Absolutely not.

She should step aside voluntarily. This won't go away unless she does. It was a stupid comment, and if Obama keeps her on, he's going to have a hard time explaining why.

Make her step aside, and this story will die a rapid death. Keep her on, and we're going to be hearing and reading about this for some time.

C'mon Obama people. Learn to handle this sort of kerfluffle already. You dropped the ball, big-time, on the Nafta-gate (and yes, everyone, I KNOW that the whole thing was unfair, but life is unfair, so deal with it). Don't keep making these mistakes: the media has stopped giving you the relatively free ride that it has.

You have to admit, Clinton has shown the door to several people in her campaign for similar incidents. Obama, as far as I can recall has yet to do so once. In fact they never even issued so much as apology as far as I know for Jesse Jackson Jr.'s remarks on the morning after NH.

OK, Lets pull out all the "Off the Record Comments" by Clinton's people and have a mass firing, with Wolfson first for the Ken Starr comment.

I do not think the Clinton's have the upper hand here.

Come on... if one of my surrogates had called my opponent a monster and then my opponent demanded I fire my surrogate you know what I'd say? "I'm not afraid of monsters."

You'd think a little namecalling is the worst thing that could ever ever happen in a campaign. That thinking is Obama's fault but come on.

How... monstrous.

How about Obama demand Hillary fire the guy who compared him to Ken Starr? Or, how about Obama demand Hillary fire the woman who compared him Unfavorably to John McCain? Oh wait.

Anyway, it would be insane to fire someone as brilliant as Powers over something so minor. But leave it to Hillary to spin something minor into the end of the world. I'm not sure how this constant delusional hysteria on behalf of Hillary is supposed to be for feminism.

I think for the good of the campaign she needs to step aside. Obama just doesn't need anything to distract him and to provide her with another "woe is me" storyline.

I am a certified Hillary hater and I think Obama needs to fire this staffer. (He can re-hire her once he has the nomination locked up.)

How do you fire an advisor?

Are they hirees or advisers?

Bowing to the wishes of Hillary's surrogates shows strong leadership?

Did Hillary fire the folks passing on the Weather Underground smear? She is a monster. I thought that's what her supporters liked about her.

I repeat. Get rid of this advisor. Now. The AP headline in Google news:

Obama Adviser Says Clinton "A Monster"

This is going to be used to hammer at Obama, over and over and over, no matter how stupid it is. Get. Rid. Of. Her.

Hillary Clinton should fire herself for lying about NAFTA.

Just when I think Hillary can't make me like her any less...Ms Powers shouldn't have said that but she apologized and Obama condemned the comments.
This is just vindictiveness though.

It's gonna be a little hard to fire someone who is an UNPAID ADVISER.

This is a little ridiculous. If the campaigns fired everyone who said something insulting about their opponent, Clinton would lose half her campaign. I mean, jeez, Bob Johnson says Obama's dealing drugs, and she doesn't even APOLOGIZE for it, let alone distance herself from the guy. And let's remember that Billy Shaheen in New Hampshire was not fired, he resigned.

Yes, I'm sorry Hillary's feelings were bruised. But can we stop playing the victim card all the time? It's tiresome.

Sure he should fire her- just as soon as Hillary apologizes to the Democratic Party for endorsing McCain over Obama, and drops out of the race.

I was just gonna say that :)

But she IS a monster!

SCREW YOU! You tried to make Obama into Jesse Jackson so white people wouldn't vote for him! Your people basically accused him of being an ex-crack dealer! One of your people just recently called him Osama bin Laden (accidentally). You've accused him of being Bush, Karl Rove and Ken Starr! Go to hell Hillary.

And this wasn't even supposed to be on the record, it wasn't like this was a campaign strategy.

I hate to say this, but I think she has to go. I hate to see Obama cave in but he needs to nip this in the bud right away so that Hillary can't continue to use this shit against him. It was a stupid thing for her to say (even off the record - why in God's name did she trust that reporter, anyway???) Even with her apology, the Clinton campaign is not going to back down and will use this to their every advantage.

