I wrote about Obama’s Iran speech for Politico today:

We’ve been here before.
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said a while ago that an Iran deal would be the health-care bill of President Barack Obama’s second term, and he was right.
Like Obamacare, the Iran deal represents an ideological fixation of the president’s; it is unpopular (a Quinnipiac poll had opposition running 2-to-1); the arguments mustered in favor of it are unconvincing; and it will get through Congress—or to be more exact, avoid disapproval by Congress—through sheer partisan force.
When Obama mounted a defense of the deal on Tuesday it was aimed less at public persuasion—never a strength of his during the Obamacare debate—than base mobilization as he seeks to hold the Democrats he will need for the one-third+1 of Congress necessary to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval.
How else to explain a speech that chastised opponents for their “strident” rhetoric at the same time it contended that Iranian hard-liners “are making common cause with the Republican caucus”? A juvenile little jab worthy of a DailyKos diarist, but not much more sophisticated than the president’s core argument: Accept this deal, or empower America’s hard-liners to go to war once again.