Pretty much this. You can't look at how the world has shaken out post-Obama and pretend that effective messaging was the issue at hand.
There are people now, even after four years of Trump doing exactly what they accused Obama of doing or worse, that will still have the same baseless claims about Obama. They'll still talk about how Obama didn't do enough worked, golfed too much, embarrassed the country internationally, was divisive and wouldn't reach out to political opponents. They'll still try to say these things with a straight face. Because it was never about truth with them.
And Obama wasn't perfect. I would love to deep dive some of the things he could have done better or differently. But I'll be damned if I'm going to be the springboard some asshole uses to try to confirm that "black people weren't happy with him, either". I'll keep my critiques low key, and share them in trusted company.
One big takeaway for me in all of this is reconfirming that all of the white folks that were scared of Obama with power and didn't trust him with it got exposed for what they are. Because when the (allegedly) rich white guy that spouted the hate they like weilded that same power in uglier fashion, they didn't say shit. In fact, a lot of them liked it. So it was never about having "too much power" for them. They just didn't like the person with the power.
