Politico:
Revelations about the Obama administration’s expansive domestic surveillance programs have opened a chasm between Democratic elected officials and their progressive base — one that could be tricky for the party’s future presidential hopefuls to bridge.
Have Democratic voters become more accepting of surveillance tactics after blasting them during the Bush administration? Or could this become the 2016 version of the 2008 Democratic Party brawl over who voted for the Iraq War, a debate that helped sink Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and elect Barack Obama? It is too soon to say.
But there are certainly echoes of that messy fight about whether Democrats were too close to President George W. Bush’s signature doctrine. In this case, it could turn out to be a disadvantage to have been inside the administration that conducted the phone and email surveillance, as opposed to outside it.
And in a politically peculiar moment — in which liberal icons like Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, up for reelection next year in a purple state, have loudly endorsed the National Security Agency tactics — the issue creates a vacuum into which a candidate on the left end of the spectrum could step into the 2016 fight.
“It’s more of a problem for progressives than it is for conservatives,” said Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation, adding later, “There’s less of a conflict if you’re a conservative.”
Both Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, having served in the Obama administration, could face a backlash from a war-weary party base. Clinton in particular has experience with outrage from progressives over her initially hawkish stand on the Iraq War. Her carefully calibrated walkback of her vote authorizing the war left many voters in the 2008 primaries viewing her as calculated.
Aides to Clinton and Biden declined to respond to emails about this issue. If Clinton runs and remains the prohibitive front-runner for her party’s nomination, the debate over where the Democratic Party should stand on the question of civil liberties and security might be short-lived. At minimum, though, it’s another issue that Clinton — who laid her policy interests out at the Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago last week — may be forced to weigh in on sooner than she would have preferred.
Indeed, the darling of the progressive left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), may be the only person who could easily thread the needle on this issue, having come to Congress just this year (her aides insist she is not running for president). But she — like most prominent Democratic elected officials — has had a muted response to the NSA, suggesting she’s waiting to see how it plays out.
Still, the atmosphere created by the NSA’s tactics could be ripe for a new figure on the left — if not Warren, then perhaps a Democratic primary challenger to a sitting senator. The goal wouldn’t necessarily have to be winning an election but using the campaign as a launchpad to become a progressive icon.
