President Obama has flunked another fact check, this time for his claim that the nuclear agreement with Iran has “strong support” from U.S. lawmakers and the public.
“Since we concluded these negotiations, we have had the most consequential national security debate since the decision to invade Iraq more than a decade ago. Over the last several weeks, the more members studied the details of this deal, the more they came out in support,” Obama said last week.
“Today, I am heartened that so many senators judged this deal on the merits, and am gratified by the strong support of lawmakers and citizens alike,” he added. Obama made a similar comment after the House failed to approve the deal last week.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler said this week that Obama’s conclusions are completely inaccurate.
“The statement is carefully crafted. The president refers to senators studying the details of the deal and coming out in support, as opposed to reflexive opposition,” the fact checker wrote. “For many weeks, the key question in Washington was whether Obama would win enough support to sustain a veto of the resolution, so the fact that he secured enough votes to block a final vote was a bit of a surprise.”
The Obama administration managed last week to secure enough votes to see his Iran deal through Congress. But while Democrats in the Senate were able to prevent a vote on a resolution disapproving of the deal, only 42 of the 100 members of the United States Senate came out in favor of the deal, which directly contradicts the “strong support” from lawmakers portion of Obama’s claim.
It’s possible that the president meant that the deal has “strong support” from Democratic senators, Kessler noted, adding further that the claim is then simply misleading (as opposed to totally false). But as for the public, it appears that the president is simply wrong to say they strongly support the deal.
“[S]upport for the agreement consistently dropped over the summer, even as the White House was picking up enough votes from Democratic lawmakers to thwart a resolution nullifying the agreement,” Kessler reported, citing several polls demonstrating the collapse in public support for the deal.
The decline in support is seen not just with Republican respondents, but with self-described Democrats as well.
“Anyway you slice it, it is difficult to support the claim that there is ‘strong support’ for the Iran deal among lawmakers and citizens,” Kessler wrote. “This is clearly a case of winning ugly, in the face of minority support among lawmakers and increasing opposition among American citizens.”
He added, “The White House certainly did better than many analysts expected, since enough Democrats supported the agreement to prevent a final Senate vote on the merits. And Obama avoided a veto fight. But that’s a different than having ‘strong support’ for the deal.”
The final result is that the Post awarded the president three Pinocchios, just one shy of a full flunking grade.
This is far from being the first time that the Post’s fact checker has deemed an Obama claim inaccurate or outright false.
The president has been dinged by the newspaper in the past for claiming falsely that the Trans-Pacific Partnership would create scores of jobs, that 7 million Americans now have “access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion,” and that the Keystone XL oil pipeline “bypasses the United States.”
