I do think a big part of the problem is that the answer to "what should we do" has been pushed way too far up the chain. "Caring" is measured by voting patterns in presidential and congressional elections. But that's way too far up the chain, it's already too late to have an impact at that level. Impact comes from affecting the processes that control who becomes politically influential, which controls who is nominated in those elections. This is where local and state governments and other politically active institutions (including businesses) come into play, but it's not at all clear and very hard to predict in exactly which ways. Voting in elections and arguing with your parents is not even close to enough, but going further isn't an obvious path, and nobody ever talks about how to do it. From a personal standpoint, I'm interested in this stuff, and I vote, but I also recognize that I have no influence and no idea what to do about it, which isn't exactly motivating!
Find a pivot with a really long lever and jump on the end of it. The War on Terror is in full swing but we can defeat the war on drugs. You could get people to read this - or at least absorb the salient points, http://chasingthescream.com/.
Yes and no.
He's the commander in chief and the top manager of the administration. Executive orders and simple orders. He could stop the drones. Basically any military unit. (As far as I know. Though probably while honoring the chain of command, so not directly. But disobeying a direct order is grounds for court martial, etc.)
But other than those, he could have done a lot more, on paper.
The question is do we know why he picked the people he did during his terms? Why he waited with the equal pay order? Why is he not pushing more on transparency?
And why is his team so incompetent that they botched the fucking healthcare.gov site? ACA was the big thing he pushed through Congress. And no one was keeping an eye on it?
I'm really tired of reading stuff like this, the idea that the president doesn't use snapchat to communicate with voters and that is why millennials don't care. Communication is not the problem. I have no problem picking up the white house message, be it through the NYT, CNN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, RedditAMA, Funny Or Die, The Daily Show, or anywhere else he has shown up the past couple years. The issue is that it increasingly feels like there is nothing that can be done to influence the situation. That's not just from a personal perspective - it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.