[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fYp3ZVQAzE]
Based on Dinesh D’Souza’s 2010 book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, the new film 2016:Obama’s America – now in limited release – seeks to answer the question of how Barack Obama’s past influences will determine the future should the president win a second term.
The documentary is independently produced by Gerald R. Molen, who produced the 1993 academy award winner for best picture Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park.
The film looks for answers to some of Obama’s puzzling actions from his first three years in office such as his return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the British; his shutting down American off-shore oil exploration while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil; and his drive to slash the nation’s nuclear stockpile while doing nothing to stop Iran’s nuclear quest namong others.
D’Souza travels the globe throughout the course of the film looking for clues about the experiences and influences that shaped Obama’s life and his way of thinking, using his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father as a guide for clues.
The film theorizes that Obama’s worldview can be traced to his idealization of his absent father Barack Obama Sr., a man whose friends in Kenya describe to D’Souza as having been a radical leftist and an anti-colonialist who was involved in the struggle for Kenyan independence against the British.
The experience of having an absent father was likely particularly troubling for the young Obama, according to Dr. Paul Vitz, a noted psychiatrist whose research has examined the impact of fatherlessness on children as they mature into adulthood, who D’Souza interviewed in the film.
But the father Obama thought he knew was an idealized version passed along by his mother Stanley Ann Dunham, who married the elder Obama at the age of 18 in 1961 before abandoning her and the future President at an early age.
Dunham’s political views were every bit as radical as the president’s father, and his knowledge of his father came through her stories about him, according to D’Souza.
D’Souza recounts in the film how Dunham would rebuke Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, for working with an American oil company to extract Indonesia’s oil wealth and how he would slap the backs of Texas and Louisiana oil men.
The film also examines Obama’s ties to Frank Marshall Davis through eyes of Dr. Paul Kengor and his book The Communist, which examines the Stalinist background of Obama’s mentor and the impact it may have had on the formation of the president’s ideology, noting the long hours he spent with Davis in his teens.
A more colorful episode emerges during D’Souza’s trip to Kenya where he interviews the president’s 30-year-old half-brother George Obama – who lives in a shack in Nairobi, Kenya. The film contrasts his impoverished existence with that of the President, asking him if he’s embittered that his half-brother has never helped him.
But the younger Obama says, no, noting the President has his own immediate family to worry about. The film also contrasts his worldview with that of his powerful half-brother with George Obama saying that Kenya would have been better off had the British stayed longer because former colonies such as Singapore and South Africa have reached near-First World standards of living while Kenya has languished in poverty.
D’Souza reaches the conclusion in the movie based on his interviews and his examination of the President’s book that Obama’s worldview owes more to a radical leftist anti-colonialism that seeks to redistribute wealth and power to the Third World at the expense of America than to the Founding Fathers. D’Souza’s thesis has proven controversial, with people such as Vice President Biden calling it “science fiction.”
The film concludes that Obama likely could become more bold in pushing this ideology should he win a second term.
