If you had asked me who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington, I probably would have said Samantha. She’d been a journalist in the Balkans and won a Pulitzer Prize in her early thirties for a book about America’s failure to prevent genocide. To my generation of liberals, she offered an alternative to the neoconservative views that dominated the debate after 9/11: She supported an interventionist America that promoted human rights and prevented atrocities, yet she’d opposed the war in Iraq, standing apart from many liberal interventionists who were co-opted by the Bush crowd.
