Cautious reformers tipped for new China leadership

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s ruling Communist Party will this month unveil its new top leadership team, expected to again be an all-male cast of politicians whose instincts are to move cautiously on reform.

Sources close to the leadership say 10 main candidates are vying for seven seats on the party’s next Politburo Standing Committee, the peak decision-making body which will steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next five years.

Only two candidates are considered certainties going into the party’s 18th congress, which starts on Thursday: leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping and his designated deputy, Li Keqiang, who are set to be installed as president and premier next March.

Of the remaining eight contenders, only one has the reputation as a political reformer and only one is a woman.

Following are short biographies of the candidates, including their reform credentials and possible portfolio responsibilities.

XI JINPING

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Considered a cautious reformer, having spent time in top positions in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, both at the forefront of China‘s economic reforms.

Xi Jinping, 59, is China‘s vice president and President Hu Jintao’s anointed successor. He will take over as Communist Party boss at the congress and then as head of state in March.

Xi belongs to the party’s “princeling” generation, the offspring of communist revolutionaries. His father, former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, fought alongside Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war. Xi watched his father purged and later, during the Cultural Revolution, spent years in the hardscrabble countryside before making his way to university and then to power.

Married to a famous singer, Xi has crafted a low-key and sometimes blunt political style. He has complained that officials’ speeches and writings are clogged with party jargon and has demanded more plain speaking.

Xi went to work in the poor northwest Chinese countryside as a “sent-down youth” during the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, and became a rural commune official. He went on to study chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing and later gained a doctorate in Marxist theory from Tsinghua.

A native of the poor, inland province of Shaanxi, Xi was promoted to governor of southeastern Fujian province in 1999 and became party boss in neighboring Zhejiang province in 2003.

In 2007, the tall, portly Xi secured the top job in China‘s commercial capital, Shanghai, when his predecessor was caught up in a huge corruption case. Later that year he was promoted to the party’s standing committee.

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LI KEQIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen as another cautious reformer due to his relatively liberal university experiences.

Vice Premier Li Keqiang, 57, is the man tipped to be China‘s next premier, taking over from Wen Jiabao.

His ascent will mark an extraordinary rise for a man who as a youth was sent to toil in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

He was born in Anhui province in 1955, son of a local rural official. Li worked on a commune that was one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s. By the time he left Anhui, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.

He studied law at the elite Peking University, which was among the first Chinese schools to resume teaching law after the Cultural Revolution. He worked to master English and co-translated “The Due Process of Law” by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.

In 1980, Li, then in the official student union, endorsed controversial campus elections. Party conservatives were aghast, but Li, already a prudent political player, stayed out of the controversial vote.

He climbed the party ranks and in 1983 joined the Communist Youth League’s central secretariat, headed then by Hu Jintao.

Li later served in challenging party chief posts in Liaoning, a frigid northeastern rustbelt province, and rural Henan province. He was named to the powerful nine-member standing committee in 2007.

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WANG QISHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer and problem solver with deep experience tackling tricky economic and political problems.

Wang Qishan, 64, is the most junior of four vice premiers and an ex-mayor of Beijing. But he has a keen grasp of complex economic issues and is the only likely member of the Standing Committee to have been chief executive of a corporation, leading the state-owned China Construction Bank from 1994 to 1997. As such, he may take a leading role in shaping economic policy, including trade and foreign investment.

Wang is an experienced negotiator who has led finance and trade negotiations as well as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with the United States. He is a favorite of foreign investors and has long been seen as a problem solver, sorting out a debt crisis in Guangdong province where he was vice governor in the late 1990s and replacing the sacked Beijing mayor after a cover-up of the deadly SARS virus in 2003.

Wang is also a princeling, son-in-law of a former vice premier and ex-standing committee member, Yao Yilin. His possible portfolio could be chairman of the National People’s Congress (China’s rubber-stamp parliament), head of parliament’s advisory body, executive vice premier (responsible for economic issues) or the party’s top anti-corruption official.

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LIU YUNSHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash.

