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“Right America: Feeling Wronged” Part 2

Posted by Agent Squirrel on February 20, 2009

This past Monday I watched the documentary “Right America: Feeling Wronged – Some Voices From the Campaign Trail” on HBO. I posted about it last week but hadn’t seen it yet. I had joined in on some of the comments that were posted on a YouTube video about it but really did want to reserve my feelings until after I watched it. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m still trying to figure out how I feel.

If you missed this, it is airing on HBO a number of times this month and is available on HBO On Demand (if you have that on your cable system). The documentary was produced and directed by Alexandra Pelosi (yes, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter). Pelosi has produced and directed other documentaries for HBO. Most recently was “The Trials of Ted Haggard” which followed the former evangelical Christan leader who was caught buying drugs and having an “inappropriate relationship” with another man. In that documentary and in another Pelosi piece, “Journeys with George”, I found a certain amount of empathy I felt for people that I didn’t think I could feel that for. So I wasn’t sure what to expect from “Right America: Feeling Wronged”.

Let me preface this with the fact that I worked on the Obama campaign. I went door-to-door, worked the phones and was just out there talking to people. I was often surprised at how some of the supporters of McCain/Palin were. Not all by any means, but a fair number of them, were so angry and rude.

When you go door-to-door, you have a list of people who are registered Democrat or Independent. If someone is registered Republican, you don’t stop by their house. But people move, change parties before the information gets updated, etc. So you do end up visiting people who don’t support your candidate. It isn’t that you are trying to convince them to vote for your candidate or anything. The purpose is to speak to people who are in your party, see if they have any questions about the candidate, know where they are going to vote and things like that. Having a door slammed in your face by someone who is voting for the other candidate is no big surprise. Being told that the world will end if McCain didn’t become President was also no surprise. Having serious talks with people about the issues was fine with me (and I really did enjoy talking to people about the issues no matter who they were voting for). Some of the things that happened though were a surprise to me. I never expected that I would be threatened with violence. One man said he wished I’d be hit by a car as I was walking. Another told me that he supported the NRA and if I knew what that stood for I should get off his property. He then informed me I was going to hell because I supported Obama. Those are two extremes and they didn’t really bother me. But there were others. A lot of it was anger. I was cursed at, yelled at, told that I didn’t know what I was doing and things like that.

Screen Capture from Film: Woman from McCain Rally

So, with all that said, I can’t help but have had some pre-conceived thoughts as I sat down to watch “Right American: Feeling Wronged”. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel any anger at the people shown in the film. As I said earlier, Pelosi has a way of showing you both sides to the topic she is covering in her films. This film did not just cover people like the woman who called Obama an Arab at that now famous McCain rally (though she is featured in the film). Pelosi talked to people from all over the country. You get a mix of people who supported McCain/Palin. For some it was completely based on the issues. For others it was because they are Republicans and probably wouldn’t vote for a Democrat no matter what. Some just hated Obama. Some admitted they were racist. And some were just pretty out there.

If you’ve read any of my posts about voting, such as this one you know that I believe that every American should go out on voting day no matter who they are voting for. I feel so strongly about this point that on Election Day, I spend most of my time driving people who don’t have any transportation to the polls. I’ve been doing this since 1987. I never care who the person is voting for. I remember one older woman I picked up in 1992 who saw my Clinton/Gore bumper sticker on my car and informed me she was voting for Bush. I told her that was fine because she was voting and now we knew we canceled each other out that day. I also believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The one thing that does bother me though is when someone votes without knowing the issues. It doesn’t take much time to find out where a candidate stands on issues important to you. It is annoying when you find someone who is voting without knowing what they are really voting for. I am a liberal. No doubt about that. But I’ve voted for and supported a few Republicans in my life (not sure if I would again, but that is for another post).

Voters at NASCAR

So, back to the film…Some of the people shown in the film had opinions that I really disagreed with but respected. I think the men that were interviewed at the NASCAR event surprised me the most. They may have been the most honest people I’ve seen in a long time. I respected that some admitted that were not ready for a black President. One said that his daughter tells him he is “behind the times” and he tells her that “everyone else is just too forward”. The man on the far right in the image to the left may have surprised me the most. It is obvious that he loves this country. While I disagree with him on the direction it is taking, I respected his views because he believes them. He says that he is old school. I think I respected him, and a number of others during this particular point in the film, because they were not shouting out sound bites they heard like Obama being a Muslim (as if that were a bad thing if he were – ah yet another topic for another time), or he is going to take everyone’s money. Though I know nothing more about these men than what is shown in this film, I believe that they have strong opinions on how things should be in this country and care about this country.

