Obama: What Happened to Hope? This World

The United States, we're told, is where you can live your dream.

Once it was the future.

Things happened here first.

Whatever its troubles, it seemed to be the constantly

self-reinventing, self-confident, leading edge of today's world.

Which is why, when Barack Obama was elected four years ago, that seemed

such a great symbol of everything that was best about America.

First black President and all those wonderful words

about hope and change.

Hope in the face of difficulty.

Hope in the face of uncertainty.

The audacity of hope.

'I thought this was like my JFK.'

My parents talked about how JFK was the one president they believed in.

Barack Obama makes an incredible first impression.

You know, I suspect he makes the best first impression of anybody

in American politics in the last 40 years.

Those who tell us that we can't,

we will respond with that timeless creed

that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes, we can.

Four years on and Obama's in a very tight race with Mitt Romney,

and the mood in the country is very polarised

and often incredibly angry.

We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!

It's that simple. He's in over his head, he has been the whole way,

and that's reflected in the dismal results of his administration.

America remains a sun-kissed country

but the shadows have never been darker,

so you could say the question is simple.

Whatever happened to hope?

This is the story of a personality

and it starts with a man in the corner.

On July 27th, 2004,

a photographer was covering presidential candidate John Kerry

at the Democratic National Convention.

Waiting for his speech, she found her attention wandering

towards a tall, skinny, African-American with big ears.

I did some photographs of him just sitting on a stool.

He wasn't nervous.

I'd asked him, "Are you nervous about your speech?" He said, "No."

I sent all these pictures of him back

and my editor was like, "Obviously you really liked this person.

"I don't know why you sent me so many pictures of him."

I said, "I don't know. I think you're going to see him a lot."

And then he made this speech,

the now famous speech at the Democratic convention.

If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read,

that matters to me, even if it's not my child.

If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay

for their prescription drugs and having to choose between medicine and rent,

that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent.

If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit

of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

Now, this was one of the great verbal hijackings

of American political history.

A short speech which changed Obama's life forever

and made him a household name.

Before the speech,

the idea of Obama running for president would have been laughable.

He was a young state senator, a beginner,

though he and his wife, Michelle, did seem normal folk

from outside the tight circles of America's political elite.

When I started covering the Obamas, they really were Barack and Michelle.

They were Chicagoans, they were normal people, very ambitious,

very talented, but they did not live in the political bubble.

They did not live in a universe of green rooms and briefing books.

Another interesting one here.

This is him in an ice cream parlour, yes?

-It's a little diner, ice cream parlour.

-Little diner, yeah.

He had got an ice cream

and I loved it cos everybody was getting ready to leave,

we were getting ready to get on the buses and the car,

and he's tidying up, and he said,

"You know, Michelle gets upset if you don't clean up after yourself."

But this polite, tidy man had always stood out

amongst his political contemporaries.

His was a restless ambition.

The first time I encountered Barack Obama

was when he gave the opening lecture to first-year law students.

He was the new President of the Harvard Law Review at that time,

but he was already very well known on campus

and incredibly charismatic.

He's incredibly poised.

He has a combination of being

commanding and light at the same time.

He made an incredible impression on me

and all the first-years who saw him that day.

He wanted to build a movement that was about change.

Expanding the electorate was an important part of this,

bring in younger voters, bring in new voters to the process,

bring in more African-Americans, bring in more Hispanics, you know,

create an electorate here in this country

that looked more like the country itself.

PROTESTERS CHANT

But change means political change.

It's not just culture and it can't be just skin deep,

so change to what?

This autumn, in Obama's home town, Chicago,

where he cut his teeth in the tough south side, the mood is angry.

Today the teachers are striking over proposed changes

to their pay and school conditions.

The teachers are walking the picket line today,

demanding a fair contract and better schools for our children.

-Are you going to stick together?

-ALL: Yes.

This is the first teachers' strike in Chicago in 25 years.

It's been partly organised through the community organising movement

that Obama himself was part of when he started out in politics.

CHANTING CONTINUES

Did you come across him in your work in organising and so on?

Yes, actually, our neighbourhood is where he was a state senator.

He did a lot of great things, you know, trying to create policies

that really impacted the lives of people on the ground

and this is important because, as a President that knows how to

listen to the people directly impacted,

I know he'll hear the voices of teachers and the parents

because this is not going anywhere. It's only going to get worse.

Obama supporters are protesting against cuts under his presidency,

by his allies, who still run this city,

and yet they are still believers.

This is a city with a reputation for brutal, often corrupt, politics.

