Post Trump America Decision 2026, Part 7: How The Democrats Electoral Failures In Texas In the 21st Century Have Little to Do With The GOP And How James Talarico Might Be The Best Chance to Reverse Their Fortunes

 

 

In the summer of 2025 when the Texas legislature had begun the first of a seemingly endless battle of partisan gerrymandering battles my reaction was different then so many other Americans on either side of the aisle.

"Why are Abbott and the Republicans bothering?" I thought to myself.  "Party keeps heading in this direction by 2030 they're won't be any left in Texas anyway." This opinion was based very much on my own research in the subject reminding me yet again how much my party has been its own  worst enemy in the 21^st century.

As I wrote in a separate article about the Democrats and Dixie:

"During the 1970s Republicans were now being challenged by a new generation of moderate Democrats. Democrats had a monopoly on the black vote and the more Republicans ran to the right, the more it energized the base. Typically Democrats needed little more than a third of the white vote to ensure victory. These Democratic candidates gave high-minded but measured speeches about racial progress that flattered the prejudices of southern voters about how much the South had changed and combined with the Democrat's New Deal heritage, they had easy entrée to working class whites and accused Republicans of being the country club set. Men like Fritz Hollings, Sam Nunn and in Arkansas Dale Bumpers and David Pryor would become fixtures in the Senate for years and decades to come."

This changed in the aftermath of Obama's election in 2008. The coalition he managed to build in 2008 was a variation on the one that came out for George McGovern in 1972. Obama managed to win not only an overwhelming majority of the black vote, but also a majority of the women’s vote, two-thirds of the Latino vote (McGovern did the same, but back then there were less than 5 million Latinos registered) and most of what we now would call the LGBTQ+ vote.

And in the aftermath of it Obama's DNC made two decisions which have crippled the party ever since. First they abandoned Howard Dean's 50 state strategy which had been integral to the Democrats retaking first both houses of Congress and then the White House in the aftermath of the 2004 election. Second they made it clear that on a national and state level they were going to try to build the same multiracial coalition that had worked for Obama. In other words they were abandoning two strategies that had worked for the party for nearly forty years in favor of one that had worked once.

We saw the result even before Obama's term was over: after the 2014 midterms, the GOP had the biggest margin of in Congress since 1928 and the Democrats had lost nearly every seat they had in the Senate. Much of this was based in the ridiculous moronic thinking that what played for the Democratic coalition at a national level would work in deep red states. Nowhere was this more apparent in Texas which the Democrats not carried since 1968, hadn't won a Senate seat since 1988 or the gubernatorial race since 1990.

In 2013 the Democratic Party became enamored of Wendy Davis, a Texas legislator who had filibustered in the Texas Senate floor to stop an anti-abortion bill from the state. Her courage and bravery won the hearts of so many progressives across the country – despite the fact that all she did was delay it for the next session, at which point the bill would ultimately pass. 

So the party threw its weight behind her for the governorship against Greg Abbott that fall. Davis ran a pretty nasty campaign against Abbott, calling the worst names possible in a desperation move. Davis was hailed by all the left wing journals and lost in a landslide to Abbott, losing by more than 20 points and not even managing to get a majority of female votes. It was nearly as bad a defeat as that of John Cornyn over his Democratic opponent for reelection to the Senate where he trounced the Democratic candidate David Alameel by nearly a two to one margin.

The Democratic Party knows at its core that if it is to have a future it has to win states in the South and the West. Texas which has all the characteristics of both is by far the biggest electoral prize for Republicans with 40 electoral votes as of the 2020 election. But the more the national party has gone to the left the more difficult it has been for Democrats to win not only there but any Southern State. In 2018, however, they came closer than they had in decades.

Ted Cruz is another in a seemingly endless line of Texas Republicans that Democrats loathe with a passion. When he won election to the Senate in 2012 the party wanted to make him a target early. And in order to do so they ended up going to their past.

Cruz was not particularly popular with only a 49 percent approval level. It was particularly bad with Latinos at only 29 percent. They chose to nominate Beto O'Rource three term Congressman from El Paso. O'Rourke was opposed to Obama's immigration policy. O'Rourke planned to run a positive campaign, not focused on Trump or Cruz. He spent much of his career trying to win the progressive vote, raising money for small donors. O'Rourke was compared very much to Obama's campaign for President. And though few gave him much of a chance – he trailed by 7 points as late as October 18^th – on election day he received more votes than any Democrat in Texas in the states history, over 4 million. He would lose by just 2.5 percent and give Cruz a hell of a run.

