Obama has, unsurprisingly, gone free speech absolutist, because that's the class he's in
Obama has always been the embodiment of complacent, middle-class liberal technocracy, and he knows it, which is why he lied to everyone that he was a "progressive" in order to get elected
Setting the Overton window so as to classify Obama as a progressive also had the convenient fringe benefit of making it possible to call Joe "urban jungle" Biden a moderate, so the DNC were very much into it for obvious reasons