But Chicago's mood on that historic night in November 2008

when Obama was elected president was briefly ecstatically different.

It sort of showcased to the world, not just a historic evening,

but a very euphoric feeling that people had.

It was a very happy time.

It was almost sort of Kumbaya, you know.

Not something you're typically going to see in the city of Chicago,

even though it's a friendly city. This just took it up a notch

and it was just one of the most wonderful things to be part of.

It was a very exciting and hopeful time for America.

People were excited, you know?

This is something that a lot of my friends on the campaign

worked very hard for months, and maybe a little over a year,

and to actually be there to be able to work and start implementing

the change that you fought for, it was an electric time to be there.

One of his greatest strengths was simply his presence.

Full of charisma and charm when it suited him,

Obama could be suddenly captivating.

One of my most amazing memories I have from working in the White House

was bringing my parents in that first summer I was working there.

My dad is a very chatty person.

I have never seen him speechless until this moment,

and both my parents got tears in their eyes

and the President stuck his hand out to my dad,

and my dad, being who he is,

gave the President of the United States a hug.

And the President said, "Oh, you're a hugger?"

And hugged him back.

Honestly, that is one of my most precious memories

of working in the White House.

It is a lovely picture, but it isn't the whole picture.

Another close observer, Artur Davis,

had spotted a flaw right from the start.

Bill Clinton was a big talker.

You could bring Bill Clinton into this restaurant right now

and you could sit him down and Clinton could talk for 20 minutes to everybody in this restaurant.

That's not Barack Obama.

The times I've seen him,

not much of a small talker,

not someone who engages in the kind of chit-chat -

it's a wonderfully British phrase -

the kind of chit-chat that American politicians tend to be good at.

He doesn't have that Clintonian kind of ability to make you feel

you're the only person in the room he's interested in talking to.

He is someone who strikes me

as being enormously comfortable on a stage.

We are shaped by every language and culture,

drawn from every end of this earth,

and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation

and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united,

we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall some day pass,

that the lines of tribes shall soon dissolve,

that as the world grows smaller our common humanity shall reveal itself

and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

He did a very good job painting a picture of politics without

necessarily filling in the canvas with a lot of policies.

Frankly, there's a talent to that.

You know, the people who teach politicians how to be politicians

try to tell you how to do that kind of thing,

and Obama seemed very good at it.

Whenever a new charismatic leader arrives and is over-praised,

we all sort of know what's going to happen next,

and this is not just an American issue.

There was a guy called...

Tony something, in our case.

But with Barack Obama it was even more so.

There was an exuberance, a political intoxication

which is particularly dangerous if the person concerned then inhales

and starts to believe it,

and with Barack Obama you look back at the language used in 2008,

and it's embarrassing.

He was compared quite seriously by some people with a messiah.

It got even so bad that Joe Biden, the vice president,

said to a group of people at a dinner,

"I'm really sorry that it's me addressing you tonight.

"The president can't be here. He's preparing for Easter.

"He thinks it's about him."

Even Obama saw the absurdity of it.

I believe that my next 100 days will be so successful

I will be able to complete them in 72 days.

LAUGHTER

And on the 73rd day, I will rest.

LAUGHTER

Self-deprecation is perhaps

the most successful modern politician's weapon of all,

but Obama believed his own rhetoric of sudden and radical change.

On his first day on the job,

he signed an executive order promising with a stroke of a pen

to change the moral ground rules of the War On Terror.

This is me following through on,

not just a commitment I made during the campaign,

but, I think, an understanding

that dates back to our founding fathers

that we are willing to observe...

..core standards of conduct,

not just when it's easy, but also when it's hard.

The very first day in office, he signed these three executive orders,

to close Guantanamo, to end the torture of detainees,

and to make sure America would treat all detainees humanely.

Now, those were the most important promises he made from day one,

and you felt right away he was going to make good on those promises.

You felt he's getting off on the right foot.

He's making good on those campaign promises.

And so if our expectations were high

it's also because the president himself set them high.

This was Obama's own thought-through project

for a different, friendlier America,

and his chosen audience wasn't just at home

but in Europe, Asia and the Arab world.

The Obama administration, very deliberative.

The president is a constitutional law professor

and I think he runs that process in a very deliberate,

very concerted, very focused manner.

I think the most significant challenge

was re-establishing US credibility in the world

and the world was looking for a different kind of leader

after George W Bush.

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning

between the United States and Muslims around the world.

One based on mutual interest and mutual respect

and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive

and need not be in competition.

This speech at Cairo University

promised a new start in the Middle East.

