If you missed Tricia's Morning Maddow post earlier, President Obama's re-election campaign released its 17-minute documentary last night, and whatever one thinks of the president or the election, it's worth watching as a product of political communication.
The film was narrated by actor Tom Hanks, and there were a couple of phrases, used at the very beginning and the very end, that helped capture what the Obama campaign's message is all about.
"How do we understand this president and his time in office? Do we look at the day's headlines? Or do we remember what we as a country have been through? ... Time after time we would see rewards for decisions he had made. So when we consider this president then and now, let's remember how far we've come and look forward to the work still to be done."
It's a fact of life that when it comes to politics, especially during trying times, much of the public has exceedingly short memories. It's easy to forget how close we were to a cliff when Obama took the oath of office, and just how much effort it took to bring us back to safer ground. With that in mind, the point of this documentary isn't to recite the president's greatest accomplishments -- though there's some of that, to be sure -- but rather, to refresh everyone's memory about the literal horror the president inherited before he even set foot in the Oval Office for the first time.
Even the name of the film, "The Road We've Traveled," is clearly intended to communicate a specific message: look less at where we are and more at where we were and what we've been through. When the narration tells viewers, "Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president," that's not hyperbole. Given that FDR "only" had to deal with the Great Depression, and Obama inherited a financial crisis and two wars, Michael Beschloss has argued that Obama's job was actually harder than anything any incoming president had to deal with in modern American history.
Put it this way: Obama entered the cockpit of a plane that was crashing, managed to slow and stop the descent, and then gain altitude, slowly but surely. As easy as it is to complain about the ongoing turbulence, the point of videos like these is to remind folks that the nose isn't pointed down anymore.
For some, this simply may not be good enough. Indeed, Republicans are counting on that sentiment. The 2012 presidential election may come down, not to Americans' answers, but to their questions -- the GOP wants voters to ask themselves, "Are conditions in this country good?" Obama, meanwhile, wants voters to ask themselves, "Are conditions in this country getting better and stronger every day?"
Which question will largely determine who's president next year.
For more along these lines, I'd also recommend the new issue of the Washington Monthly [full disclosure: I blogged for the Monthly before joining the Maddow team], and Paul Glastris' cover story on "The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama," along with his list of Obama's top 50 accomplishments, many of which weren't included in the campaign's documentary.
Glastris argues, persuasively, that Obama's record is as impressive as any modern president, but these accomplishments are not generally appreciated because of ongoing national frustration about the pace of the post-recession recovery. It's exactly this kind of frustration that "The Road We've Traveled" seems intended to address.
Leave a Comment:
"An obvious creation of Commanistic, Atheistic, Mooslum Hollywood Elites.
And to think Mr. Tom Hanks used to be a hero."
In your head you can hear that, yes?
Then they ever saw Tom Hanks 2008 YouTube endorsing the President. No Cast. No Crew. Tom with a cam in his house (he even turns it off himself)
And I want the rest of the movie. Director did such a good tease on @Lawrence last nite.
(OK I know @Lawrence is a different show but to me everything is an open thread and I do no apologize)
"I can never watch Saving Private Ryan again!"
To reply to myself (actually I do that often) I cannot get enough of this short. It is great.
Not at all sure what you're trying to say, NextMSNBCStar. Excellent video, though. Too bad conservatives aren't likely to be impressed, but that makes no sense either.
The right is reacting in the way I "Readers Digest condensed". It is actually hilarious to watch them scramble.
I know they are hard to fathom. A Skilled professional Analysis: Pls. Never, ever try this at home :)
Well done! The President is a gentleman and a scholar as well as a man for all seasons!
I love the President.
Oh, yeah!!! Let's see how the Republican candidates, et al, respond to this video. My only concern is the length of the production in context of the public's short little attention span. I do not think anything in this video is refutable.
I do believe they could have put a little more emphasis on the actual hindsight numbers of how deep our recession (depression?) was, and relate to why it has taken longer to extricate . At the time, January 2009, nobody wanted to say the "D"- word out of concern it would make matters worse.
Does this president deserve another four years? Unequivocally, YES!! He also deserves a Congress that will work with his administration for the good of ALL 310 million Americans.
OBAMA/BIDEN 2012!
Hell no! Nobody "deserves" the Presidency. Either as reward or punishment.
However, he's the best person available for the job right now. Which is, after all, the more important thing.
