**Written by Doug Powers
Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power demonstrated by way of a recent documentary and interview what happens when the trifecta of overconfidence, sanctimony and bureaucratic gobbledygook collide:
On the night of Nov. 8, 2016, Power threw a party for the 37 female diplomats at her apartment in New York City, a scene that is captured in the new HBO documentary, “The Final Year.”
Power also invited Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold the position, to the election night party, which she expected to end with Clinton’s victory.
“I thought, what an amazing night for them,” Power told Politico of the 37 female ambassadors to the U.N. “I mean, that’s what America represents to the world, when a glass ceiling is shattered in our country, it creates a whole new sense of possibility for people everywhere.”
Power said she hoped the election wouldn’t be “quite the blowout that it was anticipated to be,” as she wanted her attendees to have more time to interact with Steinem.
But instead of being a “blowout,” Power said it soon began to dawn on her guests that the election would not turn out the way they predicted, as Donald Trump began to gain on Clinton.
Power’s party started out as Woodstock and damn near turned into Jonestown in a matter of hours.
The interview with Power is nothing short of unintentionally hilarious. Seriously, who talks like this outside U.N. walls and DC seminars for career bureaucrats?
Glasser: So, your concern was that actually that the evening was going to be over early.
Power: Too soon. I wanted to milk the soft power dividend of this moment, and instead, and HBO was there, I guess unfortunately or fortunately, to capture it all, but instead, you really see what so many people went through, which was all of that sense of promise and excitement, and frankly, a dose of complacency. And then, it slowly dawning on us that not only was this going to be much closer than anybody anticipated, but that it was not going to end well.
If there’s one sentence that should sum up the Obama years in the history books, it’s “tried to milk the soft power dividend of the moment.”
**Written by Doug Powers
Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
