The Corruptions of Power

LESS THAN 100 hours before 2008’s critical Super Tuesday vote, Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, stared plaintively into the eyes of Armenian-American YouTube viewers and delivered a heartfelt testimonial to a “true friend of the Armenian people,” Barack Obama. Past presidents have shied away, she said, from the “sometimes hard truth telling” of calling the Armenian genocide a “genocide.” But not the junior senator from Illinois, as evidenced by his “very forthright statement on the Armenian genocide, his support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later, his willingness as president to commemorate it.”

Fourteen months after Power’s promise, Obama finally got his big chance to deliver. And he whiffed. “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that