It probably was intentional, but it’s so self-destructive a remark that the fun thing to do would be to let it slide and in fact encourage the nutroots to whoop it up. Maybe the Swift remarks are intended to provoke exactly this reaction.

Obama has plausible deniability for the remark. But the nutroots are so ham-fisted they don’t realize that the deniability is a key element. They’ll make explicit what has to be implicit, and cause the very alienation that Obama was seeking to avoid by being “clever.”