HBO Crap Documentary

HBO is featurning a documentary called, "Right America: Feeling Wrong." Since it's HBO, the channel that hosts Bill Maher, red flags go up immediately. It's actually produced and made by Nancy Pelosi's daughter. Instinct tells me that it'll string bits of thinks taken out of context, inarticulate people, and a few token racists. Well, as usual, my instincts were correct. Even the Washington Post was having none of it:

It's drive-by journalism, to put it charitably, a string of stupefyingly brief hit-and-run interviews with a bunch of unidentified people who we know are going to say nothing that will surprise us. By then, we've already figured out they're going to be fried by Pelosi's camera. We know they're going to sound like yahoos, often goaded, always reduced to sound bites and caricatures.

All the conventions of the smirking, winking, belittling political documentary are abided by in this film. An inordinate number of the yahoos wear T-shirts and weird caps. There is the obligatory NASCAR tailgating scene with the requisite Confederate flags and some white guys saying they'll never vote for any black man. There are a couple of campaign events sporting all-American schoolgirl choruses who sound like they're right off the "Up With People" tour bus. There is a young guy whose T-shirt, meant to deride Obama, declares "Say No to Socilism," and when Alexandra Pelosi tells him he's misspelled socialism and asks him to define it, we know he's not going to be able to, that he's going to say something way wrong and stupid -- which he does, offering that socialism is "basically, it's like the views of Hitler. It's between like communism and -- I don't know what the other word is."
In short, it's good yuks time....

But she looks to be in over her head here with a documentary that professes to explain why die-hard conservatives feel so aggrieved. Note: Just to turn on the camera and record the juvenility and venom at a campaign rally isn't nearly enough to capture the whys of that behavior. Except for some celebrities, we never see most of her subjects for more than a few seconds. We never enter their homes, never view what they do for a living. We never get to know their families or acquire virtually any information about their backgrounds. We don't know if anybody has been scarred by a traumatic event or recently lost a job. My gosh, with one exception, we never learn their names. This is less a documentary than a reason for a snarky laugh track.

As a reporter who spent much of 2008 writing about McCain and talking with many of his most ardent supporters, I certainly met angry conservatives along the way. A few times I was accosted by people who excoriated the media they loathed while expressing assorted fears of Obama -- their conviction that he would bring ruin to the country; that he was a rogue Middle Eastern agent; that he would seize their guns; that he would make a point of keeping the white man down.

But such opinions were a decided minority....While passionate in their opposition to Democrats, most of the conservatives I met at the rallies that day expressed fascination and respect for Obama.