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**Written by Doug Powers

I’d have preferred if Tom Hanks would have appeared as a character named “Forrest Biden” and dished out catchphrases like “stimulus is as stimulus does,” but I guess this is as close as we’ll get:

President Barack Obama’s re-election machine on Thursday released a two-minute trailer for what they have billed as a 17-minute documentary that makes the case that he deserves a second term.

From the giant American flag fluttering over a cheering crowd in the opening scene to the dramatic recounting of the Navy SEAL raid that took out Osama bin Laden to Tom Hanks’ narration, “The Road We’ve Traveled” is undeniably a state-of-the-art pitch for the president.

It could be the first campaign video to feature two Academy Award winners: Hanks, and director Davis Guggenheim, who helmed Al Gore’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.”
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Hanks’s narration begins: “How do we understand this president and his time in office? Do we look at the day’s headlines? Or do we remember what we, as a country, have been through?” Words onscreen promise “a film about determination and progress,” “told by those who saw it happen” as Obama made “tough decisions” to confront “historic challenges.”

The inclusion of the director of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” came about because the producers sought somebody to guide the project who was comfortable working in the myth, fantasy, science fiction, action, true crime and disaster genres.

Here’s the trailer:

First impression: Too predictable. There’s Bush-blame right from the start. It’s like watching a documentary about the ’62 Mets that implies the team would have won the World Series that year if it hadn’t been for the ’61 Mets.

Update: Hanks is also the producer of the factually-challenged movie “Game Change.” How surprising that a bunch of Tinseltown lefties apparently couldn’t pull off an accurate portrayal of a conservative woman.

**Written by Doug Powers

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