CHILMARK, Mass. — Brushing off criticism from a majority in Congress, President Barack Obama said Republicans are reflexively opposing the nuclear deal with Iran because his name is attached to it, as he continued his campaign to build support for the controversial deal.
Ahead of a looming congressional vote to try to derail the deal, Obama argued in a pair of interviews released Monday that it should surprise nobody that Republicans were opposed to the deal en masse. He pointed to their resistance to his health care law and budget proposals as evidence that their recent hostility had nothing to do with the content of the nuclear deal.
“Unfortunately, a large portion of the Republican Party, if not a near unanimous portion of Republican representatives, are going to be opposed to anything that I do,” Obama told NPR News, adding that the judgments have often been based not on the merits, but “on their politics.”
That hasn’t always been the case. It was Republicans who in June drove legislation through Congress giving Obama expanded authority to negotiate trade deals with Europe and Asia — over the staunch opposition of much of Obama’s own Democratic Party. Many Republicans have also demonstrated a willingness to work with Obama on criminal justice reform and increasing funding to the military in excess of the budget caps put in place previously by both parties.
Yet with the vast majority of Congress opposed to the nuclear deal, Obama has been searching for ways to discredit the opposition — and to attract as much Democratic support as possible before Congress votes on the agreement roughly a month from now. Already the White House has conceded that Congress will likely pass legislation opposing the deal, which Obama will veto. Obama’s goal is to secure enough Democratic votes to prohibit Congress from overriding his veto.
A notable blow to that effort came last week when New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is in line to be the top Democrat in the Senate, announced his opposition. Obama’s interviews were recorded prior to Schumer’s announcement, but were released Monday as the White House sought to keep the president’s voice in the debate during the August congressional recess.
In a separate interview with online news site Mic, Obama shifted his focus to young people — including some in Iran and Israel who posed questions to the president via video. Asked by a 22-year-old woman in Iran why Obama had to hurt the Iranian people with harsh economic sanctions to get a deal, Obama said his hand was forced because his entreaties to Iran’s supreme leader went unrequited while the U.S. caught Iran secretly enriching uranium at its Fordow facility.
“Unfortunately we didn’t have a better way of doing this,” Obama said. “What we had to do was to more severely enforce sanctions so that Iran had greater incentive to come to the table and negotiate.”
