2008 was a spell ago, but it seems my recollection is correct that Obama was the one who emphasized his experience as a community organizer: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/us/politics/07community.h... (“Mr. Obama’s three-year stretch as a grass-roots organizer has figured prominently, if not profoundly, in his own narrative of his life. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Obama called it ‘the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,’ an education that he said was ‘seared into my brain.’ He devoted about one-third of the 442 pages in his memoir, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ to chronicling that Chicago organizing period.”). Certainly, Obama was steeped in racial politics prior to his becoming president. And racial activism has flourished in the aftermath of his presidency—though it’s unclear whether he’s a cause of that or a symptom of it.

I’m not blaming Obama for these things—it’s not clear that politics in the US could be otherwise given the facts of history. But it’s certainly not conducive to good government.