I know there's a lot of things wrong with the OP: there's still a possibility that in some twisted way Obama's spyings are legal, whereas Nixon's clearly aren't, etc.. But I do find the idea provocative. I really never understood the Obama-mania in the US. I can understand that people vote for him, but I really can't get excited about this guy as I could for a ... say ... Bill Clinton. I guess I hope that after Snowden we can all agree that Obama is not the messiah and that we're all going to just move on with our lives as if a fairly ordinary person is in the White House.

"I really never understood the Obama-mania in the US."

Well, as I was there when it happened... ;)

I'd say it was part "Hooray-Bush-Is-Gone!!!" mania, part "Yes-A-Black-President-MLK-4EVAR!!!" mania, and part "This-Guy's-Just-Damn-Charismatic."

I'd say, for 2008, all three were valid...

Even some Republicans were glad to see Bush go...
It WAS pretty inspiring that barely 40 years after MLK we had this big step forward...
And then...

Well, even now at times Obama shows off his charisma.

Not as much as he did earlier in his presidency, he's been roughed up and the job's worn on him...

But given both how young and how "new" he felt coming in, just to speak for myself...

I thought he had sort of a Kennedy-vibe when he took office that way, an out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new sort of approach that was just mirrored in a better-than-Hollywood way in his being the first black president while replacing an old, stodgy, unpopular white man, and a Southerner to boot (a young black man beating what one could perceive to be the stereotype of the rich white Southern conservative...again, if you scripted that, no one would ever believe it.)

Even then I knew he wouldn't turn things to gold overnight...or live up to the loftiest of his high-high-HIGH expectations...

But still, I thought things would change for the better--and if I'm to be honest, while there's been some definite bad that's come with Obama, especially recently, I DO think he's an improvement overall over Bush (again, at least until recently he was definitely ahead...now he's starting to slip, and we'll see if he recovers or he's, shall we say, "Bushwhacked" during the 2016 campaign and on his way out the way Dubya was kicked to the curb.)

I'm surprised you don't get it redhouse. When the Republicans are in power and do something wrong, Republicans will defend them and Democrats will attack them, and vice versa. See how Democrats make apologies for Obama while attacking Bush over similar actions. Imagine the shit Bush would have got if he instituted the no fly zone over Libya.

Meh. I do get it, but it's good to have a little debate out.
I understand the enthusiasm about a black person being able to become President, I understand the happiness about ousting Bush, it's just that I wonder why the morning after election night everybody just didn't wake up and say "okay, what's next."

^Oh, no, I'm not letting that stand...

Given Ghaddafi's actions, I'd have been OK with the no fly zone...

..the same way I was OK with the INITIAL invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam.

It was the staying for years and years under first the false pretense/falty intel of WMDs and then just the staying itself that put me off as a Democrat.

Daddy got it right--a one-month war, the Gulf War was relatively popular at the time...

Dubya made the mistake of getting bogged down in the place and turning it into Vietnam Part II rather "The Glorious Little War" the Spanish-American War was and is seen as.

A short war?
Americans love it!
A long war?
We'd BETTER win, and clearly win, and be fighting Hitler or something...

Or else we tend to hate that, especially in the age of mass media.

I do want to point out some of this spying went all the way back to Bush's years as well. And really Watergate could never happen now. The journalists would of been branded traitor and punished.

I respect that, Celtic, but I think there comes a point when you have to start taking responsibility for what happens under your watch rather than say "it all started under Bush". I just hate Obama for the most recent revelation in Der Spiegel for having spied on the European Union's office in Washington DC. Particularly the ferocity with which the Obama administration has criticized countries like China for fighting a cyber-war: this kind of revelation doesn't help.

PS I know how much the US craves having more friends in the world, but when it comes to the more powerful nations, the EU is all America has.

I have to ask, redhouse:

Isn't it possible the EU's spying on D.C. as well, and just hasn't been caught?

After all, what better way to keep friends "friends" than to keep a close eye on them?

Again not condoning it, just trying to see it from the point of view of the folks who see us as mere units in their great big game of real-life Diplomacy. :)

In answer to the original question, the "centre ground" in mainstream US politics has moved considerably since Nixon's time. If Nixon did what he did now, he wouldn't be forced to resign, and if Obama did what he's doing back then he would have been forced to resign.

@obiwan

That would assume that a coherent foreign policy and service of the EU exists, which is sadly not the case, unless the ineptitude is really a clever disguise.

@obi, for the response see Pepijn.
@mendax, thanks that's very interesting, I believe we should explore that further
@Pepijn, are you Dutch? Pepijn sounds Dutch :)

The difference between Watergate and the NSA revelations is the Obama and Bush before him have not used the NSA spying for political gain, while the Watergate break-in was part of a wider strategy for Nixon to win the 1972 election. Now, there's really nothing much stopping the NSA programs from being abused, but there's no evidence that it's happened yet. And that's the difference.

"If Nixon did what he did now, he wouldn't be forced to resign, and if Obama did what he's doing back then he would have been forced to resign."