Remember the Edwards dust-up with the female bloggers he had hired because of some stuff they had written on their blogs (when they weren't even working for him at the time)? Those women stepped down pretty quickly when it became apparent that the story was gaining legs. I think Powers needs to do the same, in the interests of the campaign. Otherwise, the next few news cycles will be all Samantha Power, all the time, obscuring the real issues.

The argument to fire Wolfson is somewhat valid, but calling Obama Ken Starr is not the same as calling Clinton a "monster". Those are pretty strong words, even if she assumed it would be off the record.

This is a two edged sword for Clinton: by making the "monster" remark an issue, she is also replicating the meme which will spread among the electorate and plant seeds of doubt. The backlash to the "monster" remark will come mostly from folks who already support her. Her best response was to shut up about it and go on with her negative campaigning.

For Obama, as suggested above, he probably has to remove Powers from any active role in the campaign. But also as suggested upstairs, he should also hit back and demand Wolfson's resignation for comparing Obama to Bill's nemesis Ken Starr. This will have the effect of hitting back at the same time reminding people about Bill's abundant failings.

By the way, why would the Clinton campaign want to remind everyone about the Bill and Monica follies? Strange.

nobody cares what you think IS EXCELLENT NEWS!!! FOR HILLARY!!!!

A lawyer in a predominantly Democratic suburb of Cleveland relates this tale to The Swamp on the day before the all-important Ohio primary:

So last night around dinner time, the phone rings. It’s the Hillary campaign–official number, per the caller ID. The woman on the other end asks me if Hillary can count on my support Tuesday. I say I have not decided.

She asks what would help me decide. I say, “Well . . . maybe she can make Bill her vice president.” She does not know how to take me, of course, but has to assume I am serious. “I don’t think she can do that.” “Bill will have a significant role in major decisions, though, won’t he?” I ask. “Oh, certainly he will be very involved. Do you like Bill?” “Very much.” I reply.

She then launches into a two-minute spiel on all the very specific initiatives and proposals Hillary has put forth on health care, the war in Iraq, etc., etc. At the end of her spiel, she says, “And we haven’t heard anything that specific from Osama bin Laden.”

I say, “You did not just say that.” She replies, “I’m sorry . . . just a slip of the tongue.” She then thanks me for my time and encourages me to vote for Hillary on Tuesday.

The lawyer says he was "stunned" and tells The Swamp the call originated from the Clinton campaign in Columbus. Are the dirty tricks ramping up as we get down to the wire? Swamp readers in Ohio and Texas, relate your own encounters with the Clinton or Obama campaigns if you've had them.

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/03/did_i_say_osama_i_meant_obama.html

"been very clear to my campaign. I do not want to see research that is involved in trying to tear people down personally. If I find out that somebody is doing that, they will be fired. And I have been absolutely crystal clear about this, and I have been clear about this for a very long time."

Obama has an out - he can say Power didn't do any research to show Clinton is a monster.

OMG! Grow the F*ck up. HRC's campaign has leveled every insult possible at him and one person calls her a name (that a lot of people agree with) and they want her fired? SHUT UP. You people are juvenile and embarrassing..no damned wonder there is such a thing as Clinton fatigue.

Obama needs to put his foot down tell Hillary that he doesn't need her input on how to manage his campaign.

Using that logic she should fire Bill for his offensive comments; then she should fire herself for her own.

One thing is clear - the people saying the Dem primary should go for as long as it takes were seriously deluded. With every passing day, John McCain is closer to being the next President of the United States. Thanks, Hillary.

So I guess they are also suggesting Wolfson should be fired for calling Obama Ken Starr & Karl Rove? Those are far more slanderous names than "monster."

Obama's best response:

"I denounce and reject the notion that Hillary Clinton is a monster. She is not a monster as far as I know..."

When will the MSM fully vet the Clintons?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/09/wus609.xml

It was a metaphor, kind of like "commander-in-chief" threshold.

Ah. The Clinton's must be back.

All of America must be dragged into whatever Clintonian drama and trumped up OUTRAGE is on the agenda.

It's ALL about THEM.

How ARE Chelsea and Bill FEELING today? Are they ok? Is Hillary headed for another screaming melt-down? Can I get them a pillow? Better,can I get them a therapist?