"Socilism" T-Shirt

The feelings I had about the men at the NASCAR race differ from the opinions about some of the other people shown in the film. One young man had a t-shirt that he wrote on which read “Say No to Socilism” [sic]. Pelosi points out that “Socilism” was spelled wrong – I’m not picking on him for spelling it wrong because I’m a terrible speller myself – and he asks her if she has a marker so he can fix it. Pelosi then asked him what the definition of Socialism is and he begins to look it up on his cell phone. She asked him to give her his definition and his response is that “Socialism? It’s basically like the views of Hitler. It’s the in between…between…ah Communism and…I don’t know what the other word is but it’s between…it’s like the medium between two views. Between Communism and another view, but I don’t know exactly what that is.” This young man left me shaking my head. If he really, really believed that an Obama Presidency would equal socialism, I could respect that. But he doesn’t understand what the word means.

Anti McCain Sign

Later in the film there was a woman screaming “You want Obama? You’ll be on welfare. You’ll be too lazy to work”. Still not sure where that came from but I know some of the people I met during the campaign who did not support Obama repeated this same sort of thing to me. During this point you also see a man attacking another man who is holding up a sign with a altered photo of McCain with no clothes on and a pink cowboy hat covering his privates that reads “The Emperor Has No Clothes!” While others are shouting at him – I believe the woman mentioned above was shouting at him – another man physically attacks him.

Physical Attack at Rally

Someone I talked to recently saw this part of the film, and ONLY this part of the film, and decided the rest wasn’t worth watching. I explained that most of the people were not like this and maybe he would be surprised. Not sure if he watched it yet. While this was disturbing to see, it was more disturbing to know that people feel so strongly about politics at times that they can get this angry. There were McCain supporters at an Obama rally I went to and nobody was yelling at them or trying to hurt them. As I campaigned throughout the month of October, the anger that a lot of McCain supporters seemed to be expressing was coming up more and more. As I told someone I encountered while going door-to-door, we all have the right to vote for who we want. She replied that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Wow! All the talk I hear about how people want to “protect” the rights we have in this country and that McCain was the man to do that, yet Democrats shouldn’t have the right to vote because they don’t agree with someone else?

In the end, I guess I was left feeling no differently about things. We are a divided nation. We have been for a long time and will continue to be. While that is one of the things that makes America what it is – the right to have different views and opinions – I do see it getting a little more divided. Pelosi was on The Rachel Maddow Show last week (YouTube video available here) and talked about how divided the country is. Maddow said that she doesn’t believe that there are two America’s. Pelosi responded by saying that Maddow is such an optimist and later that she is drinking the Obama kool-aid. I, like Rachel Maddow, want to believe that we are not really all that divided. I want to believe that there are no red states and blue states. Living in Central Pennsylvania, it is easy for me to see that we are divided. While I did not support George W. Bush for President in 2000 (and really didn’t in 2004), I accept that he was my President in the beginning. I didn’t like him, but he was my President. He was the President of the country that I was born in and am proud to live in. I stopped supporting him when the things he was doing as President became too far to the right for me to accept. I gave him a chance though. I made the jokes about moving to Canada if he became President, blah, blah, blah, like many other people did. But it was never serious. Speaking of, in the film there is a point where a number of people say they would move out of the US if Obama became President. I really doubt that any of them have left or have plans to either. While I want to believe that we are one UNITED States of America, I just have to turn on the news to know that is not true. Yes, as a Democrat I feel that the Republican party is to blame for a lot for this. Not supporting anything that is coming from the White House right now is – in my opinion – not in the best interest of this country. Republicans who did not support Obama just have to look to the leaders they do support to see get validation for not being willing to even give the President a chance.

McCain Supporter Brought to Tears

Went off topic again…The final thing I want to mention about film is that I guess I could relate to some of the people interviewed. If someone had asked me during the campaign some of these same questions, I might have responded the same way they did – minus the violence and screaming. One person who stood out was a man who was asked by Pelosi “How are you going to feel about America if McCain loses?” He paused for a long time as tears came to his eyes. Trying to fight back the tears, his reply was, “It’s going to sour me. I’ll do what I can to keep my head up.” If someone had asked me this question during the campaign, I might have replied the same way and with the same words.

I think that everyone, regardless of who you voted for, should take 45 minutes to watch this documentary. You never know what thoughts you might have. And no matter who you voted for, one interesting point to remember is something that even Pelosi said herself…most of the people shown in this documentary were interviewed at rallys. If you ever attended a rally, it most likely means that you are/were a die-hard supporter. People don’t usually stand in line for hours and hours to see someone speak if they are undecided. So, while this is a sampling of people who supported McCain/Palin, it is not the entire Republican party. Why do I say that? Because someone commented on another message board that this showed all McCain supporters were “crazy”. I couldn’t disagree with that statement more. Maybe we can all take a look at how were express our political views and how we respond to those whose views differ from ours?