I like this post on how the public would react to an American bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, but the real threat to Obama would be that it would be crossing a line, the line, that he couldn’t hope to cross with his base without creating a permanent break. It would be like, I don’t know, a Republican president nominating someone squishy on abortion. Presidents are able to maneuver in ways that the rank-and-file of their parties don’t really approve of, but there are limits to that, and attacking Iran would almost certainly be one. I doubt that all Democrats would line up in opposition, but many certainly would, and a party divided down the middle is a terrible thing to lead into an election. Lyndon Johnson destroyed his party when he went into Vietnam, so much so that he couldn’t even win renomination to another term, but it took about three years for that to happen. It would take less than three months for that to happen to Obama, who leads a very different party that includes few hawkish Southerners and not very many Paul Douglas-esque hawkish conventional liberals. Liberals have tolerated a lot from Obama that they wouldn’t have from Bush on foreign policy, and the reasons for that are complicated. But an Iran strike is different from drone strikes and intervention in Libya. For the better part of a decade, the idea of an Iran strike has held a talismanic influence among neocons on one sides and antiwar liberals on another. It’s hard to express just how worried many liberals were that Bush would attack Iran during ’07-’08, because his popularity was so in the dumps that he had nothing to lose (or so the thinking went), and many on the right (reportedly including Dick Cheney) were fixated on pressuring Bush to do it because they feared Obama would refuse to. Were Obama to lead or participate in such an action, he’d be fulfilling the darkest fears of liberals that Obama isn’t even plausibly interested in rolling back the warfare and violence of the Bush years, and the likely results will be immediate disillusionment, a steep drop in support among the left (and a bump in the polls for the Green Party’s Jill Stein), and suddenly accusations of political opportunism coming from both sides of the spectrum would become mainstreamized. I myself would not disagree in the event, and would be inclined to wash my hands of any support for Obama. I don’t think I would be alone.

Even though Obama has not always showed the greatest ability to reach out to the left–there’s been a gradual improvement from the outright hostility of the Rahm Emanuel era to the indifference of the Bill Daley days to the modest outreach and rapprochement that we currently see–I think he pretty clearly grasps that he cannot bomb Iran without encountering tremendous blowback from his own party, and I don’t think he’s especially interested in being the next LBJ in the sense of blowing up his party. Or of causing economic panic, torpedoing any hope of Middle East peace, etc. My guess is that he’d be less likely to “get tough” on Iran in his second term, as without the stringent Iran antagonism of Hillary Clinton within the Cabinet, the great likelihood of Ahmadinejad being out of the picture as President of Iran, and without the need to “play nice” and avoid irritating AIPAC anymore. This is, admittedly, just a guess–it could be that Obama would decide to launch an attack on January 21st, the day after his Inauguration. But I doubt it. The neocons who want Iran bombed have only a few months to try to psych Obama into doing it, and I don’t see him as being inclined to take the bait.