Obama was vigorously waving an olive branch at the Muslim world.

But four years on, with no movement between Israelis and Palestinians

and the bloody war in Afghanistan grinding on,

relations with the Muslim world remain tense.

Guantanamo Bay stayed open.

Congress wouldn't have agreed to take the untried detainees

on to American soil.

Even if you're president,

saying something doesn't mean it will happen.

The dilemma for the president has been high expectations

and on a policy-by-policy basis

people may well be disappointed.

Guantanamo would be a perfect example.

He committed to close Guantanamo and has been unsuccessful in doing that.

So if Obama had naively over-promised

when it came to a whole range of foreign policies and human rights

and much else, this election now,

like all big American elections,

is about whither America, and that means the economy,

still in terrible trouble.

And that story has to start in 2008 with the banking crisis,

when, for an awful lot of people, it seemed the entire banking system

was on the edge of complete collapse.

People unable to take out money to buy food.

Millions of people perhaps being thrown out of their houses

on to the streets, and America facing a social crisis

at least as bad, possibly worse, than it went through in the 1930s.

Into this storm was thrown a young economics professor

from Chicago University.

We met face to face in the green room and he says, "Who are you?"

I said, "I'm Professor Goolsbee." And he looked and said,

"I thought I had a guy with a tweed jacket with patches, 65 years old.

"You don't look anything like a professor!

"And what is it with Goolsbee?"

And I said, "Look, you're telling everybody you're the skinny guy

"with the funny name, you stole my bit, that's my bit!"

Goolsbee had been one of Obama's closest advisors during the campaign.

Later he'd become the White House Chairman of Economic Advisors.

We come in and it's getting worse one week after another,

and so the transition between

Election Day and Inauguration Day

was largely a blur of people scrambling to sort out stimulus,

sort out financial rescue.

In addition on the side, the auto industry is about to collapse.

They're coming in.

"Unless we get 20 billion more it's going to cease to exist."

I mean, it was just one thing terrifying after another.

Then we go to the economy.

At that time, the data was suggesting

that it was shrinking at about a minus 4% annual rate,

which is about as bad a recession as we've ever had.

It's now been revised that it was shrinking at a minus 9% annual rate,

that it was the worst six months in the 65 years of data

that we have on GDP growth.

Housing, horrible, down, it's not coming back.

Net worth of family. So it was just one thing after another. Awful.

The political people are at this meeting.

Their faces are just dropping more and more. Oh, my God.

And then the meeting finishes,

I go up to the president-elect and I say, "You know what?

"That's got to be the worst background briefing

"that a president-elect has had since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932,

"or maybe since Abraham Lincoln in 1861."

You know, that the nation has decided to break up.

And Obama looks at me and he says,

"Goolsbee, that's not even my worst briefing this week."

And it was like, "Oh, jeez, Louise."

You do not want to be in this guy's job.

He is in the cabinet room and in the photograph he is leaning back

in his chair, and Larry Summers is saying,

"I'd like to say this all going to get better,

"but it is going to get so much worse before it's better."

I can remember him saying, "I need you to tell me all the bad stuff.

"Do not tell me how good it's going to get.

"I need to know how bad it's going to get."

We're sleeping under our desks,

people are eating Tic Tac candies for dinner, and this kind of thing.

The fact that we get into just the same old politics and finger-pointing

and people are just going to argue with each other

while you've got millions of people out of work,

while we've seen a horrible financial collapse and crisis,

you would think that people would have kind of put down their guns

for a little bit and said, "All right, fine, let's sort this out

"and once we're sure we're OK then let's go back to our fighting,"

but it just wasn't to be.

Washington in-fighting is old news.

The new news was the possible collapse of American capitalism,

and Obama was very inexperienced in the ruthless ways

at the heart of American power.

Remember, he was still getting lost in the halls of the Capitol

when he decided to run for president.

He was really just out of the Illinois State Senate,

did not have strong relationships with the legislators

on Capitol Hill, didn't have a lot of economic experience.

Despite the massive national debt,

Obama went for a huge injection of cash into the economy,

some 787 billion.

He thought the way to solve the economic problems was to

inject money into the economy and get people spending again.

They passed the thing in the first few weeks of the administration,

so even though intellectually everyone knows that it takes months

for anything to have an impact, in some sense it doesn't matter

and you still see people saying, "Well, they passed the stimulus

"and the unemployment rate continued to go up,"

not noting the unemployment rate's already well above eight percent,

pushing nine percent, before the first dollar of the stimulus money

has even gone out the door.

But some economists felt that the president

was ignoring the bigger picture.

