Obama, Yellowstone, and Ken Burns

Obama took the family to Yellowstone this past weekend.

Don't confuse the little bit of time that Obama, Michelle, and the kids spent at Yellowstone with a vacation stop. Martha's Vineyard will be the site of their lavish summer vacation.

This wasn't anything like your typical American family road trip to a national park. This was business. It was a photo op.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Presidents have been making the cross-country jaunt to Yellowstone National Park for 116 years, part of a summer ritual known to generations of Americans. This weekend, President Obama joins a tradition that began long before Air Force One or even the automobile were invented.

...While in office, nine presidents have visited the granddaddy of all modern national parks and most, Whittlesey says, arrived here for vacation purposes. Obama will be number ten, though he stopped by for just a few hours.

Just a few hours?

This has photo op written all over it.

...It’s a nostalgic visit for the president. As a youth en route from Hawaii to his mother’s ancestral home in Kansas, he fondly recalls his grandmother making sure they diverted through Yellowstone to watch Old Faithful Geyser erupt and perhaps catch a glimpse of the park’s roadside bears. The memory was important enough that he mentioned it in his best-selling biography.

Dayton Duncan, who together with filmmaker Ken Burns is premiering “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” this fall on PBS, says Yellowstone is a perfect venue, in this time of great social and economic tumult, for pausing to reflect on American values.

After visiting with the president earlier this week, Duncan believes that Barack and Michelle Obama’s desire to give their daughters a taste of “classic America” is sincere. Nature, he says, has a humbling, calming effect on everyone. What’s important with the Obama visit, though, is the symbolism.

The demography of national park visitors remains overwhelmingly white. But the country is changing, and in order for large nature preserves to maintain cultural relevancy — as well as earning political and fiscal support — they need to resonate with all citizens, including African Americans and Hispanics, now the fastest growing ethnic groups in the country.

When Obama draws upon Yellowstone as a touchstone to his boyhood, and sets out to share the park again with his wife and children, it matters, Duncan notes. Moreover, he sees Obama’s visit as having a direct parallel with one taken by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the height of the Great Depression. In fact, in 1937 FDR delivered a “fireside chat” over the radio from Yellowstone.

“Yellowstone is a uniquely American invention,” Duncan says. “The National Park System is also an American idea. The very notion of setting aside the most spectacular places in the country for everyone, rather than just for the rich or nobility, came from us, and it, in turn, spread across the world. It is part of who we are as a people, embedded in our civic DNA.”

Both FDR and Obama fit the profile of activist presidents confronting huge, unprecedented economic challenges. Roosevelt confronted high unemployment by directing large sums toward creating the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC put millions of Americans back to work blazing hiking trails through parks like Yellowstone, building bridges and visitors’ centers, all of which are still used today.

...“Too often, government is portrayed as something that is separate from the people instead of being an extension of them,” Duncan says. “This is a place where the president can remind the rest of the country about not just the specialness of Yellowstone but that parks are part of their inheritance. They belong to all of us, no matter who we are.”

So Dayton Duncan along with Ken Burns will premiere The National Parks: America's Best Idea on PBS this fall.

And Duncan just happened to talk to Obama this week about visiting Yellowstone.

He reports that Obama's visit to the park is "sincere."

What?

Do you think Obama and the family at Yellowstone will be part of the new film?

I think so.

No doubt about it.

Duncan can say, "Mission accomplished."

The National Parks: America's Best Idea, a Ken Burns film, with special guest star Barack Obama.

Coming to PBS this fall.