Ellen Gray: Filmmaker delves into another America

RIGHT AMERICA: FEELING WRONGED - SOME VOICES FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL. 8 tonight, HBO.

PRESIDENT OBAMA can talk about reaching out to his rivals, but until he sends Malia and Sasha out to hang with the GOP, Nancy Pelosi can still claim to have done more.

Not that it was probably ever the House speaker's idea that her daughter, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, should devote so much of her career to trying to explain one chunk of a divided America to another.

The younger Pelosi, a former NBC producer whose footage of George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign became the Emmy-nominated "Journeys with George," has since taken her eager-puppy treatment to Christian evangelicals for HBO in "Friends of God" and "The Trials of Ted Haggard," as well as to Democratic candidates in the 2004 film "Diary of a Political Tourist."

Last year, camcorder in hand, she followed Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. The result, which premieres tonight on HBO, is "Right America: Feeling Wronged - Some Voices From the Campaign Trail."

Provocatively titled but disappointingly executed, Pelosi's latest effort, which she describes as listening "to Americans who did not want Barack Obama to be their president," is more likely to comfort Obama supporters than it is to change minds.

Not only does that sort of change rarely occur at campaign rallies, but the people who attend them - and this goes for Democrats, too - aren't always the most articulate advocates for their own causes.

It doesn't help, either, that "Right America: Feeling Wronged" focuses, necessarily, on the anticipation of being wronged. Had McCain won, would HBO have been interested in an hour of people talking about their dislike of the guy who lost?

And yet there's an anger in this country that predates the emergence of Obama as a national figure, and it would be worth a lot more than an hour to have a lucid discussion of what that anger might be about. Don't look for it tonight, though. Because "Right America" is largely about the inflammatory soundbites.

"Do you feel there are two Americas emerging from this election?" Pelosi asks one man. "There's gays, and there's working people," he replies, laughing.

Elsewhere, a slightly wild-eyed woman in a McCain-Palin hat declares, "John McCain has to be elected. He's a strong man. He will protect our country, about the terrorist thing. That's another thing that is very scary - what do you do if you wake up in the middle of 9/11 and you don't have a country? You're bombed - you don't know that that can't happen. It already happened."

"This is God's country," says a young man in Pennsylvania who's wearing a cowboy hat, adding of Obama, "He's never seen it."

Asked if there's anything Obama could do "to redeem himself in your eyes," he suggests, "Drop out of the race."

In Zanesville, Ohio, Pelosi's camera lingers for a count or two too long on one enthusiastic McCain supporter's jiggling underarms - a sin the 38-year-old filmmaker might not be old enough to yet grasp - but even she knows there's a problem when one of her interviewees gets started on his theory that Obama's the Antichrist.

If she puts him in the film, she tells him, "people are going to say that I just picked out the craziest guy in the crowd."

Yep.

And they might just be right.

There's nothing thrilling about the state of the U.S. economy, but that doesn't mean a look "Inside the Meltdown" by PBS' "Frontline" (9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 12), isn't a nail-biter.

Producer Michael Kirk and others take us inside Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in the final days and hours when things fell apart. They then follow the crisis to Congress and Treasury, explaining as clearly as I've heard yet both the bailout and the mess that made it necessary.

Still, there might be a drinking game in the number of times one talking head or another talks about how "smart" major players in the crisis were, even as they're describing actions that don't always fit the description.

For those looking for a more ground-level view, CNBC is repeating last week's excellent "House of Cards" documentary at 8 tonight.

Hard not to be as incredulous as correspondent CNBC David Faber often seems to be as he talks to everyone from homeowners and mortgage brokers to Alan Greenspan about a crisis built in part on financial instruments even the former Fed chairman admits he didn't fully understand.

He's hardly alone in that, but it's Greenspan's spirited defense of a system whose strengths, he argues, more than make up for its vulnerabilities that might make you wonder if there's any such thing on Wall Street as a lesson learned. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.