Jeffrey Sachs has been described as the world's most famous economist.

Early on, he was brought in to the White House to advise Obama,

but he was deeply unimpressed.

When you looked at the plan and it was,

"We're going to spend money everywhere and it's going to be

"in six weeks we're going to decide how to do everything," it struck me

that that was both bad politics and bad economics.

Cut taxes...

Cut taxes or increase spending, but do it fast, fast, fast.

That was the stimulus approach. That's what was adopted.

I did not agree with that at the time.

I was rather stunned because I was so much focused, also, on,

"How are we going to implement real change

"that's starting from a 1 trillion deficit at that point?"

and the government was proposing to raise it to about 1.5 trillion,

and I thought, "That's rather shocking."

The stimulus package under Obama, where we infused a lot of money

into the economy and propped up institutions that were failing

may not have done a lot to spur the economy on,

but certainly kept the country from going even further backwards

to a great depression that would be very difficult to recover from.

But, by and large, politicians don't get thanked for what didn't happen.

Unemployment is still stubbornly high,

middle-class Americans feel poorer, and the poor are as poor as ever.

Here in Southern Chicago, core Obama territory,

life is getting tougher too.

So have these people lost faith?

If this was just a story of conservative, right-wing America, sceptical about government,

versus sort of left-ish, blacker America, wanting more subsidies,

then it would be predictable and it would be a bit depressing,

but the story's more interesting than that.

The America of Chicago's South Suburban College

is intensely patriotic, and plenty of people here

are very sceptical about the ability of government to deliver jobs.

In the corner, they're registering electors to make sure they vote,

but even here there is a sturdy belief

in standing on your own two feet.

Self help remains a core American value and, after all,

Obama didn't say, "Yes, I can."

He said to America, "YOU can."

-Government doesn't produce jobs, in your view?

-Government does not produce jobs.

Businesses produce jobs, opportunities produce jobs,

so they're out there - we just have to

galvanise those opportunities and get the machines running,

in order to put people back to work.

So that original "Yes, we can" slogan -

people haven't quite understood properly?

Well, that was quite interesting, yes.

Everyone was screaming, "Yes, we can. Yes, we can."

and elected the man and turned their backs

and started whispering to themselves, "Yes, HE can."

But where Obama did say "Yes, I can. Yes, I will."

was over a big slice of top-down reform to America's health care system,

a policy which certainly would interfere with people's daily lives

but was close to his heart.

He watched his mother die of cancer and, you know,

if she had had maybe proper screenings, you know,

maybe they could have caught something sooner,

so I think for him it was very personal, and not to mention

that he heard from, you know, just hundreds of people

across the country tell their stories of how they suffered

from a disease or they'd watched their kids suffer.

BARACK OBAMA: One woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy

when her insurance company

cancelled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne.

By the time she had her insurance reinstated,

her breast cancer had more than doubled in size.

That is heartbreaking, it is wrong,

and no-one should be treated that way in the United States of America.

LOUD CHEERING

But it wasn't just the stories he heard from the American people

that were spurring him forward.

At his side, he had a formidable ally -

somebody who wasn't going to let him forget his promise

that he was going to be a transformative president -

the politically savvy, determined new first lady, Michelle Obama.

What she is is the kind of overall keeper of standards

for this administration.

Part of the job of a first lady is to try to get the country

to see the president the way she sees him.

Michelle Obama wants us to see Barack Obama as she sees him,

as she's always seen him - as not an everyday, wheeling, dealing,

corrupt politician, but as this kind of exalted figure,

as somebody who's above it all, who takes big risks,

who enacts fundamental reforms, who takes on harder problems.

That is the president she wants him to be.

And if there was one domestic policy with the potential to put Obama

into a different class, to make a lasting change,

it would be health care.

This was an issue that people in most countries

cannot even fathom or understand how the US could be...

We've got to have 40, 50 million people with no health insurance.

The most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States

is you or a family member gets some major illness

and it blows through all your resources

and you must declare bankruptcy.

So I think the issue of health care coverage and cost

is one of the most fundamental issues in the United States.

Health care in America is hugely expensive.

Most people get it through insurance with their employers.

Obama's bill would force all Americans not in a company scheme

to buy their own cover or pay a fine and, in return,

insurance companies would have to cover these new customers,

even if they already had illnesses which would once have ruled them out as bad risks.

Now, you might think, "How lovely. What could be more popular?"

Well, you could not be more wrong.

For many Americans, this was European-style socialism.

For others, it was distracting him from the big job of the economy

and creating employment.

