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Ben Smith and Miriam Alder at BuzzFeed on Obama's Iran deal. President "Obama was elected as an anti-war figure, but his legacy has been split between winding down two wars and escalating America’s campaign of drone strikes and paramilitary raids in a region ranging from Pakistan to Somalia," Smith and Alder argue. He wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. Obama "came of political age in the campus anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and made his political career with a then-meaningless decision in 2002 to oppose the Iraq war, has always seen issues of war, peace, and diplomacy differently than most of his peers." With his Iran nuclear deal, "he’s earned the foreign policy legacy he campaigned on." The Week columnist Bill Scher tweets, "If this @BuzzFeedBen/@MiriamElder take is correct then the 80s nuclear freeze movement finally accomplished something."
Franklin Foer at The New Republic on Obamacare's threat to liberalism. "Liberalism has spent the better part of the past century attempting to prove that it could competently and responsibly extend the state into new reaches of American life. With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the administration has badly injured that cause, confirming the worst slurs against the federal government," Foer argues. And "the earliest days of a policy’s existence have acquired even greater significance," he writes. "Fortunately for the New Deal, Twitter didn’t broadcast every farmer’s sad encounter with the Agriculture Adjustment Act. But the culture of modern Washington, with its hyperventilating media and legislative saboteurs, takes pornographic pleasure in magnifying failures — which in turn erodes the public’s willingness to give liberalism another shot." The Obama administration "failed to grasp" this. Charles C. W. Cooke, a writer for the conservative National Review, tweets, "This is interesting." Mediate's Noah Rothman tweets, "Fracturing."