"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.

Obama's trust problems

Obama: 'Nobody is listening to your telephone calls'

Obama's call for trust, patience and near blanket secrecy is increasingly falling on deaf ears in his own party, spurring a backlash among Democrats who say it's time for the "most transparent president in history" to provide the American people with a comprehensive explanation of a secret program that dragnets most phone records and much of the Internet.

So far, Obama and his aides have resisted that call: He's intent on defending the national security powers of the presidency and simply believes that nobody alive has his unique capacity — as a chief executive and law professor — to strike the appropriate balance between civil liberties and public safety, according to people close to him.
But Obama's own allies say his day of reckoning is nigh.
"The president or his people need to be more forthcoming. … Look, we understand the need for secrecy, I get it, but the fact is we also need a lot more transparency on the process," said Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who has joined a bipartisan group of eight senators in calling on the White House to declassify legal decisions that allowed the wide-net phone and Internet surveillance revealed in bombshell stories by the U.K.-based Guardian and The Washington Post last week.

"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."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who called for a re-examination of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law on which the the surveillance is based, told MSNBC that the White House had created the system with "secret legal interpretations" and had given "the public no chance to examine it."
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.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/challenging-obama-knows-best-transparency-nsa-92624.html#ixzz2W6RijjpH