I think an underappreciated vulnerability about Obama\u2019s \u201ccool, \nprofessorial\u201d style is that if he\u2019s not the loudest guy in the room \nthere\u2019s 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\u2019s election and re-election.
But\n at the same time he, Barack Hussein Obama, the human who regularly sits\n on a toilet and excretes feces into it really hasn\u2019t done much to \ninflame things, and has since his election often passed up opportunities\n to enhance his tactical position by publicly doing so.
And I \nthink actually a lot of the former flows from the latter, that he came \nin as this symbol of like, Changing Demography, the Emerging Democratic \nMajority For Reals This Time I Swear, and then didn\u2019t cash that mandate \nin for anything, and the other actors and megaphone-holders that wanted \nhim to, that were looking forward to it, got fed up and started doing it\n themselves. Only without any coordination so each operating in their \nown arena and idiom they ended up all writing checks against the same \noverdrawn account
(And I think that explains Republican base \nfrustration and Trump, that the party hasn\u2019t done anything to push back \non that front, and that even if it\u2019s not immediately apparent as a \nmatter of electoral politics, \u201cresist the forces openly angling towards \nyour disposession in full public view\u201d is a basic element of \nrepresentative agency, and the lackadasical - or in the case of stuff \nlike the RFRAs supine - attitude the GOP has taken here has been \nmaddening and delegitimizing)
So that\u2019s maybe a counterpoint to \nthe notion that his laid-back manner is an advantage for jujitsuing his enemies - it kinda draws the worst out of his allies \nand baits them into missteps too