One year into Barack Obama's presidency, Al Jazeera's Avi Lewis measures the gap between the 2008 campaign's promises and the reality on the ground. He interviews backroom powerbrokers from both parties, a prominent cable news host, and die-hard campaign volunteers whose enthusiasm has curdled into disappointment, then walks a mall full of Republicans lined up for a Sarah Palin book signing to hear the case against Obama from the right. The film tracks the fights that defined the year: the Wall Street bailout, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and the bruising fight over health care reform, with criticism coming from the left for compromise and from the right for overreach. Rather than settle on a single verdict, Lewis treats the country's fractured opinions of Obama as the real subject, a population that projected its hopes onto one man and is now sorting out what is left of them. It closes on a United States that is fragmented and fearful but, in his framing, still not without hope.