I have Clinton fatigue already. Please, spare us the histrionics, Team Clinton. Getting sucked into another 8 year self-indulgent melodrama is NOT in the best interest of the United States.

I could see Power stepping aside on her own to minimize the distraction associated with this non-story. I don't think she should and I sincerely hope really that she doesn't.

Campaigning is all about slapping your opponent in the face and then saying, "Gee, I'm sorry about that." With the apology the Obama camp's side of the street is clean--no need to offer up meat for the lions.

This is where BO needs to stand up and knock this story down. The HRC camp lofted up this BS demand, and it is perfect opportunity for BO to hit it out of the park. "You want to worry about your image? Fine, I'll worry about getting the American people affordable health care. You want play tit-for-tat school yard name calling games? Go ahead, I'll be getting us out of Iraq." and so on. No parsing of worried, no apologizes (let Sarah apologize for her own words, which she did), and move on.

The problem with firing her over the term "monster" is that the term doesn't involve any demagoguery, hate speech, sexism, or really anything particularly nefarious. It certainly doesn't seem to rise to any sort of significant threshold; it seems too broad and ineffective to be construed as slander or libel. It's a woefully stupid thing to say to a reporter but it's not pointed enough to be a slur or an insult.

Really Hillary's just trying to throw her weight around, and see if she can make hay of this, but that doesn't mean she should get her way. In this way it's like the NAFTA issue. It was Hillary's campaign that actually contacted the Canadians but she was able to make that issue stick to Obama by pulling the Rovian move of preemptively attacking your opponent for things you could be accused of. If she can get Obama's campaign to fire Powers it's just another notch in her belt, but it's not something that there's any ethical need for.

I don't think he should fire her, or make her step aside or whatever. It would be a sign of weakness, and that is what Hillary want to show. She apologized, he answered, good bye. All the argument that Hillary is putting forward when she is siding with McCain is we are the tough ones. If Obama flinches now he is done. PA is coming. One good thing he has going for him is that now the hypocrisy of her campaign about NAFTA is out. His campaign can say to PA workers:"She duped the workers in OH, is she gonna do the same to you?"
I know that this is not the politics we wanna live, but right now is not Obama's choice, one thing is to be a good man, other very different is to be a weak man. People do not wanna see a weak one.

Obama should fire Power when Hillary fires Bill, Wolfson, and Penn.

Hillary: "she, she called me a monster!"

Hillary: "Senator Obama, you're not going to put with this aren't you? Fire her"

Hillary Clinton for President

Let me get this straight:

1. They want Obama to fire an adviser because she called Hillary a monster.

2. Hillary was ok with her husband screwing everything that moved before and during his presidency.

OK, got it.

And by the way, Greg Sargent, this isn't some "serious hardball." This is typical politics from the Clinton camp. Vilify your opponent day after day, then call foul when you don't like it coming back to you.

I am so very conflicted by these recent developments. On the one hand, I'd like to hear BO tell HRC to go "stick it". On the other hand, I am coming to see that argument that HRC will pound this issue into the ground and thusly negate BO's chances. Ultimately, I would like to see him taking a more decisive stance against Hillary's sheinagans (sp).

All this shite is getting real tiresome as of late.

She is over reaching. This is like South Carolina all over again. The win something. The get all excited. They go negative. They turn off independents and they lose big. See what the story is on Wednesday when Obama has netted twice as many delegates in the week since then she did last Tuesday.

The Obama campaign should fire Sam Powers when the Clinton campaign fires Penn and every other idiot who insulted the "second class citizens" of the states that don't matter.

HOLY CATS!! YAHOO IS REPORTING HILLARY MAY BE BOWING OUT ON IT'S FRONT PAGE.

4th headline for some No one else is confirming, but check out the 4th headline right now!!!!!!!

Monster? Please! Sure, she’s a liar, a back-stabber, and a corrupt politician with a lust for the power that “corrupts absolutely”. But she couldn’t take on, like, Godzilla or something. She’d get squished like a toad.

We should be more precise in our descriptions of her. That way, we won’t have to apologize and we can all keep our jobs.

>>>>>All Ms. Power has to do is say that, as far as she knows, Hilliary is not really a monster>>>>

That's good.

