Many moons ago, I attended a panel discussion at Harvard's Kennedy School about the state of the War on Terror. At one point, the panel was asked whether the administration had made us safer now. Three members of the panel cautiously restated Washington conventional wisdom that there had been no subsequent attack on the scale of 9/11, so someone must be doing something right, even if no one could quite articulate who, what, where, when, or how. The fourth was Samantha Power, who stated forthrightly that the war had inflamed Arab sentiment, and made us less safe. Asked, in a follow-up, what we might do about it, she responded with the closest thing I've ever heard in person to the Dean Scream: "Obama for President! Whoooo!"

It's not often I get to accuse the author of a highly regarded book on genocide in the modern world of being naive, but come on. His record already made him out to be a good, promising guy, as far as it went --- but with no national recognition, the race factor, and numerous other, better known candidates in the race, he didn't have a chance.