Liu Yunshan, 65, may take over the propaganda and ideology portfolio for the Standing Committee.

He has a background in media, once working as a reporter for state-run news agency Xinhua in Inner Mongolia, where he later served in party and propaganda roles before shifting to Beijing.

As minister of the party’s Propaganda Department since 2002, Liu has also sought to control China‘s Internet, which has more than 500 million users. He has been a member of the wider Politburo for two five-year terms ending this year.

Liu has not worked directly for the Communist Youth League, but is aligned to it through his lengthy career in an inland, poor province, long ties to the party’s propaganda system and close relationship with Hu Jintao.

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LI YUANCHAO

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A reformer who has courted foreign investment and studied in the United States.

Li Yuanchao, 61, oversees the appointment of senior party, government, military and state-owned enterprise officials as head of the party’s powerful organization department. On the Standing Committee, he could head the fight against corruption.

Li, whose father was a vice-mayor of Shanghai, has risen far since his parents were persecuted and he was a humble farm hand during the Cultural Revolution.

Politically astute, Li can navigate between interest groups, from Hu’s Youth League power base to the princelings.

As party chief in his native province, Jiangsu, from 2002 to 2007, Li oversaw a rapid rise in personal incomes and economic development, attracting foreign investment from global industrial leaders such as Ford, Samsung and Caterpillar.

He earned mathematics and economics degrees from two of China‘s best universities and a doctorate in law. He also spent time at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the United States.

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ZHANG DEJIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative trained in North Korea.

Zhang Dejiang, 65, saw his chances of promotion boosted this year when he was chosen to replace disgraced politician Bo Xilai as Chongqing party boss. He also serves as vice premier in charge of industry, though his record has been tarnished by the downfall of the railway minister last year for corruption.

Zhang is close to former president Jiang Zemin who still wields some influence. He studied economics at Kim Il-sung University in North Korea and is a native of northeast China.

On his watch as party chief of Guangdong, the southern province maintained its position as a powerhouse of China‘s economic growth, even as it struggled with energy shortages, corruption-fuelled unrest and the 2003 SARS epidemic.

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ZHANG GAOLI

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer with experience in more developed parts of China.

Zhang Gaoli, 65, party chief of the northern port city of Tianjin and a Politburo member since 2007, is seen as a Jiang Zemin ally but also acceptable to President Hu, who has visited Tianjin three times since 2008. Zhang is an advocate of greater foreign investment and he introduced financial reforms in a bid to turn the city into a financial center in northern China.

He was sent to clean up Tianjin, which was hit by a string of corruption scandals implicating his predecessor and the former top adviser to the city’s lawmaking body. The adviser committed suicide shortly after Zhang’s arrival.

A native of southeastern Fujian province, Zhang trained as an economist. He also served as party chief and governor of eastern Shandong province and as Guangdong vice governor.

Zhang is low-key with a down-to-earth work style, and not much is known about his specific interests and aspirations. But with his leadership experience in more economically advanced cities and provinces, including party secretary of the showcase manufacturing and export-driven city of Shenzhen, he could be named executive vice premier.

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WANG YANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen by many in the West as a beacon of political reform.

Wang Yang, 57, is party chief of the export dependent economic hub of Guangdong province. He was not included in a list of preferred Standing Committee candidates drawn up by Xi, Hu and Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to sources close to the leadership, but is firmly in the running.

Born into a poor rural family in eastern Anhui province, Wang dropped out of high school and went to work in a food factory at age 17 to help support his family after his father died. These experiences may have shaped his desire for more socially inclusive policies, including his “Happy Guangdong” model of development designed to improve quality of life.

Concerned about the social impact of three decades of blistering development, he lobbied for social and political reform. However, this approach has drawn criticism from party conservatives and Wang has more recently adopted the party’s more familiar method of control and punishment to keep order.

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YU ZHENGSHENG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Relatively low-key but considered a cautious reformer.

Yu Zhengsheng, 67, is party boss in China‘s financial hub and most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai.