Polls are perhaps the most insidious aspect of American politics. One bad poll, an outlier, and the entire mainstream press is shouting that Obama ought to be impeached over high gas prices. The reality of the situation is that the president is in his best position for reelection in at ;least two years thanks to a booming economy and a debilitating Republican primary. The GOP could not find any reasonable candidates to run against Obama, and now they're on the verge of tossing aside the only sane -- though flawed -- one of the bunch. http://www.sunstateactivist.org
The "Mainstream Press" isn't demanding that the President be impeached for high gas prices, it is all those republicans with dementia - they forget that the gas price was $4.11 in July 2008 during the Bush administration and it was at that time that the FOX media said that "the president had no control over gas prices" and even Rush Limbaugh came on with a similar statement.
Dementia seems to be a problem for the republicans. They have already forgotten that 750,000 people were losing their jobs every month during the last year of the Bush administration but now jobs are being created. And that does upset the republicans in congress, because they have done everything they could think of to stop jobs from being created.
And that is quite clear....
Booming economy, huh? 8.3% unemployment. Federal tax revenue is down in spite of a "booming economy" with the federal deficit increase 50% from $10 trillion to $15 trillion. Federal Reserve last week saying that they intend on keeping short term rates at zero until at least 2014.
If this a "booming economy", I'd hate to see what your declining economy looks like.
The difference with people during WWII and today is that many people want instant gratification. They have seen their 401k and property values tank and they have an expectation that this can be fixed in a short period of time. Republicans promise tax cuts and that the they can fix the economy. People believe that this will help recover their losses in a shorter time. But these people are myopic because they fail to see the overall scheme of what is being promised and how it will be accomplished. It is no coincidence that many investment firms and retirement counselors are heavily advertising on TV. They know people will follow any person or firm that promises a quicker way to build their money. Investments and property values are going to take a long time to get back where they were before the crash, but people do not want to wait. They want it now and are willing to gamble on their future when they are promised that good times will return if you just elect the Republicans who have promised the land of "milk and honey" in every election.
I watch this and I LOL at the right when they try to say Obama can't run on his record. Obama's first term record compares favorably to any other first term.
I was involved in a head-on collision with a light poll on the day Obama won Iowa. In fact, I didn't learn that he had won until four days later, when my son told me after I had finally stopped seizing. "Mom, you have a huge brain tumor, your knee is crushed, and Obama won Iowa."
Obama's win in Iowa was the miraculous turnaround I had wanted to see. I recall the weeks before the crash, watching him and Michelle stumping from one gymnasium to the next, and I remember falling head over heals in love with Michelle's intelligence and compassion. I know this will make political people spit nails at me from both directions, but I fell for them both, hard.
I watched every second of the remainder of the campaign, and on the night that the Obama's strolled out onto that stage in Grant Park, I was already feeling the anguish. I skipped over the joy and crash landed in the irony of our first Black President having to take over when we were heading into the worst of times. Its almost a bitter national joke. "There you go, Black guy, show us what you can do. You wanted the job, We'll just sit over hear whining while you give it your best"
The only things that have kept me sane for these past few years are Rachael's show and of course Stewart and Cobert. Otherwise, its been an endless slog like some dream that I have to wake up but can't, because its hopeless. I'll surely be late to school, because I can't get my cloths together and get them on in time. I had that dream for years, decades actually, after I graduated. These past years have been like that for me, but unfortunately, I have been awake.
Here I've been, essentially useless, watching this endless freeze frame. Will we go over the cliff? Will we back up and somehow regroup? The homeless, the jobless, the more homeless, the more jobless, the issues with healthcare that I live on a minute-to-minute basis, the seemingly intractable problems on every front, from education to the drug war, to the actual wars and to the revolutions that are far from settled. From North Korea to Iran to Israel to Syria to the Invisible Children to the complete loss of hope that all have experienced during these three years, I honestly wonder if we will have a future worth living for my son.
I know one thing. We are fantastically lucky to have Obama as our President. Regardless of all of his policy problems, having a perfect President is like finding the perfect school for your kid. There are none.
So I am still here, wishing I would get up and do something important to help us make it to a better next year. I don't take his re-election for granted at all. I remember all to well being swiftboated into four more years of W. How can anyone forget that? When the left celebrates how easy it will be if Santorum is able to somehow pull off a nomination miracle, I remember times in my past when I was cocky about one election or another. I remember when Reagan won and Lennon was murdered. I had teachers in high school who taught me "there's no guarantee that it won't happen here" when that statement was well understood and not forgotten in the shards of history.
What Obama has endured is worse by far, than I feared it would be on that election night. People hated him far beyond all reason. My own family members fully believe his isn't Christian, isn't American, and is the worst kind of Socialist-Communist-Fascist-Nazi. They have actually taken on this war-on-Obama as a kind of religion, blogging, praying, ranting, and wanting nothing more than to run him out of office and perhaps worse -- out of the country or into prison.
