John Ziegler’s Review of “By The People…The Election of Barack Obama”

I am pretty sure I have a unique perspective from which to comment on HBO’s just-released documentary “By the People… The Election of Barack Obama.” After all, I am the creator of the only major documentary on the 2008 election (“Media Malpractice… How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted”) done from the “conservative” perspective and I own the website www.HowObamaGotElected.com.

So it was with great anticipation that I watched its broadcast debut last night (my preview copy must have been lost in the mail along with HBO’s offer to broadcast my film). I also tried very hard to evaluate it without bias (I like to tell people that I am the most open-minded person in the world and that, damn it, no one can persuade me otherwise).

In short, I was simultaneously completely enthralled and yet also extremely disappointed and frustrated.

The filmmakers had the kind of access and resources that people like me simply dream about getting but never do. Remarkably they are even there on election night 2006 when an Obama Presidential run was still considered little more than fantasy (the opening moments of the film were surreal for me personally as the first thing we see Obama do is fist bump Robert Gibbs over the election of Democratic congressman John Yarmuth, who happens to be my old Louisville TV co-host and one of my best friends).

With this kind of entrée to this type of incredible and historic story it is almost impossible to go wrong, so judging this film is kind of like evaluating a New York Yankees season; anything less than amazing leaves the viewer unsatisfied.

There are indeed several memorable moments, but interestingly very few of them actually involve Obama himself. Michelle Obama comes across better than I have ever seen her and some of the campaign workers are truly endearing characters (the scene where a nine-year old working the Iowa campaign phones and getting frustrated with how stupid average voters are is simply a classic). But I must say that knowing how many hundreds of hours of exclusive, behind-the-scenes, tape they surely had to choose from I kept asking myself, “is this really the best they got?”

Either Obama is machine-like in his disciplined ability to never say or do anything remotely controversial or even interesting (his erratic press conference response on the Cambridge police flap alone would seem to destroy that possibility), or the producers kept a lot of good stuff out of the film for fear of embarrassing “The One.”

Other than finally actually being able to see the tears running down Obama’s face when he tells a North Carolina crowd that his grandmother had died and seeing him unable to get Hillary Clinton on the phone the night he clinched the nomination, it was hard for me to remember any other points in the film that gave me something about him that was new (though I did find it fascinating how awkward he seems to be in one-on-one situations with strangers considering how skilled he is at handling massive crowds).

In fact, the film’s almost fanatical avoidance of even attempting to provide new information or insight into the election of Barack Obama is by far the most unsatisfying aspect of the documentary. What did I learn from this film? Other than that the adorable Obama girls need to work on their ice cream sharing skills, almost nothing.

Never once does the film even try to explain why it is that all of those depicted in the film are so incredibly devoted to Obama. There is no examination at all of what, if any, substance drove their dedication to his campaign. To me, answering the question “Why?” is the most important element of any documentary. This one doesn’t even seem to try (perhaps because, as the polling I commissioned and the interviews I did on this subject indicated, the producers would not have liked the answers that they got).

But it isn’t just the source of Obamamania that goes entirely unexplored here. Remarkably, there are almost no actual events or issues that are dealt with in the film. Other than a rather cursory (and predictably pro-Obama) glance at the Reverend Wright fiasco, the film gives you the impression that almost nothing really happened during the entire campaign. As someone who has fervently studied the events of the 2008 election and who thirsts for some understanding of how the Obama team pulled this incredible feat off, I found the lack of effort or interest in this area to be a real shame.

I expected the film to be 100% from Obama’s perspective, but it didn’t need to be so transparently whitewashed and scrubbed clean of anything resembling an honest or revealing moment. After all, the election is over. He won. They could least let us get a true peak behind the curtain.

But instead we are asked to believe that a campaign that went from no where to the White House, and which had the candidate and all his chief advisors constantly being followed by cameras, never had even one instant of genuine crisis or conflict? That the most inflammatory thing anyone in the campaign said was that the Republican candidates are a bunch of assholes? That no one ever raised their voice or got in an argument? If any of that is really true then Obama is really underperforming his potential as President.

And while the Obama people were all depicted by the film as near angels, there were gratuitous and inaccurate shots taken by the filmmakers portraying Republican supporters as ignorant racists on the verge of violence.

Since my film deals with how the media’s adulation of Obama and targeting of Sarah Palin impacted the election, I was particularly amused at how “By the People” pretends that this was not an issue at all. The news media is portrayed as being mostly unbiased, something of a hindrance to Obama, and not a significant part of the story. This is particularly ironic given that one of the most common voices in the film is that of Richard Wolffe of the MSNBC who also had extraordinary access for his campaign book “Renegade.” Wolffe is in a constant competition with Newsweek’s Joe Klein as the “reporter” who is most in love with Obama, so the notion that he is portrayed as an objective observer tells you almost everything you need to know about the political persuasion of this film.

I know liberals won’t believe me, but I honestly wanted to like “By the People,” and frankly it did make me like Obama and his inner circle more than I did before watching it. Unfortunately, it seems that provoking such a self-serving reaction was the primary, if not the only, goal of the film and that is too bad. It could have and should have been so much more. Much like the Obama Presidency to date.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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