Hopefully, they'll succeed in getting everyone else on-board. But it won't be easy, because of the way the process works, you'll have members of either party who are invested in making sure that the state is never restricted.
Follow the money.
However, you're misconstruing my depiction of the President't role in this. Basically, my point is that ANY president's role as the facilitator of this surveillance state will surely looking bad given the way that the entire program was set up in the first place. Congress, I said, was mostly responsible for creating that structure and funding it the way it's funded.
While everyone is screaming about how Obama is a bad guy for running the a spy state, very few are understanding that, unless defunds these programs, restricts the extent to which it is contracted by private industry, gives more teeth in the laws that the FISA court is supposed to use as directives and regulate the capacity to a level much lower than it currently exist, as well as start doing all of the oversight that it should have doing in the first place, you really can't expect the White House to unilaterally shrink the size and scope of these intel dredging operations.
This problem started when all of that money was thrown out there after the creation of the Patriot Act, which facilitated a field day in contracting and capacity building, as well as the growth of bureaucracy the exists with the continuity of government in spite of political changes on the Oval Office.
Accountability should have been built into the process from the beginning, but due to Congressional negligence, they're now playing catch-up.
The President isn't most vulnerable to pressure here, presidents have the least to lose. Unless you restrict the money, rewrite the rules, strengthen the courts and keep the White House under constant oversight scrutiny, no one should be surprised when the NSA goes hog wild on a free range.
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