I listened and understood the complaints from the left -- the drone attacks, the Patriot Act renewal, the timidness toward Gay marriage, the fact of his compromising on Health Care. I am not selling these problems short, believe me, they are extremely significant and they pain me.
I don't need any reminders about where we've been for the past 3 plus years. I recall every single second. I've sat in this chair watching the hatred spew forth, and am bemused by the cease fire I see happening from the left wing, and the ratcheting up of the hate machine by the right. I am fearful that we will get what we wish for -- those that want Obama re-elected that is. I fear that somehow, something will go horribly wrong. After all, there is no shortage of things that can go wrong -- from Iran to Afghanistan to more evidence of ecological destruction to the increasingly more questionable use of pepper spray and bullets to quell protesters, to the endless unemployment so many face, to the homelessness and loss of all sense that there is anything sane to live for.
I worry that Santorum or Gingrich will somehow miraculously pull off some sort of nomination coup and then inside of a year from now, we will be looking at a worse nightmare than anything anyone I know wants to consider.
We've all been hurting these past few years. I've been obsessing over my own brain cancer dx that caused my own leg to be crushed in the accident. I have seen my new friends die, one after the other, of an incurable disease. I worry about my son's future and I feel tired and hopeless much of the time. But, I know this is wrong of us. If there can be people in the world that possess so much intelligence and honor -- I feel this way about President Obama and Michelle Obama and Rachael Maddow -- we need to get our @!$%# together people and make sure that every single person who can vote does vote. I honestly believe that if we can overcome the lethargy, Obama will be re-elected. If that happens, I think we can favorably influence our country's future. otherwise... let's not even go there.
Very good post. I'm concerned too about the Swiftboat ads that the Koch Brothers and other hateful people can freely put up. How can a supreme court allow our democracy to still be a democracy if they can essentially "Buy" it?
Good luck on your cancer. I'm just hoping you live to see Obama re-elected and a future for your son.
Thanks. I am in an extremely unique situation. I have brain cancer, but it is the slowest progressing form known. I may live a more-or-less normal life span, given how old I am now -- 60. Others are far less lucky than I, because each of these brain cancer instances is unique and any one of them can suddenly zoom out of control, as is true with mine, but probably a low chance. So, instead of dying in the near term, I get to look ahead to lots of painful decisions -- painful in every sense of the term -- and I have been cut off from regular people, because even if I had breast cancer, there would be hope and a regimen and a time frame. But in my case, its all up in the air, and the fact that one's brain is being destroyed is hard. Its also hard, because most of the people I can relate to have brain cancer, but they aren't exactly in my situation, so I am simultaneously worse and better off. You see most people get their tumors removed,and they suffer immediately, and less so over the longer run, but they are missing portions of their brains. Mine is inoperable, so I have to live with that odd fact. Its all quite hard, actually. However, ALL of my issues stem from my crushed knee and not my cancer. My cancer manifests only as a major case of ADD, but all else seems okay. In other words, I fit no where. I am capable, but can't walk very well. I can think, but no one wants to relate to me, because they are too busy running away. All my physical ailments come from crushing my knee and from bad operations that followed. My brain is fairly unchanged. I'm different, but not necessarily worse -- at least for now. Its all a moot point,, because nobody in the real world seems to want to let me back in. So I exist on the periphery, absorbing much and wondering what to do with this unique perspective.
I Live in rural Kentucky and can't get broadband. if you live in Africa or the jungles of Honduras you can get broadband.
Sen. McConnell has made sure we stay as uninformed as possible so we don't vote him out of office. Can i get this video on DVD?
"The Road We've Traveled" ... -damn-fine video. It has an added-advantage in that it happens to be unassailably TRUE as well.
FDR didn't have to deal with Faux News and right-wing radio, or a Republican party that wanted America to fail.
The part they cut out of the campaign ad video
http://youtu.be/mvFF4qIQvbY
Excellent. He is the best that can be achieved at this present moment and this situation. I doubt anyone else could have achieved so much. I am very proud of our president.
I also know that there is much still to achieve and many things I disagree with him about and will continue to pressure him for more progressive agendas but there still is no one else as qualified or capable to lead our nation as Obama.
Sends a message of hope. It is inclusive, progressive, and optimistic! The president has my absentee vote!
If the lazy media had focused more attention on policy in the past three years rather than their obsession with political conflict, process, titillation and sensationalism, there wouldn't be a need for this video. It is rather amazing that so many citizens are completely unaware of the many accomplishments of the Obama administration. The fact that team Obama feels a need to inform the public of these accomplishments is an indictment of our tea leaf reading media.
All I have to do is look at a photo of the President from the inauguration and another of him today. He's added an awful lot of grey in his hair. He's done a great job of keeping our leaky ship of state afloat.