Interesting choice too - there's clearly a demographic who go to the Folsom Street Fair who definitely don't have negative connotations to "fetishizing", and I suspect any porn site operator could give you some numbers that some people would not believe about the number of people for whom fetishes are a real thing.

I wonder if Obama and his speechwriters have research about how many people (and from which demographics) that phrase is going to be read in which ways? (I wonder if they've worked out that they've already lost the tech crowd on this issue, and there's a statistically significant crossover between the tech crowd and the people for whom fetishes are considered a positive thing?)

It's also (and not only) in Marx's vocabulary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

First he accused me of clinging to my guns, but since I didn't own any guns, I was OK with that.

Next he accused me of clinging to my religion, but since I was an atheist, I was like, meh, whatever.

Then he accused me of clinging to my smartphone, and oh, boy. It's on now, motherfucker.