From US to Burma, Obama goes global

An Irish-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Harvard professor who has been known to refer to herself as "the genocide chick" after her reporting from Rwanda and Sudan, has offered a glimpse of the near-evangelical zeal within the campaign team that has pushed Barack Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Samantha Power came to Obama's attention with the book that won her the Pulitzer for non-fiction in 2003, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. She is now a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama. "I have a friend who just came back from Burma last week," she told the Sunday Times, "and said all that anybody is talking about on the streets of Rangoon is Barack Obama."

'Obamamania', she believes, is the result of real dedication within a campaign team who believed in their man right from the off. "The only way we were going to win was to have organisers who were willing to freeze their asses off in rural Iowa when it seemed like there was going to be no political payoff. The corollary is that those who are helping Obama do so with quasi-evangelical fervour. I think Obama supporters, by and large, do not see this as mere politics. They see this as the future of the world."

Power, 37, has recently completed a biography of another man who clearly inspired those around him - Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing Brazilian United Nations diplomat who was killed in the al-Qaeda suicide attack on the UN mission in Baghdad in 2003.

Her new book, Chasing the Flame, which is published in Britain on March 6, chronicles de Mello's life as a fiercely individualistic diplomat with a reputation as a ladies' man: while his wife and family lived in Geneva, he was often accompanied by girlfriends on trips to trouble-spots. She also details his final hours trapped alive in the rubble of the Baghdad UN mission.

Power believes Obama and de Mello have something in common: "Both guys have thought more about broken people and broken places than just about anybody in public life. Most presidential candidates haven't lived in broken places. They may have interned in a broken place for the summer. This is in his [Obama's] blood."