WASHINGTON — When Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey said last week that he would give President Obama two months before defying a veto threat and voting for new sanctions on Iran, he made it clear that the delay was not out of loyalty to his fellow Democrat in the Oval Office.
“I don’t get calls from the White House,” Mr. Menendez said.
It was a frank acknowledgment of the rifts that exist between Mr. Obama and Mr. Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The divisions have burst into public view in recent weeks as Mr. Menendez, a second-term senator, has taken on Mr. Obama over Cuba and Iran.
Mr. Obama’s advisers say they speak with Mr. Menendez regularly, and the senator himself described his relationship with the White House as “excellent.” But deep policy and political divisions remain between Mr. Obama and the senator, one of the Democrats best positioned to defend the administration’s foreign policy in Congress.
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The senator, who was invited by Mr. Obama to travel with him on Air Force One during a visit to Lakehurst, N.J., two days before the shift in Cuba policy was announced, has since suggested that he is angry to have been left out of the talks that preceded it. “To be notified when it’s going to happen is not consultation,” he said last week.
Mr. Menendez also said he took “personal offense” at the president’s suggestion during a closed-door exchange last month that supporters of the Iran sanctions bill were motivated by politics. Some of the people there interpreted the comment as a thinly veiled reference to pressure from pro-Israel groups that back a hard line against Iran. (Mr. Menendez has received $341,170 over the past seven years from such groups, more than any Democrat in the Senate, according to Maplight, a nonpartisan research group.)
His pledge last week, in a letter also signed by nine other Democratic senators, to delay an Iran sanctions vote until late March gave Mr. Obama the breathing room he had been seeking on the nuclear talks with Tehran.
But it also came with a threat: If no deal is struck by then, Mr. Menendez will side with Republicans to approve the sanctions, bringing like-minded Democrats with him. “It’s our intention to move forward at that time,” he said.