The Democratic Party, as is often the case, took the wrong lessons. Rather than argue that O'Rourke had done so well in this state because he was a white man who had gotten more of the white vote, they chose to argue that O'Rourke was a national candidate and that Texas could be won by going progressive.  Both were proven wrong very quickly: O'Rourke ran for governor against Greg Abbott in 2022 and he lost by more than percent. He got 3.5 million votes, which means in four years half a million voters chose to go back to the GOP.

There have been few signs the Democrats learned any lesson the next two times a Senate seat in Texas became available. In 2020 the party nominated MJ Hegar, who had never even held public office, having lost the run for Congress two years earlier. Cornyn would defeat her by more than a million votes, getting the largest number of votes any Republican candidate for Senate had in history and outperforming Trump by 4 percent in that state. When Cruz came up for reelection in 2024 the party chose to nominate Colin Allred, representative of the 32^nd district and an African American. While the polls would shows a close race, Cruz outperformed polling defeating Allred by nearly a million votes though he underperformed compared to Trump in that state.

Showing the party didn't seem to have learned anything in the leadup to the 2026 Jasmine Crockett, a two term Congresswoman who was one of the most progressive voices in the Black Caucus tried to form a movement to run for Senate while getting other candidates like Allred and Julian Castro to run for governor and lieutenant governor. The GOP, who had been using Crockett as one of their loudest campaign voices on cable news and social media to raise money for them, was salivating for that as a possibility. Fortunately the party's salvation came from another direction.

James Talarico is a former education who while he was in the Texas House, received a Masters of Divinity. In the summer of 2021 Democrats in the Texas House, including Talarico, organized a quorum break in an attempt to stop the passage of legislation they saw as restricting voting right. Mirroring what would happen four years later in the gerrymandering battle he and his fellow Democrats flew to DC. However Talarico broke ranks and was the first to return, acknowledging an infinite quorum break was unsustainable. He was criticized by those who remained behind but the legislation did pass. Four years later he would do so again and a law suit was filed to expel him by Ken Paxton.

One month later Talarico announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. While Talarico is progressive on many issues that appeal to the left -legalization of marijuana, term limits, congressional reform – he has gone out of his way to woo both the liberal media and the manosphere, appearing on Joe Rogan's broadcast and Rogan was so impressed by him he actually suggested Talarico run for President.

Crockett by contrast had gone out of her way to isolate so many Texans with her incendiary and nearly offensive remarks about Governor Abbott and had been criticized for apparently using AI in a Super Bowl campaign add, something her team neither confirmed nor denied. Texas Democrats chose the more civil Talarico over the fiery Crockett by nearly six points and while it was clear on primary night she had lost, she refused to concede until the following morning.

Talarico has another advantage. While he managed to win his primary the Republican primary would go to a run-off as John Cornyn would be challenged by a figure who is nearly as much a pariah in Democratic politics as Cruz and Abbott are: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Ken Paxton has been a staunch ally of Trump even before Trump ran for President and is flawed even by the standards of so many Texas politicians. Even before the took office he was indicted on state securities fraud charges in 2015. In October of 2020 several high level assistants accused him of bribery, abuse of office and other crimes and in May of 2023 he was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives by a nearly four to one margin. The allegations included preferential treatment to a donor who bribed him, false statements against his financial interests, misapplied public resources and false statements against whistleblowers. He has constantly been sued for avoiding the use of subpoenas. He was narrowly acquitted.

In 2015 he created a human trafficking unit that in 2020 and 2021 has only managed two convictions, two of which were deferred adjudications. He has been one of the biggest arguers of voter fraud ever since he took office and has pursued it ever since 2017. He has managed very few convictions on that as well. That was always going to make him one of Trump's closes allies even before he spent 22,000 hours looking for voter fraud after the 2020 election and would sue the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

While he was being investigated in February 2023 Paxton accused the House Speaker of being incapacitated. When he became only the third office holder in Texas history to be impeached, Paxton then called in a politically motivated sham and said "the RINOs in the Texas Legislature are now on the same side of Biden." One of the Texas Senators was Paxton's wife Angela and that combined with the increased support from Trump and the increasing split between the Texas Republican Party. Angela didn't vote but she announced that she was divorcing her husband after the 2024 elections.