And for a huge number of Americans,

it was simply too complicated to understand.

This is a courageous president.

He could have side-stepped health care for a while.

Instead, he took it on right away.

He made it a very important executive decision

that right from the beginning of his administration,

health care would be a core agenda.

I know he got advice from many advisors - it's been written about -

to say, "No, no - not yet. Stay, wait a while."

He chose not to, and I think he did the right thing.

-CROWD CHANTS:

-No more Obamacare! No more Obamacare!

I want to know if it's coming out of my pay cheque...

'In public meetings over the summer, opponents of health care reform

'made it clear they weren't just concerned - they were incandescent.'

I don't want this country turning into Russia,

turning into a socialised country.

No Obamacare! No Obamacare!

These folks, and all the folks like them,

want the rest of all of us to go to work every day

to pay for their health care, so they don't have to.

It's disgusting.

Much of America loathed the idea

of the state getting more involved in medicine.

Obama misjudged the level of anger his bill would unleash

among people who deeply distrusted big government.

..power over life and death. They've already taken our jobs,

our houses, and now they're going after our cars.

Everyone has to admit that a communication lapse developed

around an important, helpful law

that was somehow not understood that way by the public,

and I don't understand where that message got lost.

This was one of the most bitterly fought pieces of legislation

in recent American history,

and after months of hostile debate, it became law in March 2010.

President Obama, can you hear America now?

But eight months later, he would pay a huge price.

Good evening, everyone.

Today we saw a humbled and introspective President Obama

after a major political defeat.

The mid-term elections give American voters the chance,

two years into a President's term, to shake Washington up.

It's an unmistakeable verdict on how the man at the top is doing,

and, in 2010, Obama's Democrats were slaughtered.

They suffered their biggest loss since 1948.

Jubilant Republicans took control of the House of Representatives,

and were able to block him in the Senate as well,

and this was a political disaster.

He paid a huge price for it.

I think in part you can explain the losing the House of Representatives

in 2010 to the health care reform debate, and I think that there was

just a very, very powerful feeling that things had not changed and,

in fact, were going in the wrong direction, that the things that

people hoped would be different when he was president weren't different.

What they chose to do was not

what the country needed to help fix the economy.

They chose to do health care.

They chose to, you know, work on energy policy,

they chose to ignore the economy.

They did what they wanted to do, so it's a fallacy.

They got done exactly what they set out to do.

It was just the wrong thing to do.

It may not be his election, but losing Congress

fundamentally changed what he could actually do as President,

and certainly started this narrative around, you know, his loss,

his fall from grace, the loss of power, the failure,

you know, of his efforts.

Obama could rouse and inspire. He could do the poetry of politics.

What he couldn't do was argue through the nit and the grit,

make the complex seem clear, tell a story about governing.

He had been a great symbol, but symbols aren't always good

at having conversations, and for a president that's a serious failing.

We welcome President Obama and Governor Romney.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Two years later, in the high-stakes arena

of the first presidential debate with Mitt Romney,

Obama again stumbled.

He seemed nervous, and failed to get his message across.

You know, four years ago, I said that I'm not a perfect man

and I wouldn't be a perfect president, and that's probably

a promise that Governor Romney thinks I've kept.

But I also promised that I'd fight every single day

on behalf of the American people, and the middle class,

and all those who were striving to get in the middle class.

I've kept that promise, and if you'll vote for me

then I promise I'll fight just as hard in a second term.

The pulpit is one thing, the bear pit quite another.

Obama seemed to disdain the job of defending his record result,

Romney reignited his spluttering campaign.

There's no question in my mind

that if the president were to be re-elected, you'll continue to see a middle-class squeeze,

with incomes going down and prices going up.

I'll get incomes up again. You'll see chronic unemployment -

we've had 43 straight months with unemployment above eight percent.

If I'm president, I will create - help create - 12 million new jobs

in this country, with rising incomes.

CHEERING

The polls have grown tighter, and Obama has upped his game,

but when it comes to communication, he doesn't rank

with the past masters.

From Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton,

the recent titans of American politics have had the gift

of fantastic phrases, but also of looking the nation in the eye.

One of the things that's really interesting, being here,

is a lot of people say that Obama might be good

at the kind of really big-picture vision stuff,

or used to be, but he's rubbish

at actually explaining what he's doing,

and all these policies are very difficult to explain.

I was just sitting at the airport yesterday,

watching Bill Clinton give a sort of masterclass

of how to get the message through,

and just picked up the Washington Post here, and it says

that Obama has found a name for Clinton.

He calls him the Secretary of Explaining Stuff.

