“What do we remember in November of 2008?” asks Tom Hanks in the opening narration of Davis Guggenheim’s new Barackumentary, a 17-minute paean to President Obama paid for and distributed by his reelection campaign. “Was it this?” Hanks continues as triumphant slo-mo footage of Obama’s Election Night debut in Grant Park rolls onscreen. “Or this?”: a lowlight reel of the economic crash punctuated by images of despondent Wall Street traders. “How do we understand this President and his time in office? Do we look at the day’s headlines? Or do we remember as a country what we’ve been through.” Guggenheim, and Obama’s political advisers, clearly want voters to remember the latter. [youtube=http://youtu.be/2POembdArVo] The still photographs, spliced throughout the movie Ken Burns style, are not of a smiling, hopeful President. They show Obama in sober contemplation, chin in hand or finger over mouth. The adoring crowds from Grant Park make no second cameo until the last seconds of the film, but during the health reform section, Guggenheim shows Tea Party armies marching on the Capitol and an incensed senior saying “it’ll be a cold day in hell before he socializes my country.” (PHOTOS: Inside Barack Obama’s World) Economic gloom dominates the first half of the film. David Axelrod calls an economic presentation during the presidential transition “a horror movie.” Austan Goolsbee declares the  period before Obama took office “the worst six months ever,” and the documentary employs the jobs chart, long favored by the Administration, that shows the nadir of job losses in January of ’09, with the preceding Bush months in red and the following Obama months in blue. Even when touting the accomplishments of the stimulus, there are few positive metrics. Hanks says Obama is “restoring the possibility of growth,” not that he already has. Guggenheim brings in Elizabeth Warren and Bill Clinton, arguably Democrats’ most effective messengers, not to flatter Obama, but to make the counterfactual argument, always a tough sell, that things could have been much, much worse. “People have no earthly idea what would’ve happened,” an … Continue reading Obama’s Campaign Documentary: Gloom You Can Believe In