THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY ★^1147acts posted by ISIS on social media horrified most of the world but also
attracted recruits to the organization. ISIS also sponsored terror attacks out-
side the Middle East. In 2015 over 100 persons were killed in a series of coor-
dinated attacks in Paris. A few weeks later, two followers of ISIS in the United
States killed fourteen people in San Bernardino, California. As 2015 ended, fear
of terrorism in the United States reached a point not seen since the attacks
of September 11, 2001. It remained to be seen whether the rampages of ISIS
would draw the United States into further combat in the Middle East.
Another area in which Obama continued the policies initiated during
the Bush administration’s war on terror was governmental surveillance, both
domestic and overseas. The extent of such activity became known in 2013
when Edward Snowden, a former employee of the National Security Agency,
released documents online that detailed NSA programs that monitored virtu-
ally all telephone, instant messaging, and email traffic in the United States,
tracked the location of numerous American cellphones, and spied on the pri-
vate communications of world leaders, including close allies of the United
States such as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and French president
François Hollande. The government also secretly worked with major Internet
and communications companies like AT&T and Verizon to gain access to the
private data of their users. Of course, the overwhelming majority of the people
subject to government surveillance had no connection to terrorism or to any
crime at all. The Obama administration responded by charging Snowden with
violating the Espionage Act of 1917—a law passed during the height of World
War I hysteria over security. To avoid prosecution, Snowden took up residence
in Russia. But his revelations rekindled the age- old debate over the balance
between national security and Americans’ civil liberties and offered another
example of how, whichever party is in power, the balance always seems to shift
in favor of the former. In 2015, Congress approved a measure curtailing the
government’s sweeping surveillance of phone records. But much of the gov-
ernment’s prying into Americans’ communications continued.
The Republican Resurgence
In nearly all midterm elections in American history, the party in power has
lost seats in Congress. But Democrats faced more serious difficulties than
usual in the midterm elections of 2010. Grassroots Republicans were ener-
gized by hostility to Obama’s sweeping legislative enactments. The Tea Party,
named for the Boston Tea Party of the 1770s and inspired by its opposition to
taxation by a far- away government, mobilized grassroots opposition to the
administration. The Tea Party appealed to a long- established American fear of
overbearing federal power, as well as to more recent anxieties, especially about
What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?