he called Ellyn, with whom he shared everything. Once we started dating, she asked to speak with me to express how happy she was for her dad.

  Cass was a complete original. His hunger for discovery, so evident in the dozens of books he had written, was a quality he brought to every moment he was awake. He was as fresh in the world as the world was to him. I never heard him repeat himself. He wrote about serious things, but his open face always seemed ready to laugh. I found myself answering questions about myself that he hadn’t asked. I wanted him to know everything.

  My back pain had been worse than ever that year—so bad that it felt like I was spending more time at the chiropractor than anywhere else. Elliot Thomson, a close law school friend, had long believed that my back pain stemmed from psychological and not physical ailments. When I told him how bad it had gotten, he mailed me a copy of John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, which I read cover to cover. Sarno argued that pain of the sort I had been experiencing could stem from a failure to grapple with deep distress that then gets “somatized”—lodged or manifested—in the body as physical pain.

  Since none of my MRIs had turned up any actual spinal or nerve damage, I thought that it was possible Sarno’s theory applied to me. I discussed the possibility with Cass and then poured out as much of what was bottled up in me as I could access, leaving myself more exposed than in any prior relationship.

  On our first weekend away together, I popped Advil and tried to stretch my back on the floor of our hotel room. But at the same time, I told Cass about the “Bat Cave,” explaining that, in the early days of a relationship, I tended to go on a “scavenger hunt for the fatal flaw” of the person I was dating. My brother, Stephen, liked to tease me for having once broken up with a guy because he didn’t have an EZ-Pass. And I described what I was learning in intensive therapy, revealing my lingering concern that I would try to push even an ideal partner away. Despite gaining a rational understanding of my behavior, I remained subconsciously terrified of letting someone come too close for fear they would leave me or die.

  Instead of running away from my red flags, Cass told me, “I am listening. But you should know that I will not let you ruin this.”

  His confidence was bracing. Following that first trip together, my back pain disappeared after six years of regularly incapacitating me. Something had lifted.

  “This is a man completely in my corner,” I wrote in my journal. “I feel scary calm.” It didn’t hurt that, with the campaign heating up, I did not have as much time as usual to disappear into my head.

  Still, to be safe, I told Cass to call John (whom he didn’t yet know) if I started pulling away. I had seen my brother and Eddie use their buddies in AA to help keep them sober; I was asking John to mediate between me and Cass, to try to prevail on Cass not to come on too strong too soon, but also not to give up on me.

  Since Obama knew us both, I wrote to tell him I had “romantic news.” Although he was in the last stretch of his Iowa campaigning, he called me almost as soon as I sent the email.

  “This better be good,” he said.

  “It’s Cass,” I revealed.

  “Cass?! Cass Sunstein? He’s a total slob,” Obama said, and the phone line dropped.

  I knew how messy Cass was. His office at the University of Chicago was so cluttered that it had been photographed for various campus publications. Piled high on his desk—and a foot deep on the floor—were law review journals, students’ blue book exams, old editions of Baseball Prospectus, Milk Duds boxes, crusted Diet Coke cans, squash rackets, men’s ties, squeaky dog toys, socks, and much more. I was horrified when I visited, but I rationalized that perhaps this disorder, like dressing better, was something that could be fixed.

  Now Obama was giving me a more negative take, and his blurted reaction rattled me. Feeling old reflexes suddenly rising, I knew I didn’t need anyone’s help in talking myself out of a relationship. As I sat in my apartment in Winthrop and furiously dialed Obama, I kept getting voice mail. I wondered if Obama, who had known Cass for at least a decade, knew something I did not.

  Finally, after fifteen minutes, he called back, apologizing profusely for having left me hanging on a matter so important. He explained that he was in rural Iowa and had lost his cell phone signal.

  “What I should have said is: This is wonderful news! Cass is one of the most brilliant, creative, and kind people I have ever met. Congratulations.”

  Before he hung up, Obama also offered some parting counsel: “Don’t fuck this up.”

  ON THE DAY OF THE CAUCUS, one of the coldest of the year in Iowa, Cass arrived at campaign headquarters in Des Moines bearing a gift: an unfashionable woolen Chicago White Sox hat he had picked up at O’Hare Airport on the way. “I didn’t want you to be cold,” he said, simply. In that instant, I realized how long it had been since I had let anybody take care of me in the way that Cass was doing.

  As we drove around together and encouraged Iowans to participate, we met young caucus-goers who looked fresh out of high school and many other first-time participants—including Republicans and Independents.

