Obama Fires Advisor Who Called Clinton a "Monster"

Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winner, has resigned after giving a newspaper interview in which she bad-mouthed Hillary Clinton:

"We f***d up in Ohio," Power told the Scotsman newspaper ...

"In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win," Power was quoted as saying.

"She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything," Power said.

"You just look at her and think 'Ergh.'"

Power apologized, but the Clinton campaign pounced all over it, really piling it on:

"Personal attacks are not the way to convince voters that you are capable of being the president of the United States," said congresswoman Nita Lowey, who called the drama a "test" for Obama.

"We call on Senator Obama to make it clear that Samantha Power should not be part of this campaign."

Another Clinton backer, congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz added: "going down in the gutter like that and engaging in grade school name calling is distasteful and inappropriate."

Within hours Power had resigned and Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the candidate "decries such characterizations which have no place in this campaign."

This comes one day after the Clinton campaign deflected Obama's call for disclosure of Clinton's tax returns and donors to the Clinton presidential library by comparing Obama to Whitewater special prosecutor Ken Starr. No one called for the spokesman, Howard Wolfson, to resign. Power should have satisfied herself with comparing Clinton to an actual person, Karl Rove perhaps, because that's acceptable and "monster" isn't.

When my misbehaving brothers and I were little our parents sometimes called us "little monsters." We called on them to resign but it didn't do any good.

UPDATE: In my initial draft of this post I went on to compare the Clinton campaign's response to classic GOP strategy under Karl Rove: seize on a word or phrase that sounds bad, feign over-the-top outrage, demand an apology, generate a bad news cycle for the opposition, all completely unrelated to the issues. I decided that was too over-the-top, but I see that Josh Marshall and his readers are all over it:

Can't believe that Samantha Power actually resigned. This is the type of phony "controversy" the GOP/Karl Rove uses to their advantage. Josh famously called it the "bitch slap" theory of politics, and Clinton is using the same playbook. Obama needed to send a signal that these types of fake outrages won't play, but by her quick resigntation, the bitch slap is alive and well.

Depressing.

Indeed.