Tag: barack obama

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Arts Culture

Souza’s shade: Documentary recalls a world not so long ago

Pete Souza will discuss The Way I See It, a documentary showing on MSNBC on October 16, about his eight years photographing Barack Obama. A conversation with Souza and former deputy secretary of labor Chris will be available through virginiafilmfestival.org for a limited time beginning October 21. Image courtesy of VAFF.

Four years ago, former White House chief photographer Pete Souza wouldn’t have imagined he’d be the subject of a documentary and an Instagram superstar.

“We hadn’t elected Donald Trump four years ago,” reminds Souza in a phone interview.

Three years and 10 months ago, that had changed. Souza began posting photos of former President Barack Obama on Instagram with wry commentary that sharply contrasted with the actions of the White House’s current occupant. “I didn’t think Trump was competent,” he says. “He was a reality TV star.”

Since leaving the White House in 2017, Souza has published two books and accrued over 2.3 million followers on Instagram. The photos in Obama: An Intimate Portrait and Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, inspired the documentary The Way I See It, which airs at 10pm October 16, on MSNBC.

He admits he didn’t know what throwing shade was when he posted a photo of the red curtains in the Obama Oval Office after Donald Trump opted for the glitzier gold draperies, and Souza said he liked the old ones better.

“I didn’t think I would get the attention I have,” he says.

The film also traces Souza’s evolution from photojournalist to White House historian—he worked for President Ronald Reagan too—to outspoken critic.

“I had gone back and forth twice,” says Souza, working for the Chicago Tribune between his stints in the White House. “It’s not like you walk into the White House and become a different type of photographer. The work itself is the same.”

For the newspaper, the concern is getting a photograph for the next day. In the White House, it’s “are you doing a good job documenting this president for history?” he explains.

“When I left the White House, I was not working as a photojournalist,” says Souza. “It’s like John Lewis says, ‘If you see something wrong, say something.’”

Says Souza, “I have a unique perspective on the office of the president,” and both Reagan and Obama respected the dignity of the office. “Maybe there was a little hesitation about speaking out, but not much. I was offended by [Trump’s] trashing of the office.”

Souza has been to Charlottesville several times, including when Obama showed up in 2010 to try to bolster Tom Perriello’s unsuccessful reelection to Congress.

He says he doesn’t see Charlottesville as a symbol for white supremacy after 2017’s Unite the Right rally, but rather as a place where “an incident of white supremacy” occurred, much as Minneapolis and Kenosha and Louisville have become known for incidents of racial injustice.

He did have an incident here at UVA on a book tour a couple of years ago, “the only time I’d done a presentation where something questionable happened,” he says. “Just as I began to speak, fire alarms went off. Someone had called in a bomb threat.” While nothing was found, it did leave him wondering whether that was coincidental or “because of me.”

Filmmakers Jayme Lemons, Evan Hayes, and Laura Dern were already Souza fans when they jumped on Lemons’ idea to do a documentary on him, and tapped director Dawn Porter, who was in post-production on John Lewis: Good Trouble. Porter realized the urgency to get the film out before the 2020 election after she saw a Souza appearance and his photographs moved her to tears.

“I didn’t realize until I saw them as a collection, the magnitude of what we’d lost in the 2016 election,” she says

Using Souza’s vast archive of 2 million photos from his eight years with Obama, the film crafts a montage of Obama’s leadership with intimate, candid shots. Authenticity was a clear goal for Souza, and his photographs make you realize that there are no such images coming from the current administration.

While Trump is rarely mentioned by name, in the film Souza demonstrates the difference in styles of the two presidents, comparing the iconic, nail-biting war room shot of senior Obama administration officials watching the takedown of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and a posed Trump photo with uniformed generals staring at the camera after Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in 2019.

Following Trump’s Bible-clutching photo op in front of St. John’s Church in June, Souza parried on Instagram with a shot of Obama inside the church and the comment, “No tear gas was needed to get there.”

Souza says initially he turned down the job with Reagan because he wasn’t that interested in politics. And while he didn’t agree with Reagan’s policies, Souza became a fan of Reagan’s genuineness and his empathetic understanding about the power of his decisions.

With his extraordinary access to both presidents, was he ever asked to leave the room?

“I think I had a good, intuitive sense of when to leave the room,” Souza says. He recalls one time when Obama asked him to leave when the president “was going to admonish someone.”

The Way I See It reminds viewers of what it’s like to have a president with a sense of humor. Souza recounts asking Obama if he could ride with him in the limousine to his second inauguration, and the president quipped that he had planned to make out with Michelle.

Souza worries that young people won’t realize that what is happening in the White House now isn’t normal, and he says in the film his decision to troll Trump isn’t partisan.

“It’s all about the dignity of the office,” he says. “This is somebody that I think is not a good person.”

