“It is a good deal,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the framework of an agreement to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb was announced. If it is good — and that will depend on getting the final settlement done and signed between now and June — it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity. And Republicans in Congress will have failed to thwart it because they embraced [those temptations].

“The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s.

“It would have been easy, on Tuesday, when the original deadline for the talks expired, for the American negotiators to walk away—and for Obama to blame it all on the Republicans and just say that they had made it too difficult to reach an agreement. He’s done that in the past. (Guantánamo.) But the President told John Kerry—whose efforts he referred to in his statement on Thursday as “tireless, and I mean tireless”—to keep going, and Kerry and his fellow diplomats seem to have come up with something that, while not perfect, does look pretty good.” — From Amy Davidson‘s New Yorker assessment, dated 4.2 and called “On Iran, Obama Gets His Breakthrough.”