The Road We've Traveled
The Guggenheim film look less at where we are and more at what where were and what we've been through. When the narration tells viewers, "Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president," that's not hyperbole. Given that FDR "only" had to deal with the Great Depression, and Obama inherited a financial crisis and two wars, Michael Beschloss has argued that Obama's job was actually harder than anything any incoming president had to deal with in modern American history. Put it this way: Obama entered the cockpit of a plane that was crashing, and managed to gain altitude, slowly but surely. As easy as it is to complain about the ongoing turbulence, the point of videos like these is to remind folks that the nose isn't pointed down anymore.