Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski’s announcement Wednesday that she intends to supply the infamous Iran deal with its 34th vote is the latest reminder of the president’s uncanny ability to vacuum up facts, opinions, international allies, Republican strategy, and members of his own party until only a few crucial votes remain.
It takes a strange vacuum to leave a mess in its wake. But a mess is what this deal promises to create for the U.S., Israel, the Middle East, and beyond.
Yet thanks to Obama’s success as a tactician, this is a mess that the Democratic Party must now own, according to Commentary online editor Jonathan Tobin:
From this moment forward, every act of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, every instance of Iranian aggression and adventurism as well as the Islamist regime’s inevitable march to a nuclear weapon can be laid at the feet of a Democratic Party. …
Obama got his deal despite the opposition of the majority of Congress and the American people. But the Democratic Party now gets the responsibility for Iranian terror and hate. By making Iran a partisan issue in this manner, Obama saddled his party with the blame for everything that will happen in the coming years. Munich analogies are often inappropriate but when Rep. Patrick Murphy (the likely Democratic nominee for the Senate seat Marco Rubio is vacating next year) said the deal gives us “peace in our time,” his channeling of Neville Chamberlain was no ordinary gaffe. In the years to come when Obama is retired and Iran uses the deal to make new mischief and atrocities, Democrats may regret giving in to the president’s pressure. But, like the appeasers of the 1930s, the legacy of the pro-Iran deal Democrats is now set in stone.
As Iran continues to build its way to being a nuclear power, and the morbid consequences of this deal gradually become apparent to those who currently support it (just as they are now clear to the majority of Congress), they will not be able to prevaricate that this deal was purely Obama’s or Kerry’s folly.
The pernicious Corker-Cardin bill passed in May enabled the president to secure Congress’s tacit approval of the Iran deal with only a minority. But now that Obama can (and will) claim Congressional support for the deal, the Democratic Party can no longer plead guilty by mere association. A simple “guilty” will do.
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