His impeccable Communist pedigree made him a rising star in the mid-1980s until his brother, an intelligence official, defected to the United States. His close ties with Deng Pufang, the eldest son of late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, spared him the full political repercussions but he was taken off the fast track.

Yu bided his time in ministerial ranks until bouncing back, joining the Politburo in 2002. However, the princeling’s age would require him to retire in 2017 after one term.

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LIU YANDONG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Uncertain.

Liu Yandong, who turns 67 this month, is the only woman given a serious chance to join the Standing Committee but is considered a dark horse. She is a princeling also tied to President Hu’s Youth League faction.

If promoted, she could head up parliament’s advisory body, but her age would also force her to retire after only one term.

Her bigger challenge is that no woman has made it into the Standing Committee since 1949. Not even Jiang Qing, the widow of late Chairman Mao Zedong, made it that far.

Liu, daughter of a former vice-minister of agriculture, is currently the only woman in the 25-member Politburo, a minority in China‘s male-dominated political culture. She has been on the wider Politburo since 2007 as one of five state councilors, a rank senior to a cabinet minister but junior to a vice-premier.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Ben Blanchard, Benjamin Kang Lim and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing. Additional reporting by Chris Ip, Grace Li, Jean Lin, Young Wang, Alice Woodhouse and Julie Zhu; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Bendeich)

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News Summary: IDC says Apple tablet share drops

HEADING DOWN: Apple‘s share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition.

STILL UP: In the July-September period, Apple shipped 14 million devices, up 26 percent from a year ago. But its share fell because the overall tablet market grew by 50 percent.

FACTORS: Apple had no new tablets out in the third quarter. It also might have seen sales slow amid expectations of a smaller iPad. Apple could regain share in the holiday quarter with last Friday’s release of new iPad devices.

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Springsteen, Jay-Z put the pop in Obama rally

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Someone has to introduce the president.

On Monday, the final day of the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama, however, didn’t bring along an opening act. He brought along two main acts.

Bruce Springsteen. Jay-Z. Theirs wasn’t an introduction, it was pop culture moment.

The Boss was spending the entire day with Obama, traveling on Air Force One from Madison, Wis., to Columbus, Ohio, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, where Obama planned a coda for his campaign, a finale where his run for the presidency began five years ago.

Jay-Z boomed his way into Columbus‘s Nationwide Arena, performing a rendition of his hit “99 Problems” with a political twist for a crowd estimated by fire officials at more than 15,000 people. He changed a key R-rated word to make his own political endorsement. “I got 99 problems but Mitt ain’t one,” he sang.

“They tell the story of what our country is,” Obama said of the two performers, “but also of what it should be and what it can be.”

Springsteen added a whole new sense of vigor, even giddiness, to the Obama entourage, with many of the president’s aides and advisers clearly star-struck by the rocker’s presence.

Springsteen, in jeans, black boots, a work shirt, vest and leather jacket, was not wearing the typical Air Force One attire. But the Obama camp has left formality aside; many aides are growing beards through Election Day and ties have been left behind in favor of sweaters for the chilly outdoor events during the last hours of the campaign.

Asked if there was any downside to using celebrity glitz instead of substance to drive voters to the polls in the final days, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki laughed. “I think Bruce Springsteen might be offended by you calling him glitzy,” she said.

“Bruce Springsteen, and some other celebrities who have been helping us, reach a broad audience that sometimes tune out what’s being said by politicians,” she said.

As Psaki spoke to reporters at the back of the plane, Obama was up front and on the phone with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie discussing the recovery from Superstorm Sandy. Christie, who says he has attended more than 100 Springsteen concerts, said Obama then handed the phone to Springsteen, a New Jersey native whose songs often have been tributes to his youth in the state.

Upon landing in Columbus, Springsteen told a reporter that it was his first trip on Air Force One. Grinning, he said, “It was pretty cool.” As for New Jersey, he said, “I’m feeling pretty hopeful” that the state’s hard-hit shore will recover.

In Madison and Columbus, Springsteen serenaded audiences with renditions of top anthems “No Surrender,” ”Promised Land” and “Land of Hope and Dreams.” But he also has a custom-made campaign song named after the Obama motto “Forward” — which he acknowledged was “not the best I’ve ever written.”

