Day 9: Dreams of Obama

I decided a subset of my larger resolution will be to also watch every episode of PBS's Frontline available online.  Currently there are 125 episodes, with a new one being added every week. Frontline is one of my favorite shows, and I regularly showed clips from it to my sociology classes.

Today I watched an hour-long biography on President Obama. Lately my views on him have been going through some dramatic shifts. To put it briefly: I loved him during the election, was disappointed with him during his first year and a half as President, and now feel the ever-increasing need to defend him as a decent leader and person. Maybe it's just me being combative, but I'm upset with my liberal friends who apparently expected him to walk into the White House and fix everyone in one fell swoop. He made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, but Americans also put a lot of their hopes for the country on his shoulders. A lot of the complaints against Obama seem like they should be directed towards the government in general, our declining political environment, and the military-industrial complex. 

What I Learned: As I haven't read either of Obama's books, I ended up learning a lot. I didn't realize how little time he spent with his father. I didn't realize he was the first black president of the Harvard Review. Mainly what this doc taught me was how he's been a focused, heavily career-driven dude for a long time, way before he got into politics. There's a couple of interesting stories about the lengths he was willing to go to get certain jobs or positions. 

What I Liked: I liked that it wasn't biased in his favor. At least, it didn't feel that way to me. But I can admit I'm biased towards him. They did not hesitate to show Obama as a cunning, Machiavellian politician who knew what moves to make to get what he wanted. 

What I Didn't Like: It was very short. I understand it was made for tv, but I felt a lot of the info barely skimmed the surface. We barely got to know his staff or hear about his personal relationship with his wife. 

Overall it was a good primer on our 44th President and it inspires to want to learn more about him. 1 Frontline down, 124 to go. 

The biography, along with all the other Frontline docs, can be found online here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dreamsofobama/

Here's Obama's Keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention. This is the speech that launched a then relatively unknown senator to the national spotlight: 

And here's a photo of young Obama and his mother Ann Dunham.