One more particularly interesting point I wanted to raise in relation to W. has to do with W.s predecessor, i.e. Obama, and with the question of a black voice, that constitutes one of the more interesting aspects of W. It is clear that Obama, no less than Bush, is a leader with a universalizing political desire that has to do with being a fatherless son (his autobiography is famously entitled Dreams about my father, and W. itself is a film framed by a dream, with which it opens and closes, and contains as well dreams that W. had of his father.). Obama's father, on the other hand, was not a great political leader, not even an American, and it is clear that in this sense his way of not belonging, thus of being abandoned, is to an extent of a different nature than Bush's. While Stone made the film prior to Obama's victory, it is clear that this victory is already marked somehow in the film, especially in relation to the question of blacks, those members of America that are particularly abandoned and fatherless, and presented in the movie as if not having any voice with which to speak. The two blacks or African American characters are of course Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Powell is presented as the most sympathetic member of the Bush cabinet while Rice is presented as the most ridiculous, practically being a caricature (whether this points to Stone's Chauvinism or not, I have no idea,but the point he makes through this is interesting.) While they are vastly different in this sense, it is clear that Powell and Rice also share something, and this is not belonging to the white establishment, and as such as both equally not really being able to a voice of their own. While Powell is presented as an honorable and reasonable man, he is also someone who finally has to cooperate with the evil people surrounding Bush, as if not really believing that he has a right to speak, and finally, in a very symbolic moment, in his famous speech to the U.N that many see as having been the nail in the coffin that allowed for the iraq war to take place, he is seen basically as someone whose speech is taken away from him, becoming an empty mouthpiece for the watching dogs of Cheney. Rice, on the other hand, is from the beginning presented as literally voiceless (she doesn't utter a word for the first half of the film) and when she finally starts to speak, she is a pure parrot, just there to echo Bush without anything to say of her own. It is as if the blacks, those disinherited and fatherless people, not being entitled in this sense to even speak on their own, had to wait for someone who can speak in the name of a call, of a speech higher then the father's, and perhaps through this, finally achieve their own voice, being able to start to speak for themselves.