“How many things rhyme with Obama?” he asked.

Obama, no doubt, didn’t mind.

“I’m going to be fine with Bruce Springsteen on the last day that I’ll ever campaign,” he said above the din of the crowd.

“That’s not a bad way to bring it home. With The Boss. With The Boss.”

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Sudan’s Bashir to get health check in Saudi Arabia: report

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan‘s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will visit Saudi Arabia where he will receive a medical checkup, state media said on Monday, after an official said the 68-year-old ruler had undergone throat surgery in August.

Bashir, who has ruled Sudan for 23 years, has held fewer public rallies in the past few months, prompting Sudanese newspapers and blogs to speculate about his health.

Last month, a government official said he had undergone surgery on his vocal cords in Qatar in August but was in good health.

State news agency SUNA said on Monday Bashir would meet the king and other officials on his trip to Saudi Arabia but did not say when the visit would take place.

“During the visit, the president will undergo a normal medical checkup related to the inflammation of his vocal cords,” SUNA said, quoting the presidency.

The president was in “good health” and was carrying out his activities normally, the report said.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes committed in the western Darfur region. He denies the charges.

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The Dark Art of Political Polling

How could a Gallup Organization survey published a week before the election show Mitt Romney up by 5 percentage points, while a CBS/New York Times poll from the same period put him 1 point behind President Obama? Even professional poll watchers don’t know.

New technologies such as e-mail blasts have made it possible to field polls cheaply—and to publicize them on the Internet, bypassing traditional gatekeepers in the mainstream media. With hundreds of polls to choose from, candidates draw attention to those that support their case. The public is growing suspicious of a snow job, if you believe an Oct. 2 poll about polls by Public Policy Polling. It found that 42 percent of respondents say pollsters are manipulating results to show Obama ahead. “The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense,” Nate Silver, who runs the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight poll blog, tweeted in September.

A well-done poll uses statistical science to produce something a little like magic. The key is giving every person in the target population an equal chance of being contacted. The classic method is known as “random digit dialing,” which sprays out calls to both listed and unlisted phone numbers. By interviewing a sample of just 1,000 or so people, a pollster can come very close to divining the opinions of hundreds of millions.

But there are far more ways to get it wrong than right. Take “tracking” polls. Unlike one-shot polls, they last for months. Each day new people are interviewed, and results are published for a rolling average of the previous three, five, or seven days. These polls get top billing from the media just before an election, but they have a little-noted flaw. Because each wave of polling takes only a day, there’s no opportunity to call back people who don’t answer the first time. That means raw results are skewed toward the kind of people who sit by the phone. “A one-day poll is going to get you a lot of old women,” says Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers University polling expert.

Pollsters correct for this by giving less weight to replies from quick-to-answer types and more to replies from people in hard-to-reach groups. But the reweighting itself is imprecise, so a tracking poll’s actual margin of error can be a percentage point or two higher than what’s reported as its “sampling error,” typically 3 to 4 percentage points. Paul Lavrakas, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, calls this “almost like a dirty little secret.”

Another secret: Americans routinely lie to pollsters when asked if they’ll vote—saying yes when the real answer is heck no. The trick is to ask a set of questions that ferrets out respondents’ true intentions. In an Oct. 18 blog post, FiveThirtyEight’s Silver contended that Gallup may have gotten its formula wrong, overestimating the likelihood of Romney’s supporters going to vote. Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor-in-chief, says that can’t be ruled out. “If our model is not as accurate as we’d like, we’ll definitely reevaluate it,” he says. RealClearPolitics’ average of eight national polls (including Gallup’s) showed Romney with just a 0.8 percentage-point lead through Oct. 28, compared with Gallup’s 5 percentage points.

