Forget Iran -- A Successful Obama Presidency Is What Republicans Fear Most

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NBC's Lester Holt the other day that the landmark Iran nuclear deal "is not only a threat to us -- we think this is a threat to you as well."  In other words, we should all be soiling ourselves in fear right now.  What horse-shit.  The bottom line here is that Netanyahu -- along with the entire Republican Party -- are terrified that this deal will succeed.

One of the themes of this blog in the last few years is that total Republican opposition to "All Things Barack" is based upon -- more than anything else -- the need for the GOP to de-legitimize America's first Black president.  But I do admit that some GOP opposition to Obama isn't based entirely on the President's race, and one example of this is the overwhelming Republican opposition to the recent nuclear deal with Iran.

GOP hardliners have long opposed deals such as this.  E.J. Dionne gives us some history here:

When President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985, he whispered to the Soviet leader: "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.” Reagan had a point. His inclination to negotiate with the Evil Empire left many of his conservative friends aghast.

In an otherwise touchingly affectionate assessment of the 40th president’s tenure, my Post colleague George F. Will said that Reagan had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West . . . by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” Further right, the conservative activist Howard Phillips accused Reagan of being “a very weak man with a very strong wife and a strong staff” who had become “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda.” Wow!

Wow indeed. Don't forget -- Ronald Reagan currently enjoys a higher approval rating with Republicans than does Jesus Christ, so it is pretty hard to imagine that members of Reagan's own party opposed him on anything.  But there it is.

Much of the GOP opposition to the deal with Iran is based on the notion that we can never negotiate with our enemies. Dionne notes:

There is no way of knowing if this deal will lead to a dramatic transformation inside Iran, and there are some legitimate doubts that it will. But then, Reagan’s conservative skeptics were also insistent that the Soviet Union could never change, and surely never fall. They were wrong and Reagan’s bet paid off. Obama is now making a comparable wager.

But as Steve Benen observes, there is a big difference between the Reagan Era and the Obama Era, namely, Reagan -- in deciding to negotiate with the USSR -- at least had some support within the GOP and very little opposition from the Democrats.  The same cannot be said for the current president:

Three decades later, Democrats are terrified of supporting a popular nuclear agreement and the number of Republican elected officials who’ve endorsed international talks with Iran – not just the final agreement, but the talks themselves – is roughly zero. Reagan mocked the contingent of “hard-liners” in his party who always oppose nuclear talks, but a generation later, isn’t it fair to say the GOP is made up entirely of “hard-liners”? What was once a faction of the party is now, for all intents and purposes, the party?

Benen concludes that although it is possible some Republicans are secretly impressed with the international agreement reached this week, the fact that they feel the need to remain silent for fear of a partisan backlash "says quite a bit about the state of Republican politics in 2015."

I believe the one thing the GOP fears most is that this nuclear deal with Iran will succeed.  It's akin to Obamacare in this regard.  Clearly, such a success would make this the greatest diplomatic accomplishment for America in well over three decades; and the chance that history will give the President credit for such a success cannot possibly sit well with Republicans, particularly given that they have spent the last six years trying to destroy the Obama Presidency.