  At around 7:30 p.m., we were in the backseat of a friend’s car driving to the Iowa Events Center, where we expected to watch the results trickle in on the big screen over the course of a long evening. To our surprise, we heard on the radio that MSNBC had already projected Barack Obama as the winner. Some 240,000 people had turned out to caucus, nearly double the number from 2004. Cass and I could hardly process what we were hearing, but we embraced and raced inside to wait for Obama to appear. I emailed him from my BlackBerry, “Um, congratulations on changing everything forever.”

  Many political experts—and surely millions of voters—had believed that an African American could not be elected President in a majority-white country with deep racial fault lines. In a single night, Americans in one of the whitest states in the country had changed our understanding of what was possible. The resounding triumph had also underscored how large a difference
young people make when they turn out.

  Many years later, Obama would say of his Iowa caucus victory, “That’s my favorite night of my entire political career . . . a more powerful night than the night I was elected President.”12

  Cass and I took up seats, along with Austan Goolsbee, on bleachers behind the podium where Obama would eventually speak. Ensconced among Iowans, campaign volunteers, and donors, Austan and I began to lead our section in a series of unsophisticated chants.

  “Give me an O!” I shouted. Austan wrapped his arms above his head in the shape of an O. The bleacher roared, “OOOOOOOOO!” The next morning, a picture of us making the large O sign and shouting at the top of our lungs was splashed on the pages of the Des Moines Register. We looked like drunken members of a fraternity rather than senior advisers to a potential president, but the photo captured the exaltation of the night.

  Never before in my life could I recall so much going right at the same time. My loved ones were healthy. I was part of a team of people I cherished. I had worked for three years with the person who could well become the next leader of the free world. And I was falling in love with a remarkable man who appeared to love me back.

  When Obama walked onto the stage, he seemed incandescent with delight. Instead of basking in the roar of the crowd, he began by applauding his supporters, campaign staff, and volunteers.

  Then, as he prepared to step up to the podium to deliver the victory speech that almost nobody outside of Iowa had predicted, he scanned the crowd. Most politicians—or public speakers, for that matter—look out at audiences without actually absorbing the individual faces. To my astonishment, however, when Obama looked to the bleachers behind him, he spotted me and then saw Cass.

  He pointed from me to Cass and Cass to me, as if to say, “Now this is the real news!” He offered up a wide and mischievous smile, turned to the podium, and, a few seconds later, began: “They said this day would never come . . .”

  — 17 —

  Monster

  I was in Dublin, Ireland—the place where, to paraphrase Yeats, all my ladders had started—when the politics of politics caught up with me.

  On March 6th, 2008, two months after Obama’s surprise win in Iowa, I was on the international leg of the publicity tour for my book about Sergio Vieira de Mello. After a few days in London, I had arrived in Ireland and spent a glorious evening at the University College Dublin, where I gave a lecture. A group of my former Dublin school friends, whom I hadn’t seen since we were children at Mount Anville, suddenly appeared at the table where I was signing books. I remembered most of their names immediately and, though thirty years had passed, was transported back to our school days together.

  My late father’s family and friends—including his buddies from Hartigan’s Pub—turned out in force, as did members of Mum’s family. The bitterness of the rupture from long ago was drowned out by the pride they each felt in “Jim and Vera’s daughter.” The whole evening had been an emotional one.

  Adding a surreal dimension to the day, U2’s Bono, hearing I was in town, had invited me to join him and the musician Brian Eno for a drink at the Shelbourne Hotel. Bono had just departed when my cell phone rang. I heard the voice of Denis McDonough, the foreign policy coordinator for the Obama campaign.

  “Have you seen Drudge?” he asked, referring to the right-wing news website with a large readership.

  “Drudge? No, why?” I asked.

  “They have you saying all kinds of crazy shit about Hillary to the Scotsman,” Denis replied tersely.

  I felt my face flush. Denis read aloud what the Scotsman had me saying:

  “We fucked up in Ohio . . . In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.”

  Denis paused to get my reaction.

  I assured him there had been a mistake. “No way I said that. I haven’t even been to Scotland on this trip.”

  Denis went on. “It gets worse,” he said. “They quote you saying, ‘You just look at her and think, Ergh.’ ”

  I could not imagine denigrating the appearance of the first competitive woman presidential candidate in history. Hecklers in New Hampshire had yelled at Clinton to iron their shirts. Tucker Carlson, then an MSNBC host, had remarked, “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” Clinton was the only person running whose opponents critiqued her wardrobe and the tone of her voice. I wanted Obama to win—but I admired Clinton and could see that many of the attacks against her were sexist and unfair.

