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Was Obama ever particularly identity-focused in his politics? Honest question, I didn't pay attention to politics during most of his presidency (and haven't paid much attention to him since then).
Somehow Tea Party Republicans got it in their head that Obama was the anti-Christ, but he both ran for election and governed as a fairly center-left technocrat and leaned on very main-street rhetoric that wasn't too charged. As an example, he didn't support gay marriage until a good chunk into the presidency. He mostly tried to ignore us-vs-them, at least in 2008. He got bogged down a bit into more partisan warfare later in his second term, but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it". Hillary at the end was pretty night-and-day culture warry in comparison, though some of the shift in rhetoric was visible for a few years beforehand in some left-wing higher-ed type circles. At least that was my impression.
Obama tried to come off as a center left technocrat until after his reelection, albeit with occasional slips(clinging to their guns and religion), but stuff like IRS targeting scandals and fast and furious gave the lie to the idea that he genuinely was one.
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The "dear colleague" letter and the subsequent title ix witch hunts alone should dispell that belief. How much of that was Obama vs people he empowered in his administration is debatable, but irrelevant.
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Identity politics didn't meaningfully exist in 2008. He also governed in extremely capricious ways that were more than "fairly center-left technocrat". If you watched any Fox News at all circa 2009, you would have heard over and over again Obama promising to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" in his campaign stump speeches.
Obama personally might not have given a damn about equity as such, but he filled his administration with people who did: Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice. Eric Holder practically enshrined disparate impact at DOJ, which is just equity by another name. Many of the key inciting incidents that made woke morals blow up -- George Zimmerman, Michael Brown -- were made worse by his administration and his personal actions.
We could go down the list all day.
The Tea Party started as blowback over Obamacare. It really started as spontaneous protests and town hall meetings where constituents were livid over what Obama and Congress wanted to do with healthcare. Eventually, it got co-opted by Republican officials who made it another part of their vendetta against Obama. But it started with Obamacare, a piece of legislation which made American healthcare more expensive and more complicated, which people understood at the time, and pissed them off. No Obamacare, no Tea Party.
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This is a popular take, but I don't think it's the right one. 2009 had Obama's first meeting with GOP leadership summarized as "I won", the Affordable Care Act was 2009 and passed on party lines during infamously flametastic discussion where anything but the Democratic proposal was demanding people die in the streets by the thousands or tens of thousands, and the only reason someone could oppose this was Racism. By May he was joking about IRS audits of organizations that didn't agree with him enough. He instructed the Department of Justice to not defend DOMA in federal court in 2011.
Not all the worst of the 2008 culture wars were downstream of Obama directly -- there was a conspiracy theory that Palin's youngest child was 'really' her grandchild, and she had an involuntary biographer take up residence as a neighbor, and afaik that were genuinely just nuts (Andrew Sullivan, everyone!) that media groups latched onto rather than promoted by the Dem party directly -- but a lot of them were.
Perhaps more critically, many seeds were planted for future culture wars, even fairly early. The ACA threw in expansive mandates for gender-related stuff, and took over a large portion of higher education loans, for example.
I mean, I see all of these as somewhat partisan but not necessarily or explicitly identity politics. For example, although he nominally supported affirmative action, and a few of the bills ended up having those kind of effects, IIRC most of his efforts were fairly ambivalent and he would usually say things to the tune of 'well we need to make sure we're accounting for poor white students and their disadvantage too'. He talked about being the first Black president not in a Black pride/power way but more couched in generic "American Dream" language about equality. In other words, he was on the equality train, but not the equity train, not anything like what it would eventually become. Personally, I don't think that many center-left folks had any idea what some of these seeds would sprout, and I correspondingly imagine that it wasn't by and large deliberate, up until perhaps the last two years, maybe?
Of course there was also a period from about 2011-2013 roughly where I was a bit tuned out from politics, so maybe I missed a bit there.
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His campaign portrayed him as black to blacks, non-white to other minorities, and post-racial to whites.
His actual views are a bit harder to pin down...
His mother raised him with stories about what a great African leader his father was. Obama was probably initially planning to go into the state department. He seems to have been recruited before he went to Columbia U and his assigned roommate just happened to be the son of a prominent politician from Pakistan (or some other Muslim country, I'm not 100% sure).
While at Columbia he seems to have had a change of heart.
He decided he wanted to be a black leader in the US, and moved to Chicago after graduating. So from 85-97 you can find some more identity focussed quotes from him because he was trying to get accepted by Chicago voters for an eventual run.
Michelle used to baby sit for Jesse Jackson, so getting an in with the Chicago political machine was part of her appeal.
He seems to have realized that he sold much better to white liberals than Chicago blacks. They wanted someone with stronger links to the community. Becoming president was more realistic than becoming mayor of Chicago.
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His main schtick in 2008 was post-racial, post-partisan unity of the United States. "Not red states or blue states" etc.
See his Philadelphia speech on race in 2008. Progressive activists thought he was kind of a sell-out or too much a naive believer in white goodwill.
Of course, he then lit a lot of that goodwill on fire by bungling the Trayvon Martin case, needlessly blowing the Skip Gates silliness way out of proportion (remember the "beer summit" at the White House?), etc.
I don't think he bungled anything there. To secure his re-election he needed to repeat the crazy high black turnout of 2008. That might not have happened if race relations were cool and calm.
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2008 was a different time. Post-racial unity was the way to do anti-racism back then. Esoteric critical theories were only starting to show up on obscure nerdy spaces, and even die-hard Democrats thought they were way off.
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