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The Eternal Sunshining of the Obama Mind
Nine days after a gunman killed nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then-President Barack Obama spoke at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, senior pastor at the church and a former member of the South Carolina state senate. (He had spent the last day of his life campaigning with Hillary Clinton.) The President was mournful, as stricken as the rest of the country, when he suddenly did something amazing: He began to sing.
It’s remarkable to watch. To see him hesitate, not certain he should really go for it, aware of how wrong it could go — the most powerful man in the world looking … nervous? And then he takes the plunge, and that week of grief found its catharsis. It was a profoundly moving moment. It was one of the most incredible things I’d ever seen a president do.
The Way I See It, a new documentary about White House photographer-turned-anti-Trump activist Pete Souza, features this moment prominently, and contrasts it, as Souza himself has consistently done both on social media and in his book Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, with the empathy-free void currently residing in the White House. And what surprised me most about experiencing this moment again, a moment that caused me to weep openly when I watched it live in 2015, was that I had mostly forgotten about it. Seeing it again conjured up the memories, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about that moment since … well, since November 2016. I hope you will forgive me this political amnesia. Like the rest of you, I’ve had a lot on my mind.
The whole documentary, which is currently playing in a limited number of theaters and will air on MSNBC on October 9, is like that: It feels a little bit like the Obama nomination film at a mythical 2020 Democratic Convention. Obama was not perfect, but the film sure treats him like he is, and when you compare the way he is captured by Souza’s camera with the way we see Donald Trump on a daily basis, you’ll be tempted to agree.
