http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...4.html?ml=po_r
“Trust me” is President Barack Obama’s preferred mode of action in times of crisis — and his go-to comment to nervous staffers has always been some version of “Relax, I got this.”
But that message is an increasingly hard sell for Obama in his second term, following revelations that the man who once railed against the Bush administration over civil liberties abuses has himself surreptitiously quarterbacked the greatest expansion of electronic surveillance in U.S. history.
“I’m not sure people are confident that the administration has this totally under control,” he told POLITICO. “It seems that there’s something new every day — the IRS, this — and that’s giving people lack of confidence in government. … This is the kind of stuff people used to only see in the movies, that the government can listen to everybody’s calls.”
Obama is both a constitutional law professor and a commander in chief, and those dueling identities seem to be arm-wrestling since a pair of bombshell reports that he had OK’d the collection of nearly all the country’s cell phone data and that he expanded a Bush-era program that trawled the Internet for foreign-linked terrorist activity