Could Obama’s Unlimited Faith in Himself Explain His Sudden Loss of Interest in Protecting Americans’ Privacy?

In anticipation of President Obama’s speech
tomorrow on the federal government’s surveillance programs, a
front-page story in today’s New York Times considers
how his views on the subject have
changed since he was elected. While running for the Senate in
2004, Peter Baker notes, Obama condemned the PATRIOT Act for
“violating our fundamental notions of privacy,” declaring that “we
don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries.” As a
senator in 2005, Obama continued to criticize the PATRIOT Act and
sponsored a bill aimed at raising the standard for using national
security letters to obtain business records. As a candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 2007, he gave a speech
promising that in his administration there would be “no more
illegal wiretapping of American citizens” and “no more national
security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a
crime.” After he had secured the Democratic nomination, however,
Obama voted for a bill that retroactively validated George W.
Bush’s illegal wiretapping and gave the same practices statutory
cover going forward. And once he took up residence in the White
House, all his previous concerns about the threat to privacy posed
by the national security state seemed to disappear.

Why? The more charitable explanation suggested by Baker is that
Obama suddenly realized that the national security state is all
about protecting national security. His first inkling of this came
in the form of “a supposed plot by Somali extremists to attack the
[inauguration] ceremony.” You might think the fact that the plot
proved to be bogus would reinforce Obama’s avowed skepticism about
the powers exercised in the name of fighting terrorism. But
evidently he focused instead on the fact that the erroneous warning
involved a threat to his own presidential person. He displayed a
similar narcissism in response to Edward Snowden’s revelations
about NSA surveillance. The one thing that really upset Obama,
Baker says, was learning that “the mobile phone of Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany was being tapped.” Since she is a fellow
head of state, I’m guessing, Obama can empathize with her. The rest
of us, not so much.

The less charitable (and more plausible) explanation for Obama’s
sudden loss of interest in protecting Americans’ privacy also fits
this portrait of him as a man very much impressed by himself. “He
trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush
administration,” observes Juan C. Zarate, who advised Bush
on counterterrorism policy. In case you think that Zarate’s
evaluation is tainted by partisan considerations, Baker cites
Obama’s own advisers as reporting that Obama “was surprised at the
uproar” provoked by Snowden’s revelations. “particularly that so
many Americans did not trust him.” And here is one of the people
Obama chose to serve on the advisory panel he appointed after he
realized that people really were upset about what he had
described as a “modest encroachment” that “the American people
should feel comfortable about”:

“The point we made to him was, ‘We’re not really concerned about
you, Barack, but God forbid some other guy’s in the office five
years from now and there’s another 9/11,'” said Richard A. Clarke,
a former White House counterterrorism adviser who served on the
panel. He had to “lay down some roadblocks in addition to what we
have now so that once you’re gone it’ll be harder” to abuse spying
abilities.

In other words, Obama, convinced of his own benevolence and
infallibility, has no qualms about wielding these powers. But the
thought that a Republican might one day wield them (which
evidently had never occurred to him before) does give him pause.
(On The Independents recently, a conservative
panelist expressed exactly the opposite view: that Bush could ber
trusted with these powers, but not Obama.) Obama’s unlimited
faith in himself clearly colors the way he analyzes the questions
raised by the NSA’s snooping:

Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser working
on Friday’s speech, said Mr. Obama saw the issue as two separate
questions—abuse of government power and extent of government
power.

Many of us who are not the president would suggest that limiting
the extent of government power is the most effective way to prevent
its abuse, precisely because of its tendency to corrupt those who
wield it.