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Lawrence Jackson

Former White House photographer Lawrence Jackson, who took this photo of Michelle and Barack Obama, reads from his book, "Yes We Did," at New Dominion Bookshop this week. Photo by Lawrence Jackson

Magnetic moments: “Eight years in the White House went by so fast,” says Barack Obama in the forward to Yes We Did, the new book by former official White House photographer Lawrence Jackson. (We feel you, Mr. President.) Jackson will tell stories about his work behind the scenes, snapping photos of Obama’s meetings with world leaders, tender moments with his family, and connections with people in everyday life.

Friday, November 8. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 295-2552.

Categories
Opinion

Germ of an idea: How to disinfect dirty politics

John Adams and Mark Herring. Courtesy photos

False equivalence makes me sick. Likely it does the same to you, too, even if you don’t recognize the symptoms. It’s rhetorical MRSA, an indestructible super-bug that infects the mind and body politic. And as has been widely reported, a new strain of contagion took hold on August 15 when the 2016 Electoral College Winner declared that yes, Virginia, Nazi-resisters are as bad as Nazis. With his toxic words about the “very fine people” standing up for white supremacy, Trump attacked civic decency, democratic values and American history.

Sadly, it was a familiar pain. Last time I felt it this bad was when members down at the Church of Privileged Self-Righteousness declared there was “no difference” between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Way back then, such folks had the media to lean on for some of their claims.

Plenty of so-called liberal-leaning pundits equated the computing issues and defensive personality of one candidate with the vulgarities and incompetence of the other, a known sexual predator, racist, liar and cheat who was entirely unqualified to run a local street cleaning crew, let alone the United States. Chanting “they’re all the same,” a critical number of true believers sat out the election, leaving the rest of us, but especially the nation’s most vulnerable, with a raging staph infection.

If, after all that has happened since, you still think skipping out on Election Day is inconsequential, you’re not paying attention. And yet, a recent study from the Washington, D.C.-based research firm Lake Research Partners, released by the Voter Participation Center, predicts that about 40 million fewer people will vote in 2018 compared to 2016. The biggest drop-off is projected to be among millennials and unmarried women, crucial members of what’s called the “rising American electorate,” which also includes blacks and Latinos.

In Virginia, the center projects, roughly 1.1 million of those voters will stay away from the polls next year. The study, based on census data, does not sample why non-voters and non-registered voters would choose to stay home. We can only guess.

But you had to travel only as far as the MLK Performing Arts Center for the August 27 “recovery” town hall and the August 21 Charlottesville City Council meeting before that to understand how little trust Virginians have in government these days—and why.

And yet, local voting is the best way to throw the bums out, if that’s your goal.

Leading up the federal elections in 2018, here’s another reason to get in practice and vote on November 7: the race for state attorney general. Democratic incumbent Mark Herring is running against Republican John Adams, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who opposes reproductive choice and marriage equality and vows to roll back Obama-era environmental regulations. Herring, among other things, supports Obama’s Clean Power Plan and has the endorsement of gay rights groups. Perhaps even more crucially at this moment, Herring is inclined to let localities manage their own statuary and Adams is not.

No doubt, false equivalence is toxic. The same can be true for malaise. Maybe you can’t do anything about the sputum coming out of Trump’s mouth. But you can beat back the spread of malaise. The center that commissioned the voting study noted it’s likely more effective to register new voters than to try to persuade disaffected registered voters to give a damn. When left unchecked, no difference-ism can be as harmful as false equivalence.

So get your rest, Virginia, and then take your medicine: Register two voters and call me in the morning.

Yes, Virginia is a monthly op-ed column.

Categories
Opinion

Legal matters: How court rulings will affect the 2016 elections

Governor Terry McAuliffe’s restoration of felon voting rights, which is headed to court, is the third battle that affects this year’s election in Virginia. Photo by Robinson

Although it’s not something most voters tend to notice, Virginia’s upcoming congressional and presidential elections have already, to a surprising large degree, been shaped and remolded by a number of crucial court rulings (with one of the biggest still to come).

The first of these legal battles began way back in 2010, when the General Assembly was fighting over the constitutionally mandated decennial congressional redistricting (say that three times fast).  At the time the GA was split, with the Republican-dominated House of Delegates having approved one plan, and the Democratic-controlled Senate pushing another. The elephants, astutely realizing that they were likely to flip the Senate in the next election, basically sat on their haunches until they gained an additional two seats, and then passed their preferred redistricting plan with an assist from then-lieutenant governor Bill Bolling.

Fast forward six years, and that plan (which, incidentally, had the approval of incumbents from both parties) has been found unconstitutional thanks to its blatant racial gerrymandering, and replaced by a less GOP-friendly map created by a panel of federal judges. The reason that judges drew the new lines is because assembly Republicans played a high-stakes game of chicken, assuming the U.S. Supreme Court would bail them out before the election. But due to the death of Antonin Scalia, among other factors, the supremes refused to hear the case, and thus the elephants’ 8-3 congressional advantage in Virginia is now greatly imperiled.

The second big legal battle was waged over the voter ID law passed by the Republican-controlled assembly after Barack Obama beat Mitt “Moneybags” Romney in the 2012 presidential election. The law requires voters to show an approved form of ID, such as a Virginia driver’s license or U.S. passport, at the polls. If they don’t have one, they are forced to cast a provisional ballot that will only be counted if and when the voter supplies a valid ID to the registrar’s office.