HE CHUCKLES

We are here to nominate a President.

CHEERING

A man who stopped the slide into depression

and put us on the long road to recovery.

I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside...

CHEERING

..but who burns for America on the inside.

Clinton may well be right -

Obama may burn for America on the inside,

but America has to judge him by what it sees on the outside.

Question - is Obama simply too intellectual, too solitary,

too proud, to be a great president?

'Intelligence is one of Barack Obama's great strengths.'

I've seen it again and again.

His ability to synthesise complicated information -

it's pretty extraordinary.

That said, the fair question to ask

is whether he almost over-relies on his own intelligence.

He is an extremely solitary man.

He's the most introverted President we've seen in the United States

for decades.

Bill Clinton's way of making a decision was to endlessly talk to people on the phone.

He was famous for calling people at one in the morning,

getting them out of bed to tell them to tell him what they thought.

Barack Obama sits alone in his presidential study,

up in the White House residence, for hours at night,

and he sits there writing and thinking and looking at memos

and processing, almost as if he is trying to solve

the problems of the entire country and the world by himself.

And simply blaming Obama is cheap stuff.

After all, he had offered to work with the Republicans,

but perhaps he never understood quite how much they loathed him

for what seems to them to be liberal condescension,

as if all the answers are inside his head.

He thinks he's a philosopher king.

He has such belief that he can speak to the American people

and elevate them and that he doesn't have to talk to the little people

and actually come back and deal with our day-to-day concerns.

And one of the big knocks on Barack Obama, he ran as this great uniter.

He doesn't even talk to Congress any more.

He has no relationships in Congress.

He appears to most people to be above the heavy lifting of actually

shaking hands and getting to meet these people and getting deals done.

The degree to which this majority Congress has refused to work

with the president is unprecedented.

When I came to Congress in the minority, I worked with

President Bush, and there were many other Democrats who did.

At the time, we didn't agree with him on plenty of things,

but on those things - whether it was war funding

or trade agreements that made sense, that expanded opportunities in America -

we found ways to work with the president.

We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!

As time went on, the attacks on Obama became more extreme, not less.

The insurgent, anti-big-government populists of the Tea Party

had become the loudest voices in middle America, and for them

Obama was a rank socialist, a control freak

destroying American freedoms.

There's a level of disrespect for this president

that is unprecedented, and they know

it's because he doesn't look like any other president that we've ever had.

We're talking about race here, aren't we?

-We're talking about race but we're also talking about culture.

-Yeah.

We're talking about a group of people who are uncomfortable

with the changes happening in America and, you know,

what America, you know... What's happening in America,

and they're reacting to it.

What you see in the Congress right now is unprecedented.

We were again on the cusp of a depression.

We were in the worst recession this country's seen in modern times,

and the night before the president

put his hands on that Bible and took the oath of office,

Republicans in Washington sat around in the State House and plotted

on blocking everything he did in order to see that he failed.

And it's not just Washington that's divided.

America is, increasingly so -

hunkered down into different political words

with different ideas about how to deal with economic decline,

and very little come-and-go between right and left.

You really see the whole northeastern coast

of the United States basically runs Democrat from, well,

Maine is a little bit,

but south of Maine to Maryland, and then below that

it's the reverse and everyone's Republican.

People have their own media now.

You have Fox News on the right, you have MSNBC on the left.

They're telling, giving people all this information

and it feels like you've got lots of information

and you're making good decisions but, in fact, what you're doing

is looking for information that reinforces what you already believe.

Political success is at least one-third luck,

and that was the divided America that Obama arrived to lead,

and he had the bad luck to start that leadership

in terrible economic times.

But just when he seemed at his lowest,

good luck arrived - from an unexpected quarter.

Tonight I can report to the American people

and to the world

that the United States has conducted an operation that killed

Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda.

-CHANTING:

-USA! USA!

He'd never campaigned as a tough guy national-security president,

but in 2011, at long last, American special forces

cornered the country's number-one enemy, the man behind the 9/11 attacks.

CHEERING

The photograph that was released of the president in the Situation Room

with all of his advisors sort of watching the operation

being carried out, and the fact that afterwards people knew

that there was no guarantee that it was going to work

or that Osama Bin Laden would even be there, it was a boost for him

and I think that one of the things that we've heard in our research

with voters is that, particularly during the health care debate,

there some questions about his leadership ability,

and how strong he was, and I think that Osama Bin Laden

sort of answered a lot of those questions for people.

Taking Bin Laden off the stage - very, very significant.

