What does Democratic New York Senator Charles Schumer's attack on President Barack Obama' Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) have to do with Iran? If you missed it, Schumer said Democrats "blew the opportunity the American people gave them" by focusing "on the wrong problem - health care."
The politically savvy Schumer, who is adept at reading tea leaves, knows that for 2016 and beyond, very few Democrats will want to hitch their re-election prospects to the Obama legacy.
Moderate Democrats in the House and Senate are distancing themselves from an unpopular Democratic president in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The president has chosen to ignore the shellacking his party sustained in the midterm election, and instead has decided to go on the offensive.
He does not see the defeat as a call from the American people for compromise and humility; he sees it as a call for unilateral executive action. It is a policy that scares Democrats who are up for re-election in 2016 because it is farther to the left than where they would like to position themselves before the presidential primaries, which begin in just over a year.
The surprising strong attack by a leader of the Democratic Party, who also was a leading supporter and defender of ObamaCare, has direct implications for the upcoming inevitable confrontation between Congress and the president over Iran. Inevitable because the administration is desperate to sign a deal - any deal - and call it a victory. If Senator Schumer could attack the sacrosanct Accountable Care Act, then he and other Democratic allies may be willing to confront the president on his major foreign policy initiative, concluding the Iranian nuclear negotiations.
When it was politically safe to defend the president's misguided opposition to additional sanctions, Schumer was more than happy to defend the president to a very skeptical pro-Israel community.
Never mind that those additional sanctions might have created enough pressure on the authoritarian theocratic regime to actually force it to negotiate in good faith.
Schumer continued to defend Obama when the president mind-bogglingly agreed to Iranian enrichment in the interim deal, which contradicted six UN Security Council resolutions, and also agreed to sunset all Iranian obligations over time. Politics mattered more than what was right for America.
However, with a lame duck president and the political winds changing, Schumer now realizes that the America people still fear a nuclear Iran, sympathize with Israel, and have concluded that the administration's incoherent foreign policy has weakened American security interests and prestige abroad. Schumer will now do what most politicians do: "whitewash" his record and expect his constituents to develop amnesia and forget how his leadership undermined our security interests in the region by weakening our allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
