By the People: The Election of Barack Obama

The footage is from Election Day, 2008. Chief Strategist David Axelrod is worried. Their campaign has gone well, and all signs point to a historic win, but you never know what could happen when people go into that voting booth. He acknowledges this, making phone calls to people out in the field (but admitting that nobody actually knows anything). But he finally decides to shrug it off. After all, he reasons, with a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama, how could you lose?

The fact of the matter is, no matter what your political stance, few political campaigns in our recent history have been as dramatic as that of President Barack Obama, who overcame a fierce primary battle, an ugly general election campaign, and, yes, that name, to become America’s first African-American president. By The People: The Election of Barack Obama is a compelling account of that campaign, but an imperfect one; the access granted to the filmmakers is astonishing, but some of their structural decisions are somewhat inexplicable.

The film begins two years earlier, on another election night: the 2006 midterms, when Democrats took over both houses of Congress. I love elections. They’re so much fun, grins then-Senator Obama. It’s even more fun when you’re not on the ballot. The camera catches him calling to congratulate Nancy Pelosi (Hey, congratulations, Madame Speaker), then zips ahead to April of 2007, after Obama has announced his candidacy and has set up operations in Iowa for the first primary caucus.

We see the candidate out shaking hands, talking up voters, and working with his staff. We see his family at home, hanging out and chatting him up on the phone. Throughout the first year of the campaign, directors Amy Rice and Alicia Sams’ cameras seem to be everywhere, capturing off-the-cuff moments and strategy sessions in a fly-on-the-wall style deliberately reminiscent of Robert Drew’s Primary. The access to these unguarded moments is impressive, and we’re reminded (as in Primary, or Journeys with George, or The War Room) that this kind of footage usually only exists when the candidate in question is young and less experienced — Hillary Clinton wasn’t letting cameras in like this during her campaign.

But what is done with that access? In the first half of the film, a great deal—it is, indeed, a blow-by-blow account of the run-up to that vital first victory in Iowa. We get to know the people behind the scenes, from those faces we’ve seen—like Axelrod, matter-of-fact communications director Robert Gibbs (and his adorable kid),and campaign manager David Plouffe—to the workers humping it on the ground. The youth of the campaign staff is staggering; guys like speechwriter Jon Favreau and Iowa press secretary Tommy Vietor look like children (posing for a picture with volunteers, Obama asks with a grin, Are any of these people over 30?). Campaign staffer and first-generation Korean-American Ronnie Cho provides much of the heart of the film, telling his story to the cameras and letting them catch him with his guard down during emotional phone calls to his mother. —DVDtak.com