POLIWOOD. 7:30 tonight, Showtime.

BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA. 9 p.m. tomorrow, HBO.

WHAT A difference a year makes.

Tomorrow, the eyes of many political junkies will likely be on New Jersey and Virginia, whose gubernatorial races are attracting much of the attention this Election Day.

Last November, we were electing a president, and HBO is taking us back to that time tomorrow night, with its two-hour documentary, "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," which follows Obama from a period before he'd even announced he was running right through the Iowa caucuses and all the way to election night.

As the president grapples with dueling health-care bills, the economy, two wars and the myriad other problems he got himself elected to deal with a year ago this week, a frankly fawning HBO documentary about the campaign that brought him here might be as welcome as, well, an unexpected Nobel Peace Prize.

I mean, why not just send Fox News' pundits some juicy steaks instead?

But that's Hollywood for you. Or, as Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson calls it in his own documentary tonight on Showtime, "Poliwood."

In looking at the intersection of show business and politics, Levinson, whose credits include the 1997 political satire "Wag the Dog," appears to be trying to send another message about the harm that's been done to both government and political coverage by the imposition of entertainment values, which he sees as having led to, among other things, the increasing polarization of opinions.

It's an old enough concern that he's dredged up a 1959 TV Guide piece by a U.S. senator named John F. Kennedy, who warns of the danger television poses to politicos, not long before he himself successfully uses the medium to help get elected president.

But if the sometimes disjointed "Poliwood" were really just about that, there'd have been no need to follow a bunch of earnest celebrities to last year's Democratic and Republican conventions, or to linger lovingly on their faces as they stood among the delegates, listening to Obama speak, and to others speaking about Obama.

There's something almost laughable about watching members of the Creative Coalition, a political advocacy group whose delegation in Denver included Anne Hathaway, Tim Daly, Susan Sarandon, Josh Lucas, Spike Lee and Ellen Burstyn, among others, moving around the Democratic convention like a particularly photogenic high school civics class between briefings on both policy and presentation.

For someone like Sarandon, who's been to this rodeo a time or two before, the illusion of access clearly isn't enough - she has follow-up questions. And when one briefing takes a patronizing turn, a few of her fellow actors are quick to fight back.

Some right-leaning performers, including the late Ron Silver - one of the Creative Coalition's founders - are part of "Poliwood," which also travels to last year's Republican convention to find famous friends of John McCain.

But with the exception of Ronald Reagan, little attention is paid to those - from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Sonny Bono - who've actually stepped away from their high-paying day jobs to run for public office, many under the banner of the GOP.

And for all the eye-rolling that goes on as noncelebrities weigh in on what they believe is Hollywood's undue influence, "Poliwood" doesn't pack much of a punch.

One reason may be that most of us - left, right or center - tend to discount celebrity endorsements, whether they're for candidates or products that promise to flatten our abs in five minutes a day.

An actress like Hathway may fret, as she does in "Poliwood," that the single question she answered about politics gets nearly equal billing in a story with the many she fielded about her latest movie, but unless she wakes up one morning and discovers she's Oprah, her vote probably doesn't count any more than yours or mine.

Where politics and show business intersect a bit more effectively is at a place like HBO, whose documentary division also showed us "Journeys with George," an offbeat account of George W. Bush's first run for president from the perspective of Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Alexandra Pelosi, a former NBC News employee, has gone on to make several films for HBO.

"By the People," whose producers include the actor Edward Norton, isn't nearly so irreverent as "Journeys," though.

But then neither are filmmakers Amy Rice or Alicia Sams.

Rice has said she became interested in politics, and later in Obama particularly, after an older brother died in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, while Sams told an HBO interviewer "that I wanted to put my skills toward something that would help motivate people."

So if you were looking for a warts-and-all depiction of the Obama campaign, or even one that showed the candidate in unguarded moments, you probably wouldn't come to these people.

"We didn't set out to make a campaign film, but I think at a certain point it became clear to us that it was a document of how this momentous piece of history was achieved from a certain perspective," Norton told TV critics this summer when asked about the timing of the project.

"And I think my feeling about that is that, you know, whatever President Obama goes through, whatever the struggles and the ebbs and flows of success or failure in his presidency, I don't think anything will ever diminish the significance of the achievement of his election."

If "By the People" is any indication, it's an achievement that owes much of its drama to forces outside the campaign, and to people like Hillary Clinton.

Obama, Rice told reporters, "was always . . . even calmer than I think we see him on TV. And that's actually great for a president, but it's really hard when you're making a documentary."

Thank goodness, then, for Ronnie Cho.

Given the filmmakers' diminishing access to the candidate, "By the People" quickly becomes more and more about its most reluctant participant, Obama adviser David Axelrod, and about Cho, a particularly animated campaign worker with a compelling backstory who this past year has gone from teaching dance moves to volunteers to working for the Department of Homeland Security.

Even the president thinks Cho's interesting.

"On our last day of shooting, Jan. 28th, Alicia and I filmed in the Oval Office," Rice recalled in July. "And as we were setting up, we were talking with the president, and . . . I said, 'Did you see the movie?'

"And he's like, 'I did.' And he said, 'I really loved it. It's great.' And he said, 'You know, when Ronnie Cho and [another worker] cried, I cried. And I really think you should put in more of them and less of me.'

"And we were like, 'Well, we think, you know, America wants to see a little bit of you, too. As great as you are,' " Rice said. *

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