Politics & Power Quote by Elizabeth A. Sherman

The line tries to drain personality out of a fight that’s usually fought through personality. By insisting “It’s not about Obama,” Sherman signals a corrective: stop projecting a near-mythic villain or hero onto one man and look at the machinery beneath him. That’s an educator’s move, really - shifting attention from the loud, emotionally satisfying example to the underlying system and incentives.

The subtext is a double rebuke. To the right, it implies that the outrage often packaged as opposition to Obama is, at root, ideological resistance to Democratic governance itself: regulation, redistribution, cultural liberalism, the expanded role of the state. Obama becomes a convenient vessel, a brand, sometimes even a stand-in for broader anxieties that don’t fit neatly into policy language. To the left, it quietly warns against reading the backlash as purely personal or purely racialized (even if those dynamics exist): the conflict is structural and persistent, because it’s about competing visions of what America should do.

“Cause consternation” is doing diplomatic work. It’s a soft word for a hard political reality: resentment, fear, mobilization, fundraising. Sherman frames the right’s reaction as a response to “policies,” which is a bid for rational debate, but it also implies that the emotional temperature is, in some sense, an effect produced by Democratic choices - not just by right-wing media or polarization.

Context matters: in the Obama era, politics became unusually person-centered. Sherman’s intent is to pull the conversation back to the durable partisan fault line, suggesting that even if you swap the face, the fight remains.