Sure, Kasich hates the ACA and the Iran deal

I, Democrat, think John Kasich is the Republican presidential candidate best qualified to be president. Ergo, he's doomed.

It's become a cliche that Kasich is this cycle's Jon Huntsman, a GOP candidate who seems borderline sane to Democrats and hence is a total political anaphrodisiac to Republicans. Kasich is more formidable than Huntsman and getting a better response from GOP audiences, at least in New Hampshire. But the principle does apply.

I'm not the closest observer in the political audience but that's why I'm so sure. In a year, I've sopped up two subtexts from Kasich: the ACA is okay, and so is the Iran deal. He'd deny both, but he's pricked my political pituitary twice. First, on the ACA. Last October Kasich told the AP:

Obama overcompensates for winning

Obama's defense of the Iran deal in an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward's editor-in-chief Jane Eisner was marked by bulletproof logic and and impressive grasp of nuance. It was marred, however, by grotesque overcompensation for having beaten back Netanyahu's attempt to control U.S. policy on this front. Obama foreclosed on the the possibility of a fundamental divide in interests, not to say values, in terms inappropriate to relations between nations:

There are always going to be arguments within families and among friends. And Israel isn’t just an ally, it’s not just a friend — it’s family.

And then:

No man is an island -- but the GOP is

Yesterday, in a speech in Anchorage starkly laying out the current and future effects of climate change, Obama rhetorically placed his opposition on an island unto themselves, as besieged intellectually as Alaskan islanders now are physically. That reminded me of something. Here's the passage:

But if those trend lines continue the way they are, there’s not going to be a nation on this Earth that’s not impacted negatively.  People will suffer.  Economies will suffer.  Entire nations will find themselves under severe, severe problems.  More drought; more floods; rising sea levels; greater migration; more refugees; more scarcity; more conflict.

That’s one path we can take.  The other path is to embrace the human ingenuity that can do something about it.  This is within our power.  This is a solvable problem if we start now.

And we’re starting to see that enough consensus is being built internationally and within each of our own body politics that we may have the political will -- finally -- to get moving.

So the time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is past.  The time to plead ignorance is surely past.  Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone.  They’re on their own shrinking island. 

Here's the association. Defending the Iran deal in early August, Obama similarly quarantined the opposition: 

What if Congress rejects the Iran deal? Ex-Mossad chief Halevy fills in the blanks

There's one incontrovertible point in the argument against the Congress rejecting and invalidating the nuclear agreement with Iran. Even if you think the deal was poorly negotiated, if the U.S. walks away the sanctions regime will immediately fall apart and Iran will gain everything it could ever gain either by cheating on the deal or stepping up its enrichment and weapons program when various constraints expire. 

Obama has made this point repeatedly, minus the "even if you think..." part. The shorthand is "what is your alternative?" -- and there is none. Implicitly recognizing this, Chuck Schumer, in the most self-negating policy statement I've ever read, could barely bring himself to sketch in (in the statement's last breath) an alleged alternative path:

Obama against the warmongers

Obama's speech yesterday in support of the Iran deal had one obvious structure: taking on objections to the deal point-by-point, in substantive detail. It had a parallel thematic structure: opposing the tradition of American multilateral diplomacy to the drum-beating of hegemonists, proponents of preemptive war. 

Casting himself in the former tradition, which he portrayed as the longstanding consensus position of U.S. foreign policy, he repeatedly invoked first Kennedy and then Reagan, intertwining the words and deeds of both. On the hegemonist side, he invoked one counterfactual and one actual disaster: first-strike proponents against the Soviets, and Iraq war proponents, whom he linked to opponents of the Iran deal.

The definition of chutzpah

A few step-back observations about national "debate" over the Iran deal:

1. It is the definition of chutzpah to hype the danger of a nuclear Iran for years and decades, then complain that the deal only addresses Iran's nuclear program. It's also the definition of warmongering. You can't negotiate away all your differences with an adversary at once.

2. In the same vein, it's disingenuous to reject the deal on grounds that the removal of sanctions designed to induce such a deal will fund other activities we don't like.

3. We can pretend that there's a substantive debate about the merits of the deal, but that's obviously not what's going on.  The evidence of that is in the terms in which prominent Democrats declare their support.  According to Huffington Post's Sam Stein, Senators Kaine, Warren and Nelson felt empowered to support the deal after a meeting with ambassadors from the P5 + 1 group that negotiated with the U.S. against Iran:

...the conversation lingered largely on a hypothetical: What would happen if the agreement fell through?

According to one Senate Democratic aide, the ambassadors were emphatic that this would amount to a forfeiture of a successful diplomatic endgame.

Call me naive, but...

the assurance in the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the E3/EU+3, while obviously not sufficient in itself, is not insignificant either:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any
nuclear weapons.

That's reaffirmed,  by the way, because Iran has asserted repeatedly that Khamenei declared as much in a fatwa, though that fatwa was allegedly never written down. Now, there it is, and again, standing alone as the third numbered provision in the document's preamble:

iii. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or
acquire any nuclear weapons.

King v. Burwell and Congress v. P5 + 1

Reading friend-of-the-hawks reporter Josh Rogin's account of the difficulties Obama may have getting Iran to agree to a deal that bypasses the U.S. Congress, and so could be overturned by a future (GOP) president, I was reminded of GOP demands that the administration float "contingency" plans in case  the Supreme Court destroys the Affordable Care Act by ruling for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell.

In both cases, bad-faith opposition to vital and viable policy, the product of immense collective effort and years in the making, may well succeed. In both cases, the saboteurs are demanding a collaboration they've rendered impossible.