Obama's Appeals for Trust Increasingly Fall Flat

Because he's not trustworthy

"Trust me" is President Barack Obama's preferred mode of action in times of crisis '" and his go-to comment to nervous staffers has always been some version of "Relax, I got this."

But that message is an increasingly hard sell for Obama in his second term, following revelations that the man who once railed against the Bush administration over civil liberties abuses has himself surreptitiously quarterbacked the greatest expansion of electronic surveillance in U.S. history.

Obama's call for trust, patience and near blanket secrecy is increasingly falling on deaf ears in his own party, spurring a backlash among Democrats who say it's time for the "most transparent president in history" to provide the American people with a comprehensive explanation of a secret program that dragnets most phone records and much of the Internet.