RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the American people, the world and official Washington continue to unravel the mystery named Barack Obama, a key clue may be found in the booing of Nancy Pelosi—from the Left.

The former House Speaker was booed, shrieked at and vilified for remarks she made last weekend to Netroots Nation, the progressive activists’ convention.

Ms. Pelosi spoke to the convention about Edward Snowden, whose theft of NSA computer data has taken him to China and now Russia. To her credit, Nancy Pelosi told them what they didn’t want to hear:

“I know some of you attribute heroic status to that action, but you don’t have the responsibility for the security of the United States. Those of us who do have to strike a different balance.” She said Edward Snowden had clearly broken the law.

At this, the full-time American Left went ballistic with boos.

“Leave him alone,” they shouted. “Secrets and lies!” And the ultimate articulation of rejection: “You suck!”

The Netroots Nation Democrats reined in their political compulsions in 2008 and won the presidency for Barack Obama—and for themselves. They defeated the Clinton machine, and now they own the party. But as the boos and bile washed over her, Nancy Pelosi surely saw the long-buried ghosts of her party’s past breaking out of their crypts.

Ms. Pelosi may be a proud Democrat from San Francisco, but she remembers what the phrase “San Francisco Democrat” did to the party in 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by winning 49 states.

“San Francisco Democrat” was the devastating epithet that described a party seen in the post-Vietnam years as soft on defense and the U.S.’s national-security interests. The phrase summoned memories of left-wing mobs spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam, and all that. Of late, the party’s left has reframed its old anti-defense image. It now declares support for “our troops” while opposing “Bush’s and Cheney’s wars.”

The Pelosi booing was the Democratic Left telling us what it really thinks. Assurances from two presidents who inherited the post-9/11 world that the only purpose of the NSA programs is to prevent another 9/11 or a future New York subway bomber is, for the most politically engaged on the Democratic Left, a “lie.” Edward Snowden, whose hard drive of sensitive security information almost certainly was copied in the past week by the Chinese and Russians, is a “hero.”

The Vietnam Syndrome doesn’t have to return. It never went away. The Republican Party, including its critics of the NSA’s surveillance, may be debating what it wants to be, but for the Democrats it’s settled. This is the party.

Which brings us back to the never-ending Obama mystery. On U.S. national security, what does he really believe in?

Conventional spin holds that Mr. Obama’s anti-terror policies put him at odds with the left. But beyond this unavoidable, core responsibility, and the bin Laden takedown, Mr. Obama has shown no sustained personal interest in shaping current or future policy on national-security issues or events in the world.

Again, the Netroots’ fusillade against Nancy Pelosi is instructive. There are Democrats and there are Democrats. The Netroots Nation progressives are not your grandfather’s Democrats. Since the passing of the war generation of FDR, Truman and JFK, the Democratic Left has been antagonistic, or at best ambivalent, toward the agencies of external U.S. power—the military, CIA and now the NSA. But it’s gung-ho for deploying the full statutory power of federal domestic agencies. Barack Obama, the first progressive president, is the mirror image of this ambivalence.

His May 23 speech to the National Defense University was seen as a Hamlet-like revision of the war on terror. His quixotic speech this week at Georgetown University on climate and energy was total political belief.

In his first term, Mr. Obama’s national-security ambivalence didn’t matter much. But after distancing himself in the second term from Benghazi, Syria and the Snowden affair, something odd is going on around Mr. Obama’s relations with the world. In a word—concern. The sense, fair or not, is that serious national-security issues are spinning beyond Mr. Obama’s skill-set. That runs the risk of depreciating the Democratic Party’s claim to being trusted with this function by the American public.

This surely was the subtext to Bill Clinton’s “private” remarks June 12 at the McCain Institute about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to support Syria’s rebels. Read closely, it’s clear Mr. Clinton wasn’t talking so much about this or that policy choice. He was talking about presidential responsibility and performance when representing the United States before the world.

Given what the Netroots did to Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton knows that what happens in the world on this Democratic president’s watch could imperil Hillary, who (despite Benghazi) has erected a centrist reputation on national security. If on national security the party’s current base is willing to shout “You suck!” at a woman they love, imagine what’s coming for a woman they mistrust.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 27, 2013, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Booing of Nancy Pelosi.