Although the Democratic Party of Virginia fought hard to get this law (which, like all voter ID laws, disproportionately affects poor, elderly and minority voters) overturned, a federal judge recently ruled it constitutional, which means it will be in effect for the current election year, at the very least.

The final big legal clash will be fought during an upcoming special session of Virginia’s supreme court, where the fate of Governor Terry McAuliffe’s recent move to restore the voting rights of more than 200,000 convicted felons will be decided. Republicans have been apoplectic about McAuliffe’s action, and have vowed to overturn it before the November election. The court’s accelerated schedule, along with recent revelations that a small number of felons in prison and on active probation accidentally had their rights restored, indicates that McAuliffe’s clemency order might be in jeopardy, but we won’t know for sure until the ruling arrives.

What’s being lost in all of these skirmishes, however, is the fact that this election almost certainly represents the high-water mark in the GOP’s campaign to systematically disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as possible. With the U.S. Supreme Court now evenly split between liberals and conservatives, and the near-certainty that President Hillary Rodham Clinton will select the next two to five justices, the long-term prospects for strict voter ID laws and extreme racial gerrymandering are looking grim. As is the fate of the Donald Trump-led Republican Party, for that matter.

So watch out, all you mollycoddled incumbents and vote-suppressing extremists —one day soon you might actually have to start winning elections fair and square.

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

Categories
News

From the Oval Office: Obama responds to local’s letter

Jay Varner, a local writer and professor, received a handwritten letter from President Barack Obama. Photo by Martyn Kyle

After a friend was one of the estimated 13,393 people shot and killed in America last year, Batesville resident Jay Varner wrote to eight political representatives about the increasing threat of gun violence. Last month, he received a handwritten response from the president of the United States.

The August 26 on-air slayings of WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward made Varner feel helpless, enraged and upset, he says. Last spring, he met Parker and her then-boyfriend and later fiancé, Chris Hurst, at Roanoke’s Hollins University where Varner was a visiting professor. One of Varner’s previous students, a current WDBJ7 employee, had attended a reading that Varner was giving, and brought the couple with her.

“We kind of immediately hit if off,” Varner says. “Alison was such a vibrant person.”

So they kept in touch on Facebook, and months later, when he learned that two WDBJ7 employees were murdered while filming a live segment at Smith Mountain Lake, he immediately thought of the reporter, her fiancé and his former student—all three of who he knew worked the morning shift at the station.

“I started to shake and nearly fell to my knees when I saw the location,” he wrote in the letter addressed “Dear Mister President.”

Varner, who teaches classes at UVA, PVCC and JMU, says he wrote to ask what he should tell his students when they ask what today’s leaders are doing to end gun violence.

“What are you going to do about this? Have you now seen enough of your constituents gunned down?” Varner wrote. “Have you sent enough condolences and issued enough statements expressing sadness over such tragedies? Have you seen enough grieving friends and family walk shell shocked through the aftermath of bloodshed?”

Some representatives responded, including Senator Creigh Deeds, who was stabbed several times in the face by his mentally ill son who shot and killed himself minutes later, but the only person to answer Varner’s question directly was President Barack Obama.

After opening the letter—written on a cream-colored, high-quality card with an azure letterhead at the top—Varner says, “First, of course, I was shocked,” and also “surprised that the president of the United States had responded to something I had written.”

The president reads 10 hand-picked letters in the Oval Office each night, according to a statement on the White House’s website by Mike Kelleher, the director of presidential correspondence. Obama sometimes chooses to write back.

In his response to Varner, Obama wrote:

“Thank you for your letter, and your passion. Tell your students that their President won’t stop doing everything he can to stop gun violence. And don’t fill them with cynicism—change isn’t easy, but it requires persistence and hope.”

Varner says he especially appreciates the note about not being cynical.

“The more we speak up, the harder this message is to ignore,” he says. “And that’s something in the president’s response that more than just my students need to hear: Change takes hope, it takes persistence, and it means we can’t give up doing what’s right.”

On March 13, Hurst and Parker’s parents appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” for a 90-minute show dedicated to gun violence in America.

“When my daughter, Alison, was murdered on live television, I pledged that I was going to do whatever it takes to reduce gun violence in this country,” Andy Parker said in a speech just days after her death. On “CBS Sunday Morning,” he said he believes universal background checks should be mandated for those who wish to purchase guns, and gun show loopholes that allow private buyers to purchase firearms without a background check or a record of the sale should be closed.

Vester Lee Flanagan II, the disgruntled former station employee who killed Parker and Ward and later himself, did pass a background check and purchased his gun legally.

“There are people that say, ‘Well, nothing would’ve prevented her death,’” Varner says about Parker. “Okay, maybe so. But is that a reason to not try and save the next life? Even if it’s one life?”

Click to enlarge President Barack Obama’s response.

Read President Barack Obama's response here.