Al Jazeera America, the soon-to-close local cable-news arm of Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network, is going out big before it goes black with an excellent four-hour documentary series The Limits of Hope: Inside Obama’s White House. Co-produced with the BBC, it airs over four nights, Thursday through Sunday.
There are those, of course, for whom four hours inside Obama’s White House will be four hours too many; possibly, there are some for whom this conjunction of venue and subject will stand as evidence that the president is indeed a Muslim, as 43 percent of Republicans believed according to a CNN/ORC poll from last September.
But if the current election season hasn’t drained all the life out of you, and you can stand to relive the last seven years, and you are ready to approach the subject with an open mind, you’ll find here a fascinating look into the nuts and bolts of how policy has been made and decisions have been reached inside this still-active administration, his opponents’ hopeful use of the term “lame duck” notwithstanding. If it only reminds us of the distance between being an armchair president and being the actual one, it will have done a public service.
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, economic adviser Christina Romer and the president himself are among the many insiders who sat for new interviews, but other key voices, including secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, are included as well.
Republicans are less well-represented, but this is not a “balanced” look at Obama’s presidency in the sense that it invites his opponents to counter anything said in his favor; his critics are all over the film, in any case, if mostly in archival clips. Rather, it’s a straightforward, mostly first-person account — long on anecdote and absent punditry — of the workings of the presidency through an exhausting number of national and international challenges. The episodes are devoted in turn to the financial crisis (with a side of climate change), Obamacare, the Middle East and a smorgasbord of domestic issues, including gun control, race relations and immigration.