This short video, made during the Educator’s Workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA), is a teaser/trailer for a paper on which I’m currently working. The paper is on Barack Obama’s rhetoric of “unity” as relying on an ironic sense of community and conflict in contemporary politics; it is also about the potential pitfalls and failures of such rhetoric, which we have seen strongly in the past couple of months in the most recent “debate” over health care reform.