It’s very hard to watch “The Road We’ve Traveled,” 17-minute documentary the Obama campaign released Thursday night, and not be impressed by its underlying premise, which is that the president inherited a terrible set of crises, and that we’re in far better shape thanks to his efforts. The video succeeds in recreating the clammy terror of the financial crisis, and in calling up the sense of relief you felt when this obviously serious and composed young president spoke so fluently about how we’d get out of it. It catalogues a record of legislative accomplishment that would inspire feelings of inadequacy in most two-term administrations. And, above all, it manages to equate rooting for the country with rooting for Obama in a way that feels perfectly natural rather than heavy-handed or self-serving.

For my money, the two most moving and persuasive portions of the film relate to the auto bailout and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Perhaps not coincidentally, both give prominent airtime to Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, who turn out to be far more compelling than anyone else on-screen—or, for that matter, the voice of God that Tom Hanks channels in his role as narrator.

Clinton highlights the problem with letting the automakers go, as almost everyone but Obama seemed to be urging at times, with his trademark finger-wagging intensity: “People have no earthly idea what would have happened not only to the economy, but to our self-image.” When it comes to bin Laden, the former president pays his successor a remarkable compliment: “He took the harder and the more honorable path. When I saw what had happened—I thought to myself, I hope that’s the call I would have made.” It was a rare Clintonian accomplishment: stealing the show while leaving the other guy standing at the center of it.

Biden, for his part, offers an elegant setup to Clinton’s bin Laden coda, narrating a scene in which Obama goes around the table and finds pretty much every adviser hedging, then excuses himself to make up his mind. “It dawned on me, he’s all alone,” Biden says. “This is his decision. If he was wrong, presidency was done. Over.” It was a moment that actually merited its vice presidential hyperbole, even if a failed presidency would hardly have been the biggest casualty of botching the bin Laden raid.

Still, as much as the documentary affected me emotionally, it didn’t entirely work intellectually, and I’m not sure it was perfectly executed as an exercise in political persuasion. I counted two major problems: First, even more than the stimulus, the real key to preventing a depression was the financial rescue. But the film can’t do more than mention this in passing because of the lingering resentment toward the trillions of dollars in loans, guarantees, and other goodies that the government gave the banks. (I personally think the goodies were too good—we didn’t need to be so generous to the banks. But that doesn’t mean these goodies weren’t effective at saving the financial system.)