In retrospect the real surprise is that it took until today for Donald Trump to endorse Paxton for the Republican nomination for the Senate. Considering his long history with the President, as well as the fact he pursued legal action against the Biden administration 105 times and played a vital role in both the redistricting battle as well as issuing arrest warrants for legislators like Talarico and Crockett as far back as 2021 its stunning it took him until a week before the runoff takes place for him to finally endorse him. One suspects it has much to do with the defeat of Bill Cassidy, a staunch Trump critic, in the Louisiana primary this past Saturday.

Republican Senators, by contrast, are very concerned. Susan Collins, facing her own tough reelection battle said: "(Paxton) is an ethically challenged individual." Majority leader John Thune could only say: "It's his decision" after months of lobbying Trump to back Cornyn. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi said nothing.

All polls were already showing a close race between Talarico and either of his Republican challengers.  The most recent series of polls show Talarico with a combined 4.3 percent margin over Paxton, where as he was only leading Cornyn by 3 percent. In addition Talarico will go into the general election with multiple advantages over his Republican opponent even if Cornyn manages to win next week.

Talarico has already had 3 months to prepare for the general and build his war chest. By contrast just to get to the runoff between Paxton and Cornyn it cost $128 million, most of it spent by Cornyn. It was estimated that it might cost as much $200 million even before the runoff took place. In either the case the Republican Party  has already spent a fortune just to get to one candidate – and the consequences for other Senate races where Democrats are already doing closer then they should be, such as Iowa and Florida, may put a party already facing an uphill battle in a deep hole going into the fall campaign – even before primary season is truly over. Considering that the President's approval ratings is already only at 35 percent with his support continuing the soften among his most die hard base that can only improve the chances of Democrats like Talarico.

There's also the fact that Talarico and whoever his challenger is will both be white men. And particularly in a state like Texas, where members of the LatinX demographic were already hugely moving to the Democrats even before one considers what a rabid anti-immigration advocate Paxton has been in his tenure as Attorney general, that gives Talarico an edge that Beto O'Rourke had but Colin Allred and MJ Hegar did not.  Considering how problematic so many of his policies have been, particularly in regards to women and the LGBTQ+ community Paxton will have a harder time winning them then Cornyn would.  And considering that Paxton's wife is divorcing him under the charge of adultery, one wonders just how much support he can get from evangelicals.

It's not inconceivable Cornyn could pull out and upset but whatever candidate gets the nomination will have to deal with the increasing fissure in the Texas Republican Party which this runoff has already laid bare. Whoever the winner is will have to spend a fair amount of time rebuilding the coalition of that party, time that Talarico, who has both the state and national party behind him already, doesn't need to spend. And considering how much time and energy the DNC has already spent trying to win Senate seats in Texas before it will no doubt be a lot easier if Paxton wins the nomination, considering they loathe him with an even greater furor then they do Cruz.

It's not yet clear if the Democrats have a chance to make inroads in the South during this cycle. Jon Ossoff is facing his first reelection campaign and he's already the heavy favorite even before the primary tonight. With Thom Tillis choosing not to run for reelection Roy Cooper, the popular former governor of North Carolina is the heavy favorite to flip the Senate in what increasingly becoming a swing state. (I'll be dealing with him later on.)

The prospects in the rest of the south remain grim as best. I remain unconvinced that Annie Andrews has anymore of a chance of defeating Lindsay Graham than Jamie Harrison did six years earlier. Mitch McConnell may be retiring but I have little faith the Democrats will have any more luck replacing him then they did in the last two cycles. And no matter how flawed the Republican challenger in Louisiana is (the runoff is not scheduled for several more weeks) I am heavily skeptical Jamie Davis has any chance of beating them.

What Talarico has in common with the incumbents above is what he doesn't have in common with challengers below: it's always been an easier for a white Democrat to win election to the Senate in the South then a woman or a person of color has been. The Democratic Party knew that for the last half of the 20^th century and had considerable success; they forgot it in the aftermath of Obama's win and it has been a disaster. If Talarico does manage to flip a Republican seat in Texas – still a big 'if' – it will be because of a lesson in identity politics they've cast aside during the 21^st century to a ridiculous detriment to the party nationally. It has been clear to me that so many progressives would rather run a minority candidate and lose by a huge margin in states they could win rather than win narrowly with a more centrist white male Democrat, who need I remind them, is still a Democrat.

