How Obama Inadvertently Set the Stage for Trump’s Presidency, by Josh Kraushaar.

In­stead of of­fer­ing voters a de­tailed policy agenda, Obama won the pres­id­ency in part thanks to his iden­tity, an iden­tity that power­fully ad­dressed a his­tor­ic­al wrong. In the pro­cess, he made it pos­sible for Trump to ad­vance to the pres­id­ency on the strength of an en­tirely dif­fer­ent sort of iden­tity, one that ap­pealed to an in­tensely loy­al base of white, work­ing-class voters.

Obama’s mis­take was re­fus­ing to ac­know­ledge the im­port of the Re­pub­lic­an wave elec­tions in 2010 and 2014 and de­clin­ing to pivot to the middle, which fueled the in­tens­ity of the con­ser­vat­ive op­pos­i­tion. By spend­ing his fi­nal two years do­ing end-runs around Con­gress on im­mig­ra­tion and res­ist­ing any changes to his sig­na­ture health care law, he all but in­vited Trump’s auto­crat­ic prom­ises to fix things. …

Obama and his leg­acy were among the biggest losers in Tues­day’s as­ton­ish­ing up­set. Re­pub­lic­ans will now ex­er­cise the vast powers of the pres­id­ency and con­trol the Sen­ate and the House by com­fort­able mar­gins, and … the Su­preme Court will have a con­ser­vat­ive ma­jor­ity in the years ahead. …

Clin­ton’s eth­ic­al prob­lems over her email serv­er, the sug­ges­tion of pay-for-play at the Clin­ton Found­a­tion, and her tone-deaf polit­ic­al sens­ib­il­ity all figured in her de­feat. But if voters had felt good about the coun­try’s dir­ec­tion, Clin­ton would have cruised to the White House.