Any poll that doesn’t include cell phones is highly suspect because cell-only households are more likely to vote Democratic than ones in landline-only households, says the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Robo-dialing polls, the cheapest kind of phone poll, are always landline-only, because federal law prohibits robo-dialing of mobile numbers. Correcting for that political bias by reweighting results is imperfect. Polls conducted online raise a red flag because of disparities in Web usage. YouGov, for one, works hard to get a clean random sample. But some Internet-based firms use e-mail lists that are unrepresentative, counting on weighting to fix errors. Pollsters generally disclose their methodologies, but journalists often fail to report them, treating all polls as if they’re equally valid.

The proliferation of polls has added to the public’s disillusionment, which only makes the pollsters’ job harder. People don’t answer calls from unfamiliar numbers or hang up when they hear a pollster on the line. So pollsters have to try about 10,000 households just to complete 1,000 interviews, more than three times as many as 15 years ago. “It’s harder every day,” says Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which polls for Bloomberg News.

A simple rule is to beware of polls whose results are far outside the mainstream. Journalists (though not all of us) play them up because they’re surprising, but outliers are the least likely to be accurate. Polls that crunch averages are a decent guide, because errors tend to cancel each other out. Ultimately, though, no poll is anything more than a snapshot of a single moment. The only real way to figure out who’ll win: wait till Election Day.

The bottom line: To get a reliable sample of 1,000 people, pollsters need to call 10,000, more than three times as many as 15 years ago.

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MTV to air fundraiser for devastated Jersey shore

NEW YORK (AP) — MTV, home of the “Jersey Shore” reality show, plans to air a fundraising special to help rebuild New Jersey’s devastated shoreline.

The one-hour program will air Nov. 15 from MTV’s Times Square studio in New York City. It will feature the cast of “Jersey Shore” along with other guests.

The network said Monday the program will solicit contributions for the rebuilding of Seaside Heights, the heart of the Jersey shore and the principal setting for the “Jersey Shore” series.

For this effort, MTV will be partnering with Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization that provides design and construction services to communities in need.

Seaside Heights was among numerous coastal areas devastated by Sandy last week.

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Anorexic Bakes to Gain Control Over Food

Camilla Kuhns of Kirkland, Wash., makes the best cookies in the world. Ask anyone but her.

Kuhns is a 29-year-old anorexic with a penchant for baking. She has never tasted one of her own confections. Her younger brother, Seth, samples dough and final products to let her know if anything is off, and her mother, Ilene, tastes the frosting.

“Yeah, my mom’s my angel when it comes to the frosting,” Kuhns told ABC News Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV right before she entered an inpatient treatment program for her eating disorder two weeks ago. “I don’t know what it is, but it makes me very anxious.”

On her blog, Kuhns said she is 5’8″ and weighs 104 pounds with her shoes and clothes on and while holding her purse. She baked challah breads, cakes and pastries for others to enjoy while her own daily intake amounted to a head of cauliflower with hot sauce and a tablespoon of nuts. To ensure she burned off every single calorie consumed, she exercised for three to four hours a day.

Her best friend, Amber “Nic” Poppe, said that Kuhns has suffered from various eating disorders since she was 11. Both her anorexia and the baking escalated recently after a tough year that included the death of a friend and a messy divorce.

“Baking became therapeutic for her. I know it sounds strange but it seems like her way of overcoming her issues with food,” Poppe said.

Actually, it isn’t so strange. Experts have long noted the connection between eating disorders and baking, as well as cooking, watching cooking shows and collecting recipes.

In a famous 1943 study known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, men put on a semi-starvation diet for six months developed such an intense obsession with food, they daydreamed, read and talked about it constantly. The fixation was so persistent that more than 40 percent of them mentioned cooking as part of their post-experiment plans. After they left the study and regained their weight, three of the men changed their occupations to become chefs.

“I see it a lot this in my practice,” said Jennifer Thomas, an assistant psychologist at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center at McLean Hospital in Boston. “Patients will prepare elaborate meals for friends and family while they themselves go hungry. They get a vicarious joy and a sense of superiority from watching others indulge while they don’t allow themselves to eat.”

As someone who was anorexic for five years, Victoria Casciaro said she can relate. The 20-year-old college student admitted she was also a starving baker who constantly made treats she never considered eating herself.