It doesn't end the threat of terrorism, but it reduces

Al-Qaeda's global appeal in a very meaningful and measurable way.

When people look at the first four years of the Obama administration,

clearly the crowning achievement was finding Bin Laden

and eliminating Bin Laden.

And there's a policy area highly controversial

outside the United States but over which most Americans do back Obama -

drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists overseas.

The Commander in Chief doesn't need anyone's votes to do this.

Obama decided to involve himself closely in who would die -

not exactly what core liberal supporters expected from him

when he arrived in the White House.

He's very knowledgeable about national security issues.

He speaks without a note, he knows the issues,

he knows the cases, he knows the controversies.

He knows our opinions, he knows our policies,

he knows us by name, even though many of us haven't met him before.

So he's clearly a president steeped in the substance of the issues,

and yet he's had to make decisions which I think are the wrong ones

for the country and for his own legacy.

They're decisions where he's stayed the course with the Bush policies,

much more than they'd like us to believe.

And perhaps the most damning part of the Obama administration

is the Judas kiss he gets from his former opponents

who now congratulate him on seeing the light.

Promising to be a collaborative president and to listen

to different opinions is easy enough when you're campaigning.

The reality can be quite different once you're in office,

as some found out.

When we shared with him our concerns,

it was clear that that bothered him, that irritated him.

I could tell from the body language and the interaction -

the jaws clenching, the back straightening up,

the somewhat dismissive attitude.

We were brought in because we were told the president lived in a bubble,

so we bring our perspectives outside the bubble,

but those perspectives were not always welcomed.

President Obama's political fate will be decided over the economy

above all, but towards the end of the campaign those grand promises

he made about foreign policy have come back to haunt him too.

After the Arab Spring,

far from America being loved in the Muslim world,

consulates and embassies have been attacked

and an ambassador's been killed.

Iran - more dangerous than ever before.

Afghanistan - bad news continues week after week.

And as for a new start in the Middle East peace process,

Obama's relationship with the government in Israel is, frankly, poisonous.

These are not questions that he expected to have to be answering

four years on.

Hello there, everybody! Hello, hello!

I brought some food. LAUGHTER

So where does four years of power leave Barack Obama

in this election campaign?

Well, struggling is the short answer,

and yet not out, despite the economics, despite the hostility -

and why?

Because in a matter of days, his core voters,

including those striking teachers in Chicago,

will come out for him again.

There is enough of the old magic, the half-life of hope,

still ticking away.

Do you think that if he gets elected again,

President Obama will be in a position to do more

for people like yourself?

We believe so, and we believe that

when we help our president get back in office,

we're also going to make sure that he's accountable

to the people directly impacted.

Whatever Obama's political roots,

however he really feels in his waters about supporting

this kind of movement,

in an election he's probably got to turn his back a bit on it

and not hear the voices being expressed so eloquently here.

And meanwhile, on the other side, the centre-right,

former supporters have already turned their backs on him.

I left the Democratic Party because on all the issues

that are being debated in the United States today

I candidly found my views lining up more with Republicans than Democrats.

I had been a member of the conservative wing

of the Democratic Party.

I saw that wing get a little bit smaller every year

and I saw it virtually disappear in 2011.

I was struck by the lack of creativity.

I was struck by the lack of innovation.

It seemed that what they were doing seemed very conventional -

some dusting off a lot of ideas that had kicked around for a while

on the left.

He ran as a centrist. He was going to be a Bill Clinton problem-solver,

we were going to meet in the middle and get things done.

We've never had a more polarised Washington DC.

We've never had a less effective economic and fiscal policy

and monetary policy, quite frankly, in the last three years

than we've had under Barack Obama, in my lifetime.

'Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes,

'Romney should come clean on his.'

Republicans didn't make his life easier in Washington, ever -

politics is a blood sport -

and now Obama has started to punch back with a raw brutality

that he once disdained.

In the 2008 election, he said this.

So we're not going to go around doing negative ads.

We're going to keep it positive, we're going to talk about the issues...

And in 2012, he did this.

-TV BROADCAST:

-'Mitt Romney has used every trick in the book.'

'Romney admits that over the last two years,

'he's paid less than 15% in taxes on 43 million in income.

'Makes you wonder if some years he paid any taxes at all.'

'I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message.'

For Republicans in Obama's famously roughhouse home city,

this is familiar stuff.

You can take the boy out of Chicago,

but you can't take Chicago out of the boy.

A lot of people, certainly from outside the US, have seen Obama as,

you know, an attractively, almost apolitical figure,

standing on the outside.

Rather a pristine, clean-hands kind of political leader.

