2016: Obama's America (2012)

I read somewhere once, I think it was in The Nation so admittedly it was a liberal saying this, that when Dinesh D'Souza started out writing about liberal biases at colleges he probably had a point, but that over time he seemed to grow less concerned with scholarly rigor, and more concerned with making money. Perhaps there is no better example of this then the conservative pundits foray into documentary style filmmaking. The first of these, 2016: Obama's America, D'Souza co-wrote and directed with John Sullivan. The film is based on Dinesh's 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage, and was released the weekend before the 2012 Republican National Convention.

The purpose of this documentary, though the films adverting touted it seemingly more neutrally as an exploration of the presidents psyche, was quite clearly to make the case against re-electing Barack Obama to the presidency. Though even saying the film was to "make the case against Obama's re-election" is somewhat misleading, because the film doesn't really make that case, at least not in a way likely to change anyone's opinion. Rather the movie was a rallying cry for conservatives, meant to reinforce pre-existing negative conceptions about Barack Obama, and get out the vote. Ultimately the film failed in its electoral objective, but did succeed rather handsomely at the box office, bringing in $33.4 million off of a budget of only $2.5 million. Interestingly Gerald R. Molan, a frequent producing partner for Steven Spielberg, and consequently an Oscar winner for Schindler's List, was a producer on this and all of D'Souza's subsequent films to date.

The film starts out by telling some of D'Souza's personal backstory, an immigrant from India who came to the United States to go to college, ended up working in the Reagan Whitehouse. and had a subsequent successful career pontificating. D'Souza makes the point that his foreign background gives him a special perspective into the background of Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and would likewise have been exposed to the anti-imperialist  feelings of the then recently liberated third world. Such claims to special insight seem at least somewhat over stated to me, but is hardly D'Souza's greatest overstatement in the film. Those come in when once he really starts talking about his subject.

Dinesh travels around the world retracing Obama's past, with stops in Indonesia, Hawaii, and of course the land of the presidents biological forefathers Kenya. D'Souza also investigates, though not in the depth I'd have expected, those he considers to be Obama's spiritual and ideological forefathers. People like Frank Marshall Davis, the black writer, activist, and registered communist that Barack's grandfather put him in contact with while growing up in Hawaii. As well as Edward Said, the post-colonial studies professor who taught the future president at Harvard. Also Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist turned University of Illinois professor who was an early supporter of Obama's political carrier back in Chicago. Though not so much Said, I can certainly see how Obama's associations with Davis and Ayers could raise concerns. (On a side note I never really had much of a problem with Obama's relationship with long time pastor Jeremiah Wright, given that the black communities ancestral introduction to America was aboard slave ships, and hasn't exactly been a picnic since, some of his harsher rhetoric seems perfectly understandable to me.)

D'Souza will set up potential points of concern, like the relationships with Davis and Ayers, but he is never able to translate them into anything concrete to be worried about. If these people warped a presidents thinking, how did they do that, what idea's did they plant into his head that differs from existing Democratic party orthodoxy, because I have to say I don't see it. I don't see what Obama did that Hillary or Joe Biden wouldn't have done in office. I don't see Barak Obama as a radical, I don't see this rage that D'Souza attributes to him, I would say that charge is more a reflection on those making it then on the one they are making it against. If Barak Obama was so hostile to capitalism, why didn't he try harder to regulate it in the aftermath of the 2008 fiscal crises, when there was a public demand to do so, yet not one businessman went to jail. Obamacare owed its origins to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The draw down in Iraq, the lowering of confrontational rhetoric overseas, whatever their drawbacks they reflected overwhelming popular consensus at the time. D'Souza stokes a lot of fear about what the president will do if reelected, freed from the constraints of having to run again, but now we know, turns out not much. I look at Barak Obama and I don't see much of a revolutionary, I just see a Democrat.

I will give D'Souza some credit, his tone isn't particular strident, even if some of the things he says are. The film is nicely made, it doesn't look cheap. Briefly when giving backstory on Obama he mentions that the man was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961 and that his birth was announced in two local papers. Here D'Souza's dismisses the 'Birtherism conspiracy' which was no doubt embraced by a sizable portion of his target audience. Now he doesn't come out and actually say anything along the lines of "birtherism is false and you shouldn't believe it" and challenge his audience, but at least he refuses to feed into it, which is something.

 2016: Obama's America is not as bad as I thought it was going to be, and severs as a moderately interesting historical artifact of the conservative obsession with Obama's "foreignness". In 2012 Dinish D'Souza looked forward at the potential horrors of America in the year 2016, he was right, 2016 was indeed horrible, just not for the reasons he expected. **1/2