FRONTLINE reconstructs Barack Obama's first term through interviews with White House aides, cabinet officials, and journalists who were in the room for the decisions that defined it. The film tracks the 2009 stimulus fight and the health care battle that consumed his first two years, then moves into the debt-ceiling standoff with a newly Republican House and the fraying relationship with Speaker John Boehner. Abroad, it follows the escalation of drone strikes and targeted killings, including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and asks what those decisions cost a president who campaigned against the war footing of his predecessor. Aides describe the shift from the hope of the 2008 campaign to the grind of governing against an opposition that treated compromise as surrender. The film keeps returning to Obama himself: cautious, deliberative, and increasingly isolated inside a system built for gridlock. It closes with a presidency that changed the country's health care system and killed its most wanted enemy, while leaving Washington more divided than it found it.