What has Edward Snowden done for Barack Obama? According to the President, who spoke at a press conference on Friday, all Snowden did was rush him; he was already going to look and see if “some bolts needed to be tightened up” on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs before Snowden gave any documents to the Guardian or the Washington Post. Obama just would have done it quietly, getting a few things straight. Instead, here he was, coming out with a list of proposed reforms that somehow directly touched on programs and previous lies exposed by the leaks, and being asked by Chuck Todd if he considered Snowden a patriot.

“I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot,” Obama said—quite a statement about a man he has never spoken to, and who has not yet been convicted of anything. “My preference—and I think the American people’s preference—would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws; a thoughtful, fact-based debate that would then lead us to a better place.” Maybe “Mr. Snowden’s leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response,” and without him “it would have been less exciting and it would not have generated as much press.” But absent the passion, minus the risks, Obama was sure that if he had “sat down with Congress and we had worked this thing through,” the civil-liberties concerns would have been met in the same way—sometime or other.

What, one wonders, would have been the role of the public in this “fact-based debate,” given that so many of the facts were secret? Perhaps Obama needs to assure himself that nothing Snowden revealed throws his own goodwill into question; but that is his own concern, and cannot erase the influence and importance of the N.S.A. leaks. The first of four bolt-tightening reforms on Obama’s list involved “greater oversight, greater transparency and constraints” on the use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was what the government pointed at to get Verizon to give it the records of millions of phone calls. In what passed for a public debate on this practice before Snowden’s leaks, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, lied about it in a Senate hearing. Obama’s complaint that “these leaks are released drip by drip, you know, one a week to kind of maximize attention and see if, you know, they can catch us at some imprecision on something,” was telling. Was Clapper caught in an “imprecision”?

All four of Obama’s proposed reforms are useful. The second is adding an adversary to proceedings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which has the power to approve secret warrants. Another is to assemble a committee that would issue a report about the balance between liberty and security. And then there’s a call to increase transparency. Some of this area’s elements are cosmetic—a new Web site for the N.S.A., for example, for which one hopes there is a better graphic designer than whoever puts together the agency’s classified PowerPoint presentations—and others are important but fragmentary. Obama said he’d make public the “legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215.” That is good, but legal rationales, for this and all other collection activities, are not things that should ever be fully classified in the first place. How an agency proceeds in a given case is one thing, but what it and we understand our rights to be should never be secret.

That’s also why there are press conferences, and, although Obama’s opening statement dealt only with the N.S.A., the questions ranged farther, from Obamacare to his genuine puzzlement that anyone would want to shut down the government to his hope that resurgent Russian homophobia would be countered by “some gay and lesbian athletes bringing home the gold or silver or bronze.” (“And if Russia doesn’t have gay or lesbian athletes, then that would probably make their team weaker.”) He described how sometimes, when Putin was photographed, “he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” But talking about Russia is, these days, also a conversation about Snowden, and that’s where the press conference kept returning.

Obama did concede that Snowden provided him with what seems to have been a minor revelation: “It’s not enough for me, as President, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well”:

The question is how do we make the American people more comfortable? If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes—now, granted, in the White House, I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day—[laughter]—and—and she’s a little skeptical, well, I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it.

And, he added a little later, “probably what’s a fair criticism is my assumption that if we had checks and balances from the courts and Congress, that that traditional system of checks and balances would be enough to give people assurance that these programs were run properly. You know, that assumption I think proved to be undermined by what happened after the leaks.” Did he really assume that: that the public would think that if all three branches of government were on top of it, there could be no worry for civil liberties? Perhaps what Snowden did was to remind Obama that invisible checks and balances are not quite what the Founders had in mind. As it turned out, Obama said, “I think people have questions about this program.” We do. So show us the dishes; we’ll be able to tell if they’re dirty.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty.