This has two aspects. First, it is his usual passive-aggressive adolescent, finger aside the head, flip-off for Rice having been shot down for SoS. Second, it is Obama descending into bunker mentality. His inner circle is going to get smaller, tighter, more radical, more Chicago and darker. He's going to surround himself with the type of people he feels safe with: "I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."
Important point you are making here!