Obama Gets a Great Deal on "Obama's Deal"

By Dave Andrusko

It's amazing what you run across over a bowl of cereal. Scanning the Washington Post this morning, I read Philip Kennicott's ode to "Frontline" producer Michael Kirk and his "Obama's Deal," which will air tonight on PBS.

President Obama in the Oval Office Michael Kirk's documentary "Obama's Deal."

The "Deal" is, of course, ObamaCare.

Let me beginning with a couple of paragraphs from the story.

The goal, says Kirk, is to reproduce the ambiance of a dinner party. He looks for six to eight central players, who, through the course of the film, come to seem in dialogue with one another, helping to explain the complicated interplay of politics, economics and history.

"Put them all in a similar background, so there's no influence," he explains. "Cast them in the best possible light and give respect to their opinion."

As regular "Frontline" viewers will recognize, this flattering approach turns down the volume, metaphorically, on the news. If Kirk is throwing a virtual dinner party, he's also hosting an idealized one.

"It's not a food fight," he says.

Of course we won't know how this works, literally or metaphorically, until we see the hour-long presentation. But we have a hint when Kennicott tells us that "Obama's deal" is "best seen as Chapter 2 in Kirk's ongoing analysis of Obama's personality.

"In last year's 'Dreams of Obama,' he followed the ascent of a minor Chicago politician, who gave a powerful speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, to the most coveted office in the land," Kennicott writes. "And he started probing at the emerging lines of the president's personality: How tough is he? How pragmatic? How much does his rhetoric match reality? Does he compromise too much, too soon? Or is he a visionary with the rare capacity to move the obstructions of history?"

Like to lay odds on whether the portrait paints Obama as weakling or as visionary?

A more nuts and bolts analysis of the program is a review found in the Boston Globe. Whereas Kennicott is mesmerized by Kirk's "tick-tock journalism," Sam Allis gets caught up in the sleazy wheeling and dealing, seeing ObamaCare as the great test of whether Obama's Administration would collapse barely one year into his first term.

Obama comes off as the man of steel, who refused to bend when others around him counseled "to put some points on the board''--put forth something smaller and easier to pass than the gigantic proposal which eventually passed. Obama's primary (only?) flaw is that he left management of the bill in the hands of the politicians on the Hill.

But, according to Allis, "Down in the polls, he finally took personal control of the battle--no one else could match his campaign rhetoric"--and carried the day. How?

By taking "his show on the road for a month to sell health care reform to America" and by "acced[ing] to demands for an executive order ensuring that no federal funding from the bill would be used to pay for abortions." Talk about inaccuracies.

In fact, the more the President campaigned, the lesser the support for Obama. And he carried the day, not because the public swooned at his eloquence on the hustings, but because a group of erstwhile pro-life Democrats used the fig-leaf of an executive order to vote for a bill saturated in abortion-promoting ingredients.

"Obama's Deal" is on PBS at 9:00 EST.