WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry on Wednesday called President Barack Obama "very, very naive" for supporting the historic nuclear deal with Iran.
"What I saw out of this president today, and this is of great consternation to me, it’s of great concern, I saw a very, very naive man who does not know how the world works, who cannot put the dots together, and stood in front of the American people and said, 'I really don’t care if Congress likes this or not, I’m going to do it,'" Perry told Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host.
Perry, the former Texas governor, was commenting on Obama's press conference earlier Wednesday, in which the president vehemently defended the U.S. pact with Iran and five other world powers.
Perry compared Obama's defiance of an adversarial Congress with the president's earlier efforts to pass his signature health care law. Perry and many other Republicans have continually claimed that Obamacare symbolizes what they see as the president's executive overreach.
"It’s a continuation of actually what we saw, Hugh, going all the way back to Obamacare, and forcing something through," Perry said.
As soon as the nuclear agreement was announced on Tuesday, Republican presidential candidates issued statements of condemnation, accusing the U.S. of ceding too much to Iran and creating the potential for more tensions in the Middle East. Perry told Hewitt that he feared the deal would strengthen rather than weaken Iran's nuclear capability.
"They are celebrating today in the streets of Tehran because of this agreement," Perry said. "They know that they just got a 'get out of jail free pass' from the president of the United States."
In Washington, congressional Republicans vowed to obstruct approval of the deal. On Wednesday, Obama implored them to read the details of the deal and put aside politics.
"I'm hearing a lot of talking points being repeated about this is a bad deal," Obama said to reporters. "What I haven’t heard is, what is your preferred alternative?"
"My hope is that everyone in Congress also evaluates this agreement based on the facts -- not on politics, not on posturing, not on the fact that this is a deal I bring to Congress as opposed to a Republican president, not based on lobbying, but based on what’s in the national interest of the United States of America."