  “I did not say those things,” I assured Denis.

  “Great,” he said. “It’s getting a lot of play here. So let’s just snuff it out. The campaign will demand a retraction.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I hung up, eager to get out of the news as quickly as possible.

  My hand trembled as I put the phone down. After I recounted to Eno what was being reported by the American media, he asked if I was sure I had been misquoted. “I couldn’t have said those things,” I insisted, “because that’s not what I think.”

  But as I reflected on the four days I had spent in the UK during my book tour, I realized I had little memory of anything I had said. I had appeared on radio and television morning and evening news shows. I had engaged students at Oxford University and done a slew of back-to-back, indistinguishable print interviews. Of those, I recalled only being pinned into a windowless hotel suite and managing to stay awake by alternating Diet Cokes and coffees before each interview.

  I tried to recall the different stops on the British press junket. Through the cobwebs, I suddenly remembered a phone call from Austan Goolsbee that had interrupted one of the many interviews.

  Austan had telephoned seeking advice on “how to deal with the media”—a request that would soon seem painfully ironic. He had been quoted in the press as having told Canadian officials during a private meeting that Obama’s campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA was only “political positioning.” The Clinton campaign had pounced, publicizing the report to paint Obama as duplicitous. The campaign dubbed the episode “NAFTA-gate,” and Clinton said Obama was misleading American voters while Austan gave “the old wink-wink” to Canada.

  In these critical months of the Democratic primary, significant acrimony existed between our two campaigns. Obama had gained front-runner status in February, after winning ten consecutive victories over a two-week period. Distressingly, Clinton had started making statements that seemed to favor the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain over her Democratic rival. “I have a lifetime of experience I will bring to the White House,” she told reporters at one point. “I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002.”

  In a 60 Minutes interview, when asked whether there was any truth to the rumor that Obama was a Muslim, Clinton had responded, “I take him on the basis of what he says,” and then, when pressed, deftly added, “No, there is nothing to base that on, as far as I know.” Clinton had also recently released her most memorable ad, which depicted children sleeping safely while an emergency phone rings in the White House at three a.m. “Who do you want answering the phone?” the voice-over asked, implying that Obama did not have the experience needed to handle a national security crisis. Obama had fired back. “We’ve had a red phone moment,” he told a gathering of the American Legion. “It was the decision to invade Iraq”—a decision, he reminded his audience, that Clinton had supported. Still, I worried that swing voters would be influenced by Clinton’s negative depiction of Obama if he made it to the general election.

  In fact, Clinton’s strategy to introduce doubt about Obama’s readiness for the job even seemed to be paying off with Democrats. Two days before I arrived in Ireland, she snapped Obama’s streak by winning primaries in Rhode Island, Texas, and Ohio. She called it a turning point in the race.

  My do
ubts began to tug at me. Which reporter had I been with when Austan called? Had he or she listened in on our conversation, or embellished something I had said? Then, the person’s face and manner suddenly came back to me. Young and eager, she had spent a good ten minutes before our interview asking me for advice on how she might become a foreign correspondent. I quickly called Denis back and asked him to hold off on issuing a denial until I was absolutely certain it was warranted. I said good night to Eno and rushed up to my room, enveloped by a sudden feeling of dread.

  I rummaged through my bag and pulled out a copy of my UK book tour schedule. There, on the first day, after my red-eye, was a listing for an interview with a reporter named Gerri Peev. She was the woman I was with when Austan called—and, to my horror, although she was not Scottish, the publication she worked for was the Scotsman.

  Peev’s telephone number was right there on the schedule, so, although it was after midnight, I called her. I blew past the pleasantries when she answered.

  “Hi, this is Samantha Power, and you have quoted me saying things I didn’t say.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she said.

  “But you did, Gerri,” I said, practically yelling. “You did. I would never have called Hillary Clinton a monster.”

  Then she explained what happened. “I wrote a story about you and your career and your Sergio book, but I went back to the desk and they said, ‘That’s awful dry, don’t you have anything better?’ And I went back through the tape and there was that stuff. And I thought, ‘Hey, well, that’s lively.’ ”

  “But I couldn’t have said the things you have me saying,” I repeated, even as an icy sensation crawled up my spine.

  I assumed she had made up quotes loosely based on whatever she had written in her notebook, so I asked her if she had a tape. She fumbled on the other side of the phone with her recorder, and then I heard my voice.