Oh, I think you can see that culture on display in this campaign

where, you know, the Obama campaign decided not to make this

a campaign about substance.

It's about killing Mitt Romney, taking him down,

a character assassination.

It's very much in line with the Chicago way of doing things

politically, and I think you're seeing a textbook Chicago Democrat

take-down playing out right now, in terms of how they're messaging this.

Each side blames the other.

Business as usual proved too powerful,

and in Washington that does mean business.

Political America is funded by rich America,

meaning a tiny number of people who still do very well

and who've scooped most of the little recent growth in the economy,

who may not have much of a stake in deeper arguments

about deeper problems.

It's been argued that Wall Street has far too much influence,

and we see President Obama going out with his cap, raising huge amounts

of money in the run-up to this, and I just wonder how much of this is...

I hesitate to use the words, but as an inevitable but corrupt bargain.

Well, the American political system is a corrupted system.

If politicians are raising billions of dollars of private money

to run campaigns, you know that this cannot work.

This isn't really representing the attitudes and the opinions...

The middle class.

..of the middle class, much less the poor, who also have a role.

We don't even say the word "poor" in this country,

because they don't contribute anything to the campaigns.

And so the point is that the power of the interest groups

is so enormous,

the hold on politics, that whatever happens is utterly transactional.

Well, that is politics.

But America has seen so much of its wealth-creating muscle shifted away

overseas, and its old hard-working middle class is so worried

about the future that it really needs a better level of debate.

A great president would be a President who confronted

the stuff that mattered most, who fought,

like 20th-century Democrats, for the country to take a different path.

This is not a country in good shape, even though it's still

the world's largest economy,

it still has incredible talent, it still has a great

technological dynamism, it still accomplishes wondrous things.

But we have 15% of the population in poverty,

we have one-in-six or one-in-seven on food stamps in this country,

we have about half of our households within at least twice

the poverty line or below, meaning that we have a staggering

share of America that is financially struggling right now.

We have the worst drought of modern times, we have food prices soaring,

and neither candidate will say a word about it.

So it's even worse than the reality.

It's the broken politics next to that reality,

and I don't see us lifting out of this any time soon.

For Obama, whatever happens, it will never be glad confident morning again.

He's fighting down to the wire for his political life.

Some really bruising, bruising battles.

You know, he's left people with more of a moderate view of him, a middling view.

People actually like him, but they don't love him

they way they loved him in 2008, and they think he's a human being now.

He's a more fluent, cannier politician,

far more experienced, far more savvy

in navigating the ways of Washington.

On the other hand, a part of what was compelling about Obama

in the first place is that he really wanted to change

the nature of politics.

Callie Shell has kept on photographing the president

and she's still close to him.

She's certainly seen him change.

He said, "You remember we thought the campaign was so hard?"

He said, "That's nothing compared to what I've seen in the last four years."

If somebody can live through everything you lived through

as president and not be a different person,

I think that is... You don't want that.

So grizzled inside as well as out.

He just seems as humble but maybe a little bit even more humble.

A sadder and a wiser man, perhaps.

In a matter of days, the American people will choose.

Obama helped stop the collapse of American capitalism

when he first arrived in office, but he hasn't really begun

to change or reform a state system now heavily in hock to China,

and an economy which has lost much of its old vitality.

He lost the country's attention at a crucial time,

and then he lost crucial elections, which means

that he hasn't had the votes, and, perhaps more importantly,

the authority a great president needs.

Result, he is toe-to-toe with a Republican candidate once dismissed

by liberal Washington as a no-hoper.

Obama was given a hard hand to play,

and then the odds were stacked against him,

but now, on his watch, the card table has been kicked aside

and anything might happen.

I think it's pretty clear what happened to hope.

The Republicans say this was a naive and inexperienced president,

who offered far more than he could possibly have delivered

and had no plan, and there is a lot of truth in that.

And Obama's people counter by saying right from the beginning

the Republicans in Congress were aggressively determined

to frustrate everything he dreamed of,

and that is also true.

And so goes the partisan argument,

and poor old hope gets squashed on the road in the middle of it.

But I think this story has another level.

It's also the story of too many years of politicians saying to the voters,

"Support me and tomorrow your lives will be so much better."

But instead of funding that honestly,

through other spending cuts or raising taxes,

they borrowed the money,

and the result is a terrifying burden of debt hanging over America

and hanging over many other countries, too.

It's often said that one of the differences between the Americans

and the British is that the Americans

are much more inclined to believe in miracles,

which is fair enough -

unless you choose to worship a politician.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd