AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been talked about as a possible secretary of state if Barack Obama were to become president.
SAMANTHA POWER: By people who know absolutely nothing about our campaign, but, I mean, I don’t know if that’s—how to even take that, but there’s no chance of that. But—
AMY GOODMAN: Of Barack Obama becoming president or you becoming secretary of state?
SAMANTHA POWER: Right, no. Hillary’s got her sound bite for the interview: “Adviser says no chance of Obama becoming president.” No, I hope—we are all guarding against what Obama calls our Iowa heads. You know, we can’t get big heads. We can’t get Iowa heads. So, in terms of whether Obama can become president, it’s literally one precinct at a time right now.
But I’ve never thought about going into government, never thought about getting into politics. And when I met Obama in 2005 just actually at a meeting to talk about how to fix American foreign policy, he read A Problem from Hell and just wanted to discuss what the components of a tough, smart and humane foreign policy that would be not just a critique of Bush, but an alternative, would be, and we were supposed to meet for an hour, and an hour gave ways to a second hour and a third hour and a fourth. As we entered our fourth hour, I heard myself saying, “Why don’t I quit my job at Harvard and come and intern in your office?” And so, I’ve been blown away by him from start to finish. I don’t have any aspiration to go into government, but I do—I would like to do anything I can going forward to help Obama. So if that means going into government, I suppose that’s what it’s going to require, but believe me, he—it’s not obvious to me that that would be something he would want. But, you know, I think if we’re all talking about how we need to share the sacrifice and respond to the call to service, it would be a little hypocritical to continue to sound off in my column and write books and so forth. And I think you sort of have to put your money where your mouth is at some point. So—
AMY GOODMAN: So that’s a yes?
SAMANTHA POWER: It’s a yes to a question that’s never been asked to me, never would be asked, I suppose.
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