My first question is: who the hell annointed Hillary with the power to go around, having reporters and campaign advisors fired, whenever her wrath has been incurred?

Secondly: if Obama actually does fire her on demand, he's toast. His supporters demand a candidate who will stand up to attacks. Capitulation to the Hillary camp will cost him all his base support, and his mo. Let's hope that "change" really does mean no longer going after the vanilla vote.

Finally, I disagree with David Kurtz on this one. This "problem" the Obama camp now has is a fantastic problem, a gift from God, if you will.

Consider: Obama does nothing further; Wolfson/Penn/Clinton keep hammering and hammering and hammering that "YOU NEED TO FIRE THE ADVISOR WHO CALLED HILLARY A 'MONSTER'!"

"Monster... Hillary... monster... Hillary..."

Say it again. And again. Yeah, just keep doing that.

Get it, yet?

Hell no he shouldn't fire her. Saying that you think someone is a "monster" is obviously a statement of opinion. Intimating that someone is a drug dealer is an attempt to enter into the factual record a dubious claim. She apologized and I think that should be the end of it. He should just ignore the Clinton folks if they try to hammer this over the next couple of days. I really think most people could not care less about this. If the Clinton people won't let this issue go it will eventually just make them look petty, if it hasn't already.

No freaking way do you let go someone with the mind of Samantha Power. Those of you Obama supporters that think that highmindedness is going to work against this snake in the grass, nasty harridan named Shrillary Clinto-Lieberman, really need to lay off the hard stuff. You think who advises someone matters?

Perhaps you should win a Pulitzer or teach at the Kennedy School at Harvard before you cast aspersions at Samantha Power. None of us are nearly as worthy and she didn't utter a single untrue word. Everybody already knows that Shrillary will do or say anything to win an election. I'm surprised that you namby pambies haven't noticed the perfect Rovian trap that Shrillary has laid before Obama.

athenian stranger, that was really mean! I was hoping against hope that when I went to Yahoo news, what you wrote would be true!

Well it's a moot point now, she has.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080307/ap_on_el_pr/obama_adviser_5;_ylt=AtARGOHBcWGPUBXFQTlarklh24cA

You can't have official (or even unofficial) advisers making ad hominem attacks when speaking even off the record ("official" means coming out of or acting on behalf of someone's office). It reflects badly on you; it's the kind of thing that people remember ("aren't those Obama people so insulting?!"); and it takes the focus off policy and onto personalities. Obama can't afford to look weak or vacillating. He has already drawn a line in the sand and now he has to act decisively -- like a leader.

Are you happy now, mOnStEr? She resigned for you, mOnStEr. All for you.

Now mOnStEr, will you please resign from the Senate after your disasterous vote for war in Iraq? I doubt very seriously your robotic arms can keep out the blood that has been spilled upon your hands.

Crap - she just resigned. I think it is good to get rid of this as a story but I think she was a really good advisor otherwise. Maybe she can still find a way to help.

WHY isn't there outrage over Clinton's BIG NAFTRA LIE? None of the MSM I watched this morning covered that AT ALL. What is going on here? That outrageous deception in all probability tampered the results of the election.
Why is she skating along unaccountable for this?

It is very apparent the "fix" is in place.
She has been annointed the nominee, and there is not a damn thing any of us can do about it!

Hillary Clinton and all of her co-conspirators, including those in the media ARE dispicable monsters. It's going to be their way or the highway and we better get used to it.

Clinton is the new Karl Rove.
I guess the November election will be a choice between the lesser of two evils. I haven't decided if I will sit it out or vote for her buddy McCain. Either way, we have at least four more years of George W. Bush.

Depressing, to say the least.

And she's resigned. It was probably a necessary move because you know Hillary wouldn't stop bitching about it and, hell, after he's the nominee he can bring her back. But it's unfortunate.

Ohio Guy has it right >>I think right now the best thing for Obama to do is to let Hillary continue to rant about it. She never seems to have enough sense of proportion to know when she's gone too far with a point that started out to be legitimate.

An impulsive (and frankly rather insignificant) mistake was made and immediately apologized for -- end of story. Frankly, I would be disappointed in Sen. Obama if he wasted one more second on this matter: HE (although apparently not the Clinton campaign) has more important things to do.

