The alternative news outlet Vice recently had the opportunity to sit down with the President of the United States for an extended interview. Apparently, a variety of subjects – ranging from climate change, to marijuana legalization, to “the big issues” generally – were raised. How do we know? Vice released a trailer promoting this exchange that appears to focus primarily on the uproarious hilarity of Vice founder and Obama interlocutor Shane Smith. Writing as a genuine fan of the work Vice does in reporting from international conflict zones and in exposing underreported stories in fascinating detail, I found this aspect of the trailer more than a little bit disappointing.
The full interview, scheduled for release next Monday, surely contains a bit more substance than the trailer, but it wouldn’t have hurt Vice to share an example of that substance in this teaser. There was, however, one exception to this stinging letdown. On the subject of Iran and Obama’s quest for a nuclear deal, any nuclear deal, with the Islamic Republic, the president apparently reserved most of his vitriol for his Republican opponents.
“I’m embarrassed for them,” Obama said of the 47 Republicans who signed a letter to Tehran reminding the Islamic Republic’s theocrats of their roles as members of the majority party in control of the only American institution that can legally ratify international treaty. “For them to address a letter to the Ayatollah, who they claim is their mortal enemy, and their basic argument to them is ‘Don’t deal with our president because you can’t trust him to follow through on an agreement,’ that’s close to unprecedented.”
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Where do we begin?
First, there is nothing “unprecedented” about this maneuver by Senate Republicans – “close to” or otherwise. As many astute commentators and students of history have noted, this letter is tame when compared to past efforts made by Democratic officeholders to undermine a sitting American president abroad. The notion that this letter lacks a historical parallel is a pure fabrication, not to mention a display of contempt for the intelligence of the viewing audience.
Second, Obama has misrepresented the GOP’s position. They did not warn Iran to avoid negotiating with Obama’s representatives, but to remember that they will not secure a deal that outlasts his presidency unless they give consideration to the opposition party in Congress. Republicans fear that Iran, not Obama, will fail to abide by the terms of a nuclear accord.
Which leads to the final point of contention. The president has again framed Republican objections to an Iran deal as an outgrowth of the GOP’s personal vendetta against him personally. The president frequently appeals to this rhetorical trick because it is quite effective at mobilizing the members of his waning fan club who are reflexively protective of him and are convinced that all Republican opposition to his preferred policies is unreasoning.
This is not a new tactic. Whenever the president encounters insurmountable opposition from Republicans, he has a tendency to take his complaint to the press where he suggests that their opposition is unthinking, irrational, and entirely personal. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observed this unseemly habit developing in June of last year.
“What I do worry about is that, right now, we got a Republican Party that seems to only care about saying no to me,” Obama said in an interview with ABC two weeks ago. And here’s Obama at a speech Wednesday in Denver: “Republicans in Congress right now have shown over and over they’ll do anything to rig the system for those at the top or to try to score political points on me…”
Then, later in the day at a press conference on immigration: “If I sponsor a bill declaring apple pie American, it might fall victim partisan politics.”
In a speech in Dallas on Thursday, he added, “It’s not clear how it is that Republicans didn’t seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did. Maybe it’s just me they don’t like, I don’t know.”
And later that day at a fundraiser in Austin: “You’ve got one party whose main goal seems just to say no: Say no to immigration reform. Say no to raising the minimum wage. … Say no to equal pay for equal work. Don’t just say no to doing something about climate change; just deny climate change. And definitely say no to me.”
The president has already accused Republicans who signed that anodyne letter of “making common cause with the hardliners in Iran.” This comment would seem to contradict the above statement in which Obama contends that the GOP believes the Iranian Mullah’s to be America’s “mortal enemy,” but he’s not aiming for consistency here.
As Ace noted, the president issued a signal to his supporters with this grotesque insult. Accordingly, his blinkered liberal backers quickly concluded that Republicans must be traitors who deserve to be propped up against a brick wall and summarily dispatched for their sedition. These are the same hyperventilating Obama supporters who demanded satisfaction when a former New York City Mayor nearly 15 years out of office called the president’s patriotism into question.
It’s always personal. It’s all this president has left; his cult of personality and those for whom an unwavering loyalty to the president is an element of their personal identity. There is no shortage of humor in the fact that Obama is appealing to the passions of his supporters when he charges that his critics are incapable of dispassionate logic.
There is a faction within the Republican Party that contends the Cotton letter allowed Obama to deploy the road-worn tactic of nailing himself to the cross and, as such, it was a tactical error. But the president’s history of contending that all opposition to his policies is based in a hatred of him personally suggests that he would have made this claim even in the absence of the letter to Iran. It’s the last arrow in the administration’s quiver. In fact, the letter has already forced the White House to concede that an Iran deal is non-binding and compelled the administration to approach the United Nations to seek a legal route around the American legislature. In that sense, as The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol remarked, Tom Cotton and his 46 GOP colleagues have been vastly more effective at exposing the distasteful elements of the forthcoming deal than any of their over-cautious Republican critics.
And in a final coup, the GOP has forced Obama to commit his Democratic loyalists to again come to the defense of his honor. America’s thin-skinned commander-in-chief so regularly demands that his remaining cadre of supporters tend to his easily wounded ego that it makes you wonder whether the Democratic Party will even have the energy to move on to defending his chosen successor from her army of well-armed critics.
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