Review: Davis Guggenheim's Barack Obama documentary The Road We've Traveled (2012) alternates between patronizing simplicity and creepy propaganda.

Maybe I'm just too cynical.  But even while I agree with about 90% of the content of this 17-minute documentary, I can't help but be creeped out by the context.  With Tom Hanks's narration, generically swelling music, and various stills of Barack Obama looking 'presidential' while various Americans smile or cheer approvingly, this is the kind of thing that bugs me on a number of levels.  First of all, I cannot help but be repulsed by the idea that a president ordering a military execution, even one on Osama Bin Laden, is seen as a crowning example of 'leadership'. Putting aside the issue of how much Obama's foreign policy has resembled Dick Cheney on steroids (Obama doesn't torture, but he will hold you in indefinite detention and/or order your due process-free execution while randomly bombing the crap out of civilians with unmanned drones), there is something deeply wrong with a nation that puts the ability to order the killing of another person, even a sworn enemy under just cause, as paramount example of 'leadership'.  Aaron Sorkin of course rebutted the idea in both several episodes of The West Wing and during a key first-act juncture in The American President, where Michael Douglas explains in detail why ordering military action that will take human lives is perhaps 'the least presidential thing I do'.  No, President Barack Obama never donned a flight suit and gave a presidential address from an aircraft carrier, but the idea that the (perhaps lawful/justified) killing of another person should be among the crowning accomplishments of any person, let alone a leader, is distasteful.  It was distasteful when Bush played cowboy while other people's sons and daughters bled out in the Middle East, and its only a little less distasteful when Obama claims this single military action as a shining example of 'leadership'.