To be honest I think Pelosi had the biggest influence. She related to Biden on a personal level, knew him the longest, always treated him with respect, and voluntarily stepped down from her role as speaker, herself. Being older carries some clout, too.
I'm sure they did, considering the uprising during the Arab Spring against Assad's murderous regime. But I never took you as an advocate for US interventionism!
I'm not sure a democratic uprising Obama didn't support and a civil war that has lasted 12 years and counting are great examples of Obama inspiring hope.
Obama crushed my generation's hopes. We voted for him to end our foreign wars, crack down on Wall Street, and finally give us universal healthcare. Instead, we got the Heritage Foundation's healthcare policy and...mass surveillance, for some reason. He may have inspired hope in 2008 but he had beaten it out of us by 2014.
It's a bit more nebulous than that. The Snowden leaks covered a collection or different programs between the NSA and GCHQ which took place over several years. Some of them began under Bush, some of them began under Obama, some of them were expanded under Obama, some of them Obama lied about shutting down...However, there was a huge expansion of American meta data being collected under Obama, even though candidate Obama had condemned Bush's warrentless wire tapping program.