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?

Recently the two teams played a basketball game. Earlier that day, Johntell Franklin, one of the player’s for Madison High School lost his mother to cancer. Because the coach and many of the players wanted to be with him, they were late getting to the game. DeKalb High School had driven 2 1/2 hours to play the game but Coach Dave Rohlman offered to cancel. The Madison Coach, Aaron Womack Jr. declined. Since Franklin wasn’t there, he only had eight players, but they still decided to play the game.

In the second quarter, Franklin showed up and wanted to play. The officials informed Coach Womack that Franklin wasn’t on the roster and they would have to accept a technical foul. He accepted it. The DeKalb coaches however did not want to take the foul shots. Officials told them they had no choice.

Darius McNeal, the Senior Point Guard, said he would take the free throws. McNeal threw the ball a few feet in the air and it then bounced on the ground. He repeated this for his second free throw. After the second shot, the crowd gave McNeal a standing ovation.

“Any one of my teammates would have done the same thing, and I think anyone on the Madison team would have done the same for us,” McNeal was quoted as saying.

As I said, it is nice to hear about something positive in the current situation most of us find ourselves in. I have played sports and have been involved with youth sports programs. The drive to win often takes over good sportsmanship. It is great to know that sportsmanship still shows up now and again.

You can read more about this at the LA Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Rachel Maddow talked about this story on last nights show and I posted a video of it on YouTube.

Right America: Feeling Wronged Image from HBO

FROM HBO’S OFFICIAL SITE:
Right America: Feeling Wronged -- Some Voices from the Campaign Trail On the day Barack Obama was elected the 44th President, more than 58 million voters cast their ballots for John McCain. In the months leading up to this historic election, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi (HBO’s Emmy®-winning “Journeys with George”) took a road trip to meet some of the conservative Americans who waited in line for hours to support the GOP ticket, and saw their hopes and dreams evaporate in the wake of that Democratic victory. These voters share their feelings about the changing America in which they live. Premieres Monday, February 16 at 8pm (ET/PT)

“In 2008, I followed the McCain campaign across the country to listen to Americans who did not want Barack Obama to be their President. While not representative of the entire Republican Party, these are just some of the party faithful who turned out at campaign rallies along the way.” -- Alexandra Pelosi

For her fifth HBO project, Pelosi visited 28 states and spoke about the fight for the soul of the country with mostly conservative Americans, who feel underrepresented by the mainstream media. From the Pulpit Freedom Day in Bethlehem, Ga. to the NASCAR circuit, RIGHT AMERICA: FEELING WRONGED -- SOME VOICES FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL shows a country at war with itself over the religious and cultural identities that define America. Many interviewees were particularly incensed by what they saw as a lack of any meaningful media attention given to their message during the election campaign -- including their views on such hotly contested issues as gun control, abortion rights, religion and gay rights -- and by a perceived media bias against McCain and running mate Sarah Palin. Read More at HBO’s Site.

I’ve watch all of Pelosi’s previous documentaries and believe this one will be just as interesting and informative as her previous ones.

Pelosi was a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show on Friday, February 13th. Below is one of the videos from YouTube. To watch the start of the interview, jump to 1:48.

Rachel Maddow

I’m still in the process of copying over a lot of content from various blogs, etc. that I’ve had over the years to this site so not everything I’ve ever written about Rachel Maddow is available here yet. I’m saying that because I’ve written in the past about how I feel she can be very tough on people – something that makes me admire and respect her style even more. If you watch the Rachel Maddow Show, you know that she does not feel that this election is in the bag for either candidate yet. I say all this because I don’t think Obama was necessarily sure what he was getting himself into and still felt that he handled the interview very well.

Congratulations to Rachel Maddow for getting to interview Senator Obama. She’s earned the right to interview a Presidential candidate. I just wish John McCain or Sarah Palin would go on her show!

Watch the interview at MSNBC’s site, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/.

Yes, it was a well produced program. The production value actually surprised me as I am sure it surprised many other people. But when you get past that, there is a message there. With all the back and forth that goes on in any campaign, the message often gets lost. Not this time. The message that Obama’s been saying from the beginning came through; Change we can believe in. I believe in the change that Obama wants. I have believed it since I saw him speak four years ago in Boston. I believe it more than ever.