In honor of its twenty fifth anniversary (and seeking political solace), I’ve spent the final two months rewatching “The West Wing” in its seven-season entirety.
At least me Thought I used to be watching. In its early years I used to be a staunch supporter of the Josiah Bartlet administration and am on file as such. Yet as I made my means via the sixth and seventh seasons of NBC’s Emmy-winning drama sequence, I started to have a sneaking suspicion that I used to be watching these episodes for the primary time. I do not keep in mind giving up on “The West Wing,” although when it began I had simply had my first little one and when it ended I had three. Something needed to give and apparently it did.
So there was pleasure in discovering “new” storylines, a lot of which revolved across the closing months of Bartlet’s (Martin Sheen) presidency and the campaigns of Rep. Matt Santos (D-Texas), performed by Jimmy Smits, and Sen. Arnold Vinick (R-California), performed by Alan Alda.
But there was additionally a variety of bitterness and ache.
Imagine a world wherein the 2 candidates for president of the United States each rigorously refuse to have interaction in adverse campaigning. Who use their one debate to elucidate, in impassioned element, their differing ideas on fiscal coverage and worldwide management. Who, because the election comes right down to Nevada and its constituency votes, make it clear they will not contain legal professionals.
“I will probably be a winner or a loser,” Vinick says as political advisor Bruno Gianelli (Ron Silver), in Mephistophelean mode, tries to persuade him to ask for a recount if he loses. “I will not be a sore loser.”
In the opposite discipline, marketing campaign supervisor Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) tells Santos, “Take it to courtroom, you are the man who yells on the umpire since you don’t love the decision on the plate. Nobody will vote for that boy anymore.”
In 2006, when the episode premiered, these responses may have been learn as a reference to the long-running Florida story, wherein many legal professionals had been concerned, in 2000. Or they might have merely functioned as a handy plot machine on long-running TV. present.
So President Trump has filed quite a few lawsuits in hopes of reversing his 2020 defeat to Vice President Joe Biden. And he directed an armed mob on the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. And this time it has spawned extra false accusations of widespread voter fraud, sparking fears of comparable, if not worse, violence across the 2024 election. After all that, the the Aristocracy of objective of “The West Wing” is sufficient to make you cry.
Even extra abundantly than when Barlet’s beloved assistant, Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten), died.
“The West Wing” has at all times been Aaron Sorkin’s extremely romanticized, usually preachy, deeply private and (above all) progressive imaginative and prescient of presidential politics. (Though after 25 years his usually condescending however considerably self-congratulatory therapy of a few of his feminine characters appears jarring.) The race to switch Bartlet, which started greater than a yr after Sorkin left the present, is not any completely different. Santos seems to be a near-perfect man of the folks, with an unflinching voting file and a skeleton-free closet. Vinick believes in tax cuts, small authorities and college vouchers, however he’s beloved on either side of the aisle and is such a liberal Republican that he’s strongly pro-choice.
The Santos and Vinick campaigns’ idea of “assault adverts” focuses on voting outcomes, army service and Vinick’s help for nuclear power – not on lies, conspiracy theories or advert hominem assaults. The dirtiest factor the marketing campaign will get entails a leak that Santos’ vp, former Bartlet chief of employees Leo McGarry (John Spencer), is struggling in debate prep (it seems McGarry himself leaked info) and an advert that incorrectly describes Santos’ place on abortion, which Vinick repeatedly requires to be eliminated.
Although the plots echo voters’ expressed (if not precise) need for elections to be about politics moderately than mud-slinging, the civility of the Santos/Vinick marketing campaign is so clearly aspirational that it typically borders on the ridiculous: solely TV writers may imagine {that a} single speech is able to lifting a major candidate from the purpose of abandoning the nomination.
But now these aspirations appear heartbreaking moderately than absurd. For almost a decade now, Donald Trump, sexual predator and now convicted felon, has trampled on even the vaguest definition of civility. Choosing invective over inspiration, he campaigns nearly completely on pique, repeatedly saying and doing issues that will have ended the marketing campaign of another candidate in American historical past earlier than him.
It is just not remotely biased to say that he has divided this nation in a means that no different fashionable get together candidate has ever tried to do.
If the writers of “The West Wing” had created such a bogeyman, a Republican candidate who routinely mocked, belittled and bodily threatened so many components of the voters, who primarily based his marketing campaign on the authoritarian premise that until he wins , the election is a Fraud, the tv viewers, Republican and Democrat, would merely not cease watching the present. They (together with me) would have boycotted the community.
Instead they went the opposite means. Sure, there was stress on the finish of the elections, however nobody felt that the way forward for democracy was at stake. Now my kids, too younger to recollect when Barack Obama was elected, see “The West Wing” and the tone of the Santos/Vinick marketing campaign not as progressive idealism however as outright fantasy. Trump has turned every of their first voting experiences right into a battle not for the path of the republic however for its survival.
There are many emotional moments within the closing episodes of “The West Wing,” however given the stakes and actuality of this Election Day, it’s not the top of Bartlet’s presidency and even the loss of life of Leo McGarry – necessitated by the tragic loss of life by Spencer – which forces the viewer’s throat to shut in actual ache. These are the scenes wherein President-elect Santos addresses Vinick, asking him to turn out to be Secretary of State. Not as a result of Santos desires to examine some bipartisan field, however as a result of he admires and appreciates his former opponent and since he believes that, regardless of their disagreements, he and Vinick need the nation to enhance for all Americans.
What appeared like a little bit of nonsense in 2006 appears actually not possible in 2024. Never in latest reminiscence have two presidential candidates and their supporters been so at odds politically and existentially.
You do not must be a “West Wing” fan to really feel despair, to surprise the way it bought to this. And, extra importantly, worrying – irrespective of who turns into the forty seventh president – about how the hell we’ll repair this.