And if she reacts like this to a mere word, can you bear to THINK about what she would do if subjected to the villification from nuts and foreign leaders that every President gets???? I tell you: elect Clinton and we're going to wind up longing for the half-way civil and decorous days when George W Bush was in the White House. I am NOT kidding!!

Just let her keep howling. She looks far more stupid doing so than any amount of name-calling by someone else could achieve.

Clinton just seems tone deaf on this one. Wouldn't the better response have been to say something like, "I recognize that when you're young and excited about participating in your first national campaign, you say things that you later regret. I'm sure she didn't mean it." Take the high road and suggest youth and inexperience . . . .

I'm disappointed in Obama because by quickly capitulating to the Clinton team's rabid demands, he makes himself look weak and plays into their hands. Samantha Power is a brilliant scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner. She's been thrown under the bus because of an offhand remark. He should have said something to the effect of: "Samantha Power shouldn't have said that, she's apologized, and in my campaign we recognize that people get stressed out and make unfortunate, off-the-cuff remarks. I think everyone has made a mistake like this before, and I'd ask the Clinton campaign to accept her sincere apologies, and let's move on and talk about the issues."
If he had said that and the Clinton people had kept it up they'd have started looking petty pretty damn quickly. Is he gonna run every time something negative comes up? He should have stood his ground and stood by one of his closest advisers.

First it was "Fire Shuster!" now this. (BTW, her apparent initiating of the whole "working the refs" angle by going after Shuster reminded me of how Bush Sr. went after Dan Rather on-air during his '88 campaign. Same petty, opportunistic bullying B.S. My wild guess is that the advice to target Shuster came from Bill who, in turn, got it from H.W.)

As for Clinton's call for Obama to fire Samantha Power and that his decision whether or not to do so somehow amounts to some "test of character," puh-leeease. What Power said, although highly subjective, was neither inaccurate nor was it terribly offensive, IMHO. Granted it wasn't circumspect, but compared to the Clinton campaign's recent mudslinging and, in the case of the whole Machiavellian Canada NAFTA-gate hullabaloo, outright dirty tricks, that "monster" comment was trivial.

If Hillary wants to cry "intemperate," I'll give her intemperate. Her futilely rapacious Wile E. Coyote bid for the nomination has ceased to be a campaign and has instead morphed into the political equivalent of a yeast infection, one which will not merely irritate but also compromise the health of the party going forward.

There, I said it, and admittedly in the same petty and ineffectual tone we've heard from Clinton and her surrogates time and again. Of course I recognize that more inflammatory language won't solve the problem of this campaign's runaway negativity. But hey, if Clinton's going to whine about intemperance, let's at least have an accurate calibration.

Perhaps now her campaign would like to have me banned from the internets. Whiners.

BRILLIANT.

The question here is "how does this look to senior party members who will eventually have the final say regarding the nominee??" The answer: Obama acts swiftly and decisively in accepting the resignation, indicating that negative campaigning will not be tolerated.

Samantha Power was touted by some as a potential member of the Obama cabinet. Her recent comments are inconsequential, at least compared to what she has said about the Middle East conflict.

Power, being interviewed at Berkeley (4/29/02):

Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine - Israel problem, let's say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?

I don't think that in any of the cases, a shortage of information is the problem. I actually think in the Palestine - Israel situation, there's an abundance of information. What we don't need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing -- or investing, I think, more than sacrificing -- billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you're serious, you have to put something on the line.
Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It's a terrible thing to do, it's fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don't just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It's essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Freidman has called "Sharafat." I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention, which, very much like the Rwanda scenario, that thought experiment, if we had intervened early.... Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.

"Personal attacks are not the way to convince voters that you're capable of being president of the United States," New York Rep. Nita Lowey

Ever notice how each time Hillary pulls off an upset, she is attacked with personal comments as was done after New Hampshire when she was accused of cry baby and whiner.

Now she wins Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island and Obama supporters call her a "monster".

We can expect some more personal attacks after Penn. I suppose.

I think it says something about the mentality of the Obama crowd, overall.

Rae