As Edward Snowden continues his flight from the grasping arms of the federal government, President Obama finds himself in the most unenviable position that can face an ostensibly idealistic politician.
He looks like a hypocrite.
When I made this observation in a
panel discussion last week on
HuffPost Live, moderator Josh Zepps correctly pointed out that I was in danger of begging the question. "You're presupposing that his position [on PRISM] is inherently hypocritical," he explained. "It may be that he's had a legitimate change of heart and that the boundary of where he thinks individual liberties should lie in a world where terrorists can get their hands on nukes has actually shifted more towards the security state model."
As Zepps explained, he was "all ears" to hear that case if Obama is willing to make it. While I fully agreed with that statement, I added that any presupposition about Obama's earlier position made by myself and the president's other progressive critics was entirely due to the president's own actions. As I put it at the time:
"If Obama made an alteration in his position at some point during his presidency, he should have articulated that at the time and made it clear to the American people that this was how he stood. So the perception of hypocrisy that exists, even if one's going to argue that it's rooted in a sincere shift in opinion on his part, is still his fault."
There is a lesson here for future political leaders, one that can be neatly divided into three parts:
1. Remember what you represent:
When Americans elect a leader, they are voting not merely for a resume and set of pre-stated political positions, but for a symbol. Although there were many symbolic themes
interwoven into Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, one of the most prominent was its opposition to the excesses of the post-9/11 national security state, from Guantanamo Bay and the PATRIOT Act to the Iraq War and the growth of the military-industrial complex. While Obama has taken meaningful steps toward addressing some of these problems (and deserves more credit than he receives for this),
his support of a program like PRISM betrayed the deeper principles that underlied progressive opposition to those specific issues.