Most of us know to take any election year psychological analyses of political candidates with a shovel-full of grains of salt. You have to filter any book or article that declares Mitt Romney a bully, dog-abuser, a flake for believing in magic underwear or, most recently, that he’s just like George W. Bush — running for office to exonerate a politically humiliated father — through the prism of politics.
Such skepticism is handy to have when watching “2016: Obama’s America,” a documentary by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, a psycho-political hatchet job by an ex-Reaganite who believes Obama is bringing down America due to some issues with the father he barely knew, and never saw past the age of 10.
D’Souza’s dubious thesis is as obvious as the title of the book he wrote that this documentary is based on — “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”
“Rage?” When has the cool-cucumber in the White House ever blown his cool?
D’Souza, who wrote, narrates and co-directed “2016,” paints a sinister portrait of a sort of Manchurian Candidate in the White House, acting out of impulses driven by his parents’ intense anti-colonialism to end the “American Empire,” which D’Souza honors as “an empire of ideals.”
Using Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from My Father” as a promising starting point, D’Souza goes after Obama’s influences, childhood and college age associations. Starting with Obama’s own words (including excerpts of Obama reading the book on tape), D’Souza talks to family associates, under-credentialed “experts,” right wing pundits like himself, step-family members in Kenya and others in the Six Degrees of Separation from the man to paint a portrait of “The Other,” the guy D’Souza and his fellow travelers love to hate. And as he does, the author drifts from facts into speculation, from speculation into invention and cynical hyperbole.
It’s the invention that seriously undermines what will be, to many, a film full of details about our sitting president’s life and past that many of us who don’t get all our news from Fox didn’t know. Fascinating stuff.
Poll after poll tells us that the most geographically, historically and socially illiterate class of Americans are D’Souza’s target audience here. Are they patient enough to sit through D’Souza’s longwinded, vain and smug “personal” story (He was born he same year as Obama, sees a kinship in their lives, but takes pains to give the evidence that yes, Barack Obama was born in America.), D’Souza’s life in India, his history lessons about colonial Africa, India and Indonesia?
All that is prologue to the red meat for ultra-conservatives — “What the liberal media is not telling us” about Obama.
D’Souza, the latest in a long line of foreign-born conservative Pied Pipers to pump his ideas into America’s far right — from Ayn Rand to Rupert Murdoch, Rev. Moon to Andrew Sullivan — may have an Ivy League polish to him. But he’s a clumsy demagogue, smirking and straining mightily not to undercut his own arguments with his own autobiography.
