Obama is ignoring public opinion on Iran at his own peril

Consider the polling: In this month’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 71 percent of respondents said they believed a deal would not prevent the Iranians from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Earlier in March, a Fox News poll found that a 57 percent majority believed the U.S. wasn’t being “aggressive enough” in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear program, while nearly two-thirds supported military action as a last resort. In a February Gallup Poll, 77 percent of Americans said they believed Iran’s development of nuclear weapons posed a “critical threat” to the United States.

The one recent outlier was CNN’s survey, which found a surprisingly large 68 percent majority of voters—most Republicans included—supporting negotiations “in an attempt to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.” But the phrasing of the question skewed the results. The question assumes that the end result of the negotiation is preventing Iran from getting nukes. But the reason for the growing opposition is that many voters don’t believe the agreement will come close to stopping Iran’s nuclear program, a point that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored in his congressional address…

A senior official with a pro-Israel group said the two senators to watch as bellwethers are Democrats Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, whose voting records are closely aligned with the Jewish state’s interests but who also have national ambitions and represent liberal constituencies that are still deeply supportive of Obama. But the fact that senators from New York and New Jersey—states with the highest concentrations of Jewish voters—could clinch the opposition’s veto-proof majority shows how challenging the administration’s counter-lobbying effort will be.