Gloria Borger, CNN's chief political analyst, wonders if the Obama administration's drone program, cellphone-tapping activities and health care website glitches are affecting the president's faith in government, especially since he's such a staunch defender of bureaucracy.
Irony is a part of life, the cliché goes. And right now, President Barack Obama is living the part, in a big way: He's the civil libertarian defending an activist drone program. He's the liberal with a spy agency caught eavesdropping on the private conversations of friendly leaders. And he's the high-tech health care reformer whose website got stuck at Go.
And so the ultimate irony may be this — a President who extols the virtues of government has now been sucked into the big government vortex, experiencing (up close and personal, as they say) what it feels like to lose control to the bureaucrats. The ones who are afraid to deliver bad news, not to mention those who don't deliver the news at all. (As in, "the website crashed.") And the surveillance chiefs who, um, didn't initially volunteer that they're spying on the private phone lines of America's best friends …
But here are the larger questions that play into both the website fiasco and the NSA issues: How can a President take control of his own government? How can he make sure he knows what he needs to know? And as the pro-government cheerleader, doesn't he have a special responsibility to make sure it delivers, especially when his legacy hangs in the balance?
The problem is it's never easy to untangle a bureaucratic mess. "So you're the President, you're angry and you want to know how all of this happened," says a former senior administration official. "And the truth is, even you may not be able to figure it out. You just won't have enough time left in office." …
The final irony may be this: Four out of five Americans have little or no trust in their government to do anything right. And now Obama probably feels the same way.
Read Gloria Borger's entire piece at CNN.
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