Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton could face a backlash from a war-weary party base. | REUTERS Surveillance programs divide Dems

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.

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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.

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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.

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It’s still too soon to distill how the debate will play out — whether the public exhibits sustained interest in the debate about surveillance or whether whistleblower Edward Snowden has more bombshells to drop. For the time being, the president gets “the benefit of the doubt,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress.

But, she added, “people are flying a little bit blind … the general public doesn’t have information on whether these tactics have helped save lives or not.”

If there is a primary in the presidential race, several Democratic strategists said privately that they expect candidates will be pressed to explain their views on the Obama administration’s surveillance efforts. That includes candidates who as senators may have been briefed by intelligence officials on the programs — how many times they were given information, by whom and what did they learn.

( Also on POLITICO: Cheney defends NSA surveillance)

And while Obama’s supporters say there are important nuances to understand the administration’s surveillance activities — there’s oversight that didn’t exist under Bush, they say — such distinctions tend to get lost in political fights.

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“I think Democrats are ultimately going to have a hard time jumping on the side of the progressive left” on national security, said foreign policy blogger Steve Clemons. “Democrats have tried so much to rid themselves of the Vietnam taint that they couldn’t be trusted … to make national security decisions.”

Indeed, Obama ran for reelection last year as a security hawk whose administration snared Osama bin Laden.

Still, Clemons said, “It feels to some of us like there have been encroachments on rights in a lot of different directions.”

The prospective Democratic field includes governors who have had little to do with such national security decisions (Andrew Cuomo, John Hickenlooper, the fairly hawkish Martin O’Malley), but also senators who voted to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, for instance).

Voting to renew FISA may be a potential negative for senators eyeing higher office. But Clinton and Biden have an inside-the-tent perspective on the Obama White House that other prospective nominees don’t.

In 2008, Clinton spent months distancing herself from her own 2002 vote, as then-Sen. Obama, who was not in office when that vote was cast, positioned himself as the candidate of the anti-war left.

The fact that the president remains popular within his party helps. And while Clinton and Biden both denounced Bush-era domestic spying as overreaching in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was equally critical of those policies in that campaign — until he became president.

When the initial NSA disclosures were made in news outlets in the past few weeks, a 2006 interview in which Biden told CBS News that the Bush-era snooping was “very intrusive” got new traction. “I was talking about a different program then,” Biden told a pool reporter following him last weekend about then versus now. “It was a different program.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos, said he doesn’t “anticipate anything” being said by either Biden or Clinton on this front in the foreseeable future — unless issues like old interviews force the matter, and even then, only rhetorically.

“Both have presidential designs, and no president (or wannabe president) willingly gives up executive power,” Moulitsas, who has been deeply critical of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for defending the NSA programs, said in an email.

In a signal of the difficulties facing any presidential hopeful who isn’t a governor, Moulitsas added, “Rather than be outraged by this gross violation of our constitutional freedoms, Congress has, in mostly bipartisan fashion, decided to lecture us on how they are only lying to the public for its own good. I just wish we had more whistleblowers, and more U.S. companies talking about what the government is trying to make them do.”

Clinton, for her part, may face a more immediate test of her team’s ability to weather a storm in the fallout over Benghazi and criticism of her management of the State Department.

But she has left Foggy Bottom. Biden, who will serve in the White House at the same time as running a potential campaign, will have a harder time walking the line between breaking with the president and carving out his own space on an issue in which progressives believe rights have been violated, and don’t share Obama’s view that while there’s a balance to be struck, security is paramount.

Adding to uncertainty about how the surveillance issue unfolds is the fact that the coalition against such NSA tactics has featured liberal critics of Bush and libertarian voices like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

“This is not an issue,” Tanden said, “that plays in traditional ways.”