I think an underappreciated vulnerability about Obama’s “cool, professorial” style is that if he’s not the loudest guy in the room there’s still going to be a loudest guy in the room

I think a lot of the culture war stuff getting bad recently does grow out of Barack Obama’s election and re-election.

But at the same time he, Barack Hussein Obama, the human who regularly sits on a toilet and excretes feces into it really hasn’t done much to inflame things, and has since his election often passed up opportunities to enhance his tactical position by publicly doing so.

And I think actually a lot of the former flows from the latter, that he came in as this symbol of like, Changing Demography, the Emerging Democratic Majority For Reals This Time I Swear, and then didn’t cash that mandate in for anything, and the other actors and megaphone-holders that wanted him to, that were looking forward to it, got fed up and started doing it themselves. Only without any coordination so each operating in their own arena and idiom they ended up all writing checks against the same overdrawn account

(And I think that explains Republican base frustration and Trump, that the party hasn’t done anything to push back on that front, and that even if it’s not immediately apparent as a matter of electoral politics, “resist the forces openly angling towards your disposession in full public view” is a basic element of representative agency, and the lackadasical - or in the case of stuff like the RFRAs supine - attitude the GOP has taken here has been maddening and delegitimizing)

So that’s maybe a counterpoint to the notion that his laid-back manner is an advantage for jujitsuing his enemies - it kinda draws the worst out of his allies and baits them into missteps too