Not true. If top top aids in the Obama White House planned a break-in of the GOP headquarters and the president knew about it all along then Obama would totally be impeached and have to resign in order to keep his pension and other benefits (which is what Nixon did). The technology simply didn't exist for Nixon to get the metadata for most phone calls on Earth and obviously not for PRISM, so applying the scenario to him is a waste of time.

what about the tea-party-group-tax thing?

Obama didn't know. I'll bet anything people in the IRS were totally doing it to actively help him win reelection, but that's just because they supported him politically not because he was telling them to do it. After Watergate no one would be so stupid as to have any kind of dirty tricks reach the president or candidate in any way, and given the high stakes no one would be stupid enough not to pull a few, either. Both sides.

Obama does seem to get the benefit of the doubt much more easily than Nixon did.

I hate the IRS bullshit as much as the next person, but it's not equivalent to Watergate. Watergate had recordings of Nixon meeting with the perpetrators to discuss the spying. There's no equivalent smoking gun for Obama... and while mendax is right about the shift in the middle ground, I would honestly be surprised if, were such a smoking gun discovered, Obama wouldn't be in deep shit and given a Nixon treatment.

"Obama does seem to get the benefit of the doubt much more easily than Nixon did."

You might as well say he got the benefit of the doubt more easily than Truman or Grant. Nixon left office 39 years ago. It was a totally different world.

@PE did the authorities in charge of such a procedure pursue a link between the IRS and the President as ferociously as the authorities back then pursued Nixon? It's not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know and am genuinely curious.
@Invictus I disagree. Today we are much more suspicious of authority by default than we were when going back further in history.

Basically, the feeling I have is that the outrage over PRISM is really just that: outrage. It strangely seems to coincide with what we're seeing in much of the islamic world: venting outrage and placing blame seems to interest people more than forming a coherent movement that changes something. How do people here see that?

@Invictus ... what did Truman and Grant do?

@PE ... the GOP has gone back and forth on the whole IRS thing anyway. They can't seem to back up their claim. Until they do, there's no real case against the President anyway.

@redhouse ... you probably don't know a ton about Americans and their methods of protesting, but for the most part, Americans are more than content to go on Facebook, hit a thumbs-up button to a post that suggests their views about the government, or sign an online petition to the White House, or maybe even *gasp* blog about how horrible the government is to them. Unlike pretty much any country in Europe, we never have mass protests because people are content to protest behind the protective walls of their homes. And, of course, we still expect that the government would have some kind of regard for us.

I can't explain why it is that way, but that's how it's been my whole life and that's how it's been since the Civil Rights Movement era. I guess that and the Latino protests in the same time frame were basically the end of coherent protest movements in America, and I'm sure the government is thrilled about that.

I can imagine the government is.

Bitch, please. Nixon resigned at a time when people still got into distress over Communist spying organizations. The paranoia still hadn't died down, and since the American people are too dumb to differentiate between degrees of espionage, there was no way he could have stayed as President. All of the outrage over recent invasions of privacy are just leftover feelings from the Cold War and the burdened fears of infiltration. And Lord knows, that if the president was doing some shady stuff, there's no telling where it would end. Like PE said, there's no smoking gun, Obama's ain't no crook. But the outrage we're feeling is just the Conservative media fighting back after years of taking a beating from the scandals. Don't believe me, just ask Herman Cain.

Another thing is that Obama is too well-liked to suffer if something like this backfired. People almost ignored the Iran-Contra with Reagan, people almost ignored the extra-marital affairs with Kennedy, people almost ignored the anti-semitism from FDR. Oh yeah, there's a reason why nobody knows about that...

Regardless, Obama can do whatever the hell he wants. He's Commander in Chief. He can do anything short of remotely executing American citizens on American soil. Even if he is masterminding the whole thing (even though, his advisers would probably have much more control over it all than he does), can't the government do a little spying? The NSA scandal has almost completely blownover, and you know why? Because people don't care all that much. Security of information doesn't seem as important to a generation who's life story is plastered over every social media page they ever visit. The world is ready for these kind of things, or at least America is.

The problem with this current course of spying (and if we're getting into it, torture and extraordinary rendition) is that when it was done before it was disavowed. If you were caught you were left to the wolves. Under Bush and furthered under Obama it's become part of normal security policy. It's stopped being that dirty little secret and started being the key component of how we treat what the state declares enemies (or at least presumed enemies until they can be proven to be civilians after the fact)

How is a two term President "ousted"? Obama didn't beat Bush, term limits meant he couldn't run again.

Obama beat McCain and Romney
neither of them are from the south (unless you count McCain being born in the Panama Canal Zone, but I doubt that was what you meant Obi ;-)

I believe part of the IRS thing was the Republican who started screaming about it just happened to omit all the liberal groups who were targeted as well.

The tea party was one of a number of groups that had to deal with IRS audits. Meanwhile, Occupy movements were pepper sprayed. It's pretty clear which is the bigger abuse of power here.