Barack Obama seeks to usher in a new kind of politics. His stump speech calls on supporters to help him “end the politics of fear,” and borrowing from John F. Kennedy, “that we should never fear to negotiate.” Now in a one-on-one battle with Hillary Clinton for the nomination, Obama has been forced to the defensive, searching for an effective way to fight back.

Hillary Clinton has persisted with her claim that Obama is less prepared than she and John McCain for the “3am phone call” that will come as President. But the Obama campaign is built upon positive ideals–the candidate could tarnish his image, should he go negative. The answer: send out the surrogates, particularly those who can vouch for national security credentials, to convey the message.

The Obama campaign had two of its most high-profile foreign policy advisors, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, grant a series of interviews with the press. They tried to send the message that, in their views, Senator Obama was equally, if not more qualified for that middle-of-the-night phone call than his opponents.

In one of these interviews, Samantha Power let it slip in what she thought was an off-the-record comment to The Scotsman that she thought Hillary Clinton had been a “monster” during the campaign. Ms. Power, a prominent scholar and advocate for US involvement in Darfur, quickly apologized and resigned from her post with the campaign. She issued a number of apologies to Senator Clinton, most of them equally as poignant as this:

Susan Rice took her turn speaking with the press this week, as she responded to Senator Clinton's characterization of Obama's in ability to handle the 3am phone call. On Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC, Ms. Rice announced that she believed neither Clinton nor Obama have substantial national security experience.

As Samantha Power pointed out, she is a relative novice to the tires of a political campaign. Ms. Rice, while not new to the Washington and foreign policy arenas, also made a slight error in her comments on television. Both have created nominal headaches for the Obama campaign, and failed to accomplish their objective. Instead, they made the candidate seem to be just what he had intended to combat: inexperienced.