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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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