I am  a pragmatist and I would like there to be a way to be the party that has  minorities among its permanent  members without being the permanent minority party. I'm increasingly beginning to think, that for far too many who call themselves Democrats, they are fine if we're the latter as long as we are exclusively the former. That the GOP has made it incredibly clear they're fine with this as long as they can be the majority makes it clear they understand politics in a way to many of the most progressive members don't.

Talarico has a much better chance of winning the Senate in Texas then Jasmine Crockett ever did.  Both the history of the party and the candidates bear that argument out.  Maybe there are still some die-hards who would rather have lost with Crockett then won with Talarico. If those same people were fine with a Republican winning, then honestly the Democrats don't need them.  I think the Senate needs more people like Talarico then they do Crockett's or Paxton's. And if that makes me a DINO in the eyes of some, well, I'm still a Democrat. Were they?

 

 

There Will Be Many Articles Mourning The End of The Late Show. This Isn't One of Them.For A Decade Stephen Colbert Fought The War on Trump. It's Time for Hollywood to Admit They Lost

 

I know that as an admirer of Hollywood and one who mourns the changes in the industry at some level I should be upset that this week The Late Show is coming to an end. I should be upset that a 33 year old institution is closing and nothing will replace.

I said I should. I'm not.

I can't bring myself to feel sympathy for the fact that a white male multimillionaire is losing his job. What I am is angry that it is because of this white male millionaire – and as we saw with no irony basically late night is made up of white male millionaires  -  an institution that has existed practically since the medium came into existence may very well go extinct by the end of the decade.  I'm angry that late night is the clearest casualty in Hollywood's ten years of unchecked warfare against Donald Trump and that despite all that, Hollywood seems to keep coming to the conclusion that none of this is their fault.  They blame the corporate interests, the GOP, the general public, really anyone but themselves.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that Stephen Colbert, who had been working on Comedy Central as far back as sketch shows like Exit 57 and Strangers With Candy, came to prominence on The Colbert Report, which was founded in the midst of America's utter fatigue with all things connected to the War on Terror. Colbert understood the flaws of the institutions and made it very clear in his first full year on the air. In 2006 he delivered a powerful satiric speech as the White House Correspondent's Dinner where he tore apart not just the Bush administration  but the media's complacency, both conservative and liberal. Then to demonstrate that he was equal opportunity that year at the Emmys he presented the award for Best Reality Competition and the first words out of his mouth were "Good evening, godless sodomites." I laughed hysterically because Colbert had managed to make it clear by that point on his Report that both sides and all institutions were fair game.

Now twenty years later in large part of Colbert's own comedy a thirty-three year old institution is about to come to an end. There is no sign Colbert understands his role in it. At the end of last year asked if he'd learned any lessons he said, with no sense of irony, "I learned never to trust billionaires." Considering Colbert is a multi-millionaire himself that is the exact comment that on the Report he would have mocked proof that he was 'kneeling before his God, Babylon'.

I'm increasingly beginning to realize that for the last decade Hollywood has been engage in a very public War on Trump that bears all the trademarks of America's involvement in the Gulf War that was raging when Colbert became a name.  They believed that America was under attack, engaged with an enemy under vague pretenses and bad intelligence, and have spent the last decade engaged in what is becoming a quagmire with no exit strategy in sight. And yet the attitude of the Colbert's of the world is not to acknowledge defeat, call those who argue with them giving aide and comfort to the enemy and continue to argue that victory is just around the corner. The damage they've done to is to their own industry and late night is just the most obvious casualty.

 

The day of the attack, as Michael Moore has made clear, was November 9^th 2016 when Donald Trump won the President in a huge upset. Hollywood took this as an assault on their way of life.

One needs to state upfront that despite the way cable news and the far right considers Hollywood an arm of the Democratic party at best it has been a wartime arrangement with Hollywood getting more out of it then the Democrats ever have. This has always been true and remained so all the way through 2016: while everyone in Hollywood and late night hated Trump with a passion that never translated as love for Hilary. Colbert himself acknowledged it with a dance number on the day she was nominated where the chorus was "You Have No Choice, You Have No Choice."  That Hilary Clinton would be the first female President should have excited Hollywood as much as the left but it basically left that cold: they no more wanted Hilary to be the first female president then they really wanted Obama to be the first black President. They judged both parties with contempt, and this was true even as they made it very clear how dangerous Trump would be if elected President.  

But it's worth noting they basically engaged in denial during that campaign saying that no serious person would vote for Trump. What they meant was, we don't take him seriously, therefore any electoral triumphs he has among the voters don't count." It's the same electoral philosophy I'm beginning to define as LDR 'liberals deny Republicans.

Hollywood, I should mention, was more upset then anybody that Trump one, I'd argued that they were more upset that Hilary. And somehow by the time Trump was sworn in they seem to have written their own Patriot Act'. In their interpretation America was now at war with an illegitimate President. That the Democrats had conceded the election and had made it clear they would work him was meaningless and in fact further reason to hold them unindicted co-conspirators. It was up to Hollywood, and Hollywood alone, to devote all of its public face to attacking the President. This was to be priority one, ahead of entertaining the masses.

Hollywood, it needs to be pointed out, has never been a branch of the government. It can't make laws, enforce them or carry them out.  Throughout the 21^st century, particularly during Trump's tenure, the biggest names in the industry began to create the narrative that Hollywood and the arts had always been there to speak 'truth to power'. This narrative was coming only from those within the industry and those who had similar alignments with it, academics and those from other countries – which meant it was as an impartial a decision as Dick Cheney when he led the search committee for W's Vice President. No one could point to any time in history where Hollywood, and Hollywood alone, had been responsible for a law being passed or a Supreme Court decision being made. Hollywood might have played some roles assisting to be sure but the real work was done by people the arena themselves.

But Hollywood went along with its publicly declared 'War on Trump'. The fighters in this war were all actors, writers and directors, who were rich and overwhelmingly part of the one percent – the very people that the right had spent the last twenty years framing as out of touch liberals that represented all Democrats.  Hollywood dealt with this problem the same way that the W. administration framed its argument that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction: they pretended it was irrelevant to the battle at hand and assumed that when those who had spent years watching Fox News learned the truth they would be greeted as liberators.

And to be clear they had no intention of winning the hearts and minds of the people who had voted for the President. Indeed I imagine many of them wished that there was a way to shock and awe Middle America into submission. But Hollywood doesn't believe violence is the answer to any problem even though are enemies don't share that opinion.

The strategy was to win hearts and minds. By which I mean the hearts and minds of people who already agreed with them.  Because Hilary had won the popular vote but lost the electoral college Hollywood made the assumption a majority of Americans believed in the left-wing dream and it was only a minority of privileged people that had blocked it. Ignoring the intelligence that told them that because Clinton had won California by 4 million votes – in an election where Hilary had won the popular vote by 3 million – they proceeded under the concept that they just had to convince the rest of America.

The only condition for victory in this war was as intangible as any goal in the Gulf War and beyond. It was to piss off Trump. In this battle an angry tweet directed against a host of late night was considered a triumph as big as taking out Osama Bin Laden. Colbert and his colleagues delighted in reading his angry remarks to their gleeful audiences and calling it comedy. That Trump was still President before and after he made those tweets was irrelevant, that he made similar tweets against anyone who he thought crossed him – which was an endless list – was also irrelevant, as was how this was supposed to convince those people who thought every word out of his mouth was gospel that they were being lied to was not even taken into consideration. Least of all was whether any of this was even funny to anyone other then the people in Hollywood.

Late night was key to this war as every single late night show engaged in nightly and weekly battles attacking the evils of Trump and Republicans. And it wasn't long before the casualty list began to show who was losing – Late Night.

Within two years half a dozen late night shows from Wyatt Cenac to Jordan Klepper to Larry Wilmore were cancelled.  Ratings began a slow but steady drop for every late night show on prime time and The Daily Show would suffer too. Conan O'Brien would leave the field in 2019. All of this was before the pandemic.

I should mention that Hollywood still felt no allegiance to the Democratic Party, as late as the fall of 2019 Seth Meyers and Desus and Mero openly thought Trump would win reelection is easily because there were no heavyweights running against him. Joe Biden had declared his candidacy by that point.  Even as America was entering a once in a generation crisis they seemed to view it with the same detachment as Trump did. Lockdown and being forced to quarantine was for them an inconvenience that was stopping them from entertaining the masses. That hundreds of thousand of people