PrintOctober 4, 2008
My interview for a Finnish TV documentary on Obama
A couple of weeks ago, I was pleased to be interviewed by Rauli Virtanen, a noted Finnish journalist with quite a career. He was filming a documentary on Barack Obama which will run on European television two days before the election.
We ended up driving around Chicago for a while, looking for a good spot to film the interview. We found a quiet space in Little Italy (except for a helicopter that kept circling us toward the end of the interview).
He became aware of American Thinker and my writing on politics through the efforts of Adina Klein, a senior at the University of Wisconsin, who clearly is more on the ball than I was at that time of my life. Adina's father helped quite a bit on the day of the interview and turned out to be a very interesting man to chat with before the interview.
We talked for about an hour on politics in America. I thought the focus was just going to be on Barack Obama, but the interview need up covering a wide spectrum of topics in order to put the rise of Barack Obama in context of other aspects of America.
I was prepared for a harsher set of questions, given the clear preference for Barack Obama in Europe and my own skepticism, but I was wrong. Rauli was unfailingly courteous and
polite, and my own questions to him were answered informatively. He has had a very interesting career, and was also very well-informed about American politics. I did find it interesting that he, too, had one thing wrong about Sarah Palin -- the same error Charles Gibson made about Governor Palin's prayer for our troops in Iraq. It was not the version perpetrated by left-wing blogs: that she saw it as God's War. Instead, in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, she hoped God would look after our soldiers.Rauli was receptive to hearing that version, as opposed to the wrong version.
Rauli asked about John McCain and patriotism and wondered why Barack Obama was considered elitist.
He told me that he was interviewing a Congresswoman (I suspect a local Congresswoman from my old district in Chicago, Jan Schakowsky -- a Democrat supporter of Barack Obama who may well become a Senator should he become President) and that he was going to attend a sermon by Reverend James Meeks, a man that Obama has praised in the past.
Rauli was then going to travel through battleground states on his way to Washington, D.C. where he will film the last of his interviews before heading back to Helsinki for final editing and composing.
A great experience for me and I hope a rewarding one for Rauli.