“I would look at what I put in the mixing bowl and it would scare me because I didn’t have the nutrition facts, so I couldn’t calculate whether or not it was a safe or dangerous food,” she recalled.

Not only would Casciaro resist her sumptuous creations, she would wash her hands frequently during the baking process to prevent herself from accidentally tasting the ingredients. She’d carefully avoid taking even the tiniest nibble for fear that she’d gain weight or set off a binge.

Haley Anderson, a 20-year-old recovering anorexic, said she’d often whip up copious amounts of baked treats for everyone else, then talk herself out of trying them.

“I’d tell myself that taste buds have memory,” she said, “and if you can avoid a certain food long enough then you could forget what it tastes like and no longer be tempted by it.”

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A Rising Tide of Natural Disasters

The number of natural disasters since 1996 costing $ 1 billion or more doubled compared with the previous 15-year period.

Note: Damage numbers represent the 2012 Consumer Price Index cost adjusted value except in the case of 2012 estimates; Data: NOAA, IHS Global Insight; Bloomberg

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Bwin.party revenue hit by German tax rules, poor poker

LONDON (Reuters) – Bwin.party Digital Entertainment, the world’s largest listed online gaming group, said a new gaming tax in its core German market and a big drop in poker sales pushed net revenue down 10 percent in its third quarter.

The firm said on Friday net revenue in the three months to October 31 fell to 175.7 million euros compared to the same period a year ago, but added that it had seen a marked recovery in trading since the end of September.

“The introduction of a 5 percent turnover tax on sports betting in Germany, revenue decline in poker and continued pressure on consumer spending, particularly in parts of southern Europe, held back our performance in the third quarter,” the firm said in a statement.

In Germany, the tax rule which came into effect from July 1 contributed to an 8 percent decline in the amount wagered on sports betting as Bwin.party removed short-odds bets. Year-on-year sports betting revenues fell 2 percent to 828.3 million euros, with unfavourable European soccer results also a factor.

Poker net revenue fell 29 percent year-on-year to 37.0 million euros, continuing a recent decline, although the firm said the imminent integration of its dotcom poker networks would provide a major catalyst for growth.

The group said that a recent upturn in business had been driven by a strong recovery in sports betting, with average daily net revenue in October up 19 percent on the previous quarter. It said it was confident about its full-year result.

Shares in the group were down 1.65 percent at 119 pence by 0842 GMT.

(Reporting by Neil Maidment; Editing by Paul Sandle)

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Anti-Obama “2016″ doc getting last-ditch digital release before election

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “2016: Obama‘s America,” the hit documentary critical of President Obama’s record, is getting a last-minute digital push in Spanish in a bid to boost Mitt Romney‘s chances ahead of the November 6 election, the producers of the movie told TheWrap on Friday.

The producers, who already have digital distribution in English with Lionsgate, have struck a new deal with digital company Yekra to release it in Spanish on Friday, according to Mark Joseph, a representative for the film.

“We’re just finalizing the link – it’s ready to go,” said another individual working on the film. The streamed version in Spanish will cost $ 2.99 and will be aimed at independent voters in Spanish-speaking communities.

Lionsgate released the movie on DVD, video-on-demand and streaming platforms like iTunes and Amazon in mid-October.

The producers hope to swing any remaining independent voters in a race that is neck-and-neck for the two candidates.

A Lionsgate spokesman told TheWrap: “This is commerce for us, not taking sides politically. We’re proud to have released the two highest-grossing political docs of all time, ‘Fahrenheit 911′ and ‘Obama 2016.’”

“2016: Obama’s America,” based on Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” challenges the president’s record and foretells what the nation will be like if he is reelected. Both the Associated Press and the president’s website questioned its many assertions, prompting D’Souza to fire back in an op-ed with TheWrap.

The film has been an unexpected success story, grossing more than $ 33 million at the domestic box office with a reported budget of $ 2.1 million. With its catchphrase, “Love Him. Hate Him. You Don’t Know Him,” it long ago surpassed “Bully” as the year’s top-earning documentary.

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