The Scrapbook has deep reservations about the Trump era, but we’re only human—sometimes we indulge in a small chortle or two at the discomfiture his victory caused certain parties. For instance, we took way more pleasure than we probably should have in Politico’s interview last week with the Obama administration’s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, who recalled all the gory details of an ill-fated party she hosted on election night 2016.
Power invited the U.N.’s 37 female ambassadors—and special guest Gloria Steinem—to her penthouse to glory in the election returns and Hillary Clinton’s historic victory. “I thought what an amazing night for them,” she told Politico. “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.”
Heading into the evening, Power’s concern was not that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t win the election, but that she would win it, to borrow a phrase from the president, early and bigly. “As the host, I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be quite the blowout that it was anticipated to be, because I wanted to make sure that people had a chance to interact with Gloria Steinem,” she said, adding, “I wanted to milk the soft power dividend of this moment, and instead, and HBO was there [filming], I guess unfortunately or fortunately, to capture it all . . . it slowly dawn[ed] on us that not only was this going to be much closer than anybody anticipated, but that it was not going to end well.”
Footage from the party will be included in a larger HBO documentary, The Final Year, but The Scrapbook is hoping for a director’s cut focused just on this one evening, which might be the feel-good movie of the year.
Okay, that’s probably going overboard with the schadenfreude, but really, anyone who would unironically describe their party theme with the phrase “milk the soft power dividend” is asking for it. And that’s not even the worst line of the interview. Here’s how Power describes the evening: “Well, I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life, but none as immortalized as this one.”
We beg to differ. Before becoming U.N. ambassador, Power was famous for an impassioned, Pulitzer-winning book, A Problem From Hell, that excoriated Western governments for not doing more to prevent genocide. She was perhaps the world’s leading advocate of humanitarian intervention. Then she became Barack Obama’s U.N. ambassador and held her tongue while her boss blandly allowed Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to use chemical weapons on children and ultimately slaughter nearly half a million people.
She has indeed had a lot of bad ideas that will be remembered. But we doubt that her failure to ensure party guests got enough face time with Gloria Steinem even makes the list.
