After all, when Obama took office, postpartisanship was kind of his thing. On big issues—education, climate change, health care—he borrowed ideas from Republicans. Rather than starting from one extreme and negotiating toward the center, his early proposals often arrived with compromise baked in. A few decades earlier, these gestures might have been reciprocated. But this was the age of the Tea Party. Each time Obama entered new common ground, a kind of white flight occurred.
