Obama aide forced out for calling Clinton ‘a monster’

The battle for the Democratic presidential nomination took a sharp turn away from the hunt for delegates this morning after an advisor to Barack Obama was forced to quit the campaign for making disparaging remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Samantha Power, a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, was quoted in a Scottish newspaper calling Clinton “a monster” who would do anything to win the presidency.

The campaign, which had earlier distanced itself from Power, this morning announced that she had resigned.

“With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an advisor to the Obama campaign, effective today,” Power stated.

“I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Sen. Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Sen. Clinton, Sen. Obama, and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months,” she said.

Power, who did not return e-mails or telephone calls, made the comments in a London interview as part of a book tour.

In the especially heated race for the nomination, where Clinton and Obama are about 100 delegate votes apart, the kerfuffle took on a life of its own, fueled by the Clinton campaign. In a conference call for the media, some Clinton supporters attacked the comments and called for Power’s resignation.

Within hours, the campaign said she was gone.

Power, the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, is the noted author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New Republic Books), which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. She is a widely known and respected journalist, having covered civil wars and humanitarian crises across the globe.

Touring to support her latest book, “Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World” (Penguin Press, 2008), a biography of the U.N. envoy killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2003, Power told the Scotsman that the Obama camp was disappointed with Clinton’s win in Ohio, one of three primary victories that revived the New York senator’s campaign this week.

“We f—— up in Ohio,” Power said in the interview posted on the newspaper’s website. “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,” Power said, 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.”

michael.muskal@latimes.com

maria.laganga@latimes.com