[Tapper:] Welcome back to THE LEAD. We're going to continue with the national lead. President Obama did address somebody that may be in hiding thousands of miles away, but he still cast a long shadow over today's news conference. Of course, I'm referring to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
[Obama:] And as a consequence of these disclosures, we've got countries who actually do the things that Mr. Snowden says he's worried about very explicitly, engaging in surveillance of their own citizens, targeting political dissidents, targeting and suppressing the press, who somehow are able to sit on the sidelines and act as if it's the United States that has problems when it comes to surveillance and intelligence operations.
[Tapper:] I want to welcome back our panel, Van Jones, Kevin Madden, Susan Page. The NSA surveillance program, some people think it's so hard to figure out when things started to go wrong for President Obama but some people think it started to go wrong with this disclosure of the NSA programs because, especially for progressives
[Jones:] Absolutely.
[Tapper:] who thought that the president was not living up to what he promised. Can he regain that trust?
[Jones:] Well, I think so. But, listen, the termites that began to eat through his numbers, NSA. That's where the termites started. Then, the broken Web site and the broken promise, that's when he fell through. But once you have the president of the United States caught doing things that people just did not expect this president to be doing, for progressives and also, it created a weird alliance between liberals and libertarians. You had progressives and Rand Paul suddenly united against the president. That was the first time that happened. So, I think the NSA scandal is a bigger deal in terms of appearing this crash in his numbers.
[Page:] But a big opportunity, because he does need a lot of legislation to get passed. He does need to rely on Republicans in Congress to do some kind of grand bargain with him. He can figure out what the post-post-911 balance between security and privacy ought to be. He's well-positioned to do that. It's an issue he talked about even before he became president. He's seen what it's like from the inside. And I think we will hear him talk about this in a serious way in beginning of the New Year.
[Tapper:] It's interesting, Kevin, I don't I don't know yet how much the American people actually care about bulk surveillance of metadata. I don't know. I don't know how much but I feel like there was something as Van says.
[Jones:] Symbolic.
[Tapper:] There was something about he's not living up to what he said he would do type thinking, that began to
[Madden:] Right. And it was a stark I mean, the remarks he made defending it were a stark contrast to the remarks that he made criticizing it when he was a senator and a candidate. I think to Van's point also, the president did miss an opportunity here when this initial news came out. He could have forged an alliance with a lot of Republicans on a really as a really and build a really strong national security profile. Folks like John Boehner and Peter King and others that are involved in the intelligence matters up on Capitol Hill, they were just yearning for him to come out and say something very pro-actively, very bold and defend it robustly and he didn't. And what we've seen is over the last few weeks and months is just every once in awhile he gets asked about it, he says something, but then he goes back and pushes the focus somewhere else.
[Tapper:] We have only another minute but I want to get into this question about Iran. President Obama today accused his detractors of basically beating their chests on Iran.
[Barack Obama, President Of The United States:] There is no need for new sanctions legislation. Not yet. Now, if Iran comes back and says, we can't give you assurances that we're not going to weaponize, if they're not willing to address some of their capabilities that we know could end up resulting in them having breakout capacity, it's not going to be hard for us to turn the dials back, strengthen sanctions even further. I'll work with members of Congress to put even more pressure on Iran. But there's no reason to do it right now.
[Tapper:] That's a bipartisan coalition in the Senate, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman who's a Democrat from New Jersey, Robert Menendez easy for me to say that he's going after there.
[Page:] And, you know, there's another point in that clip where he said I know it looks good for you if you're running for office or in office to stand up for tougher sanctions on Iran. Pretty tough charge because there is, of course, a substantive reason that you might think sanctions against Iran were a good idea besides the politics of the moment.
[Tapper:] All right. Susan Page, Kevin Madden, Van Jones, thank you so much.
[Madden:] Great to be with you.
[Tapper:] Great discussion. Appreciate it. Coming up on THE LEAD, if you plan to start your holiday travel this weekend, you better stick around to hear what parts of the country are in for in terms of a winter weather nightmare. And later, Charlie Brown or Christmas story? Everyone has their favorite holiday flicks. But there's a controversy over what makes a movie a Christmas classic. Take your hand off that leg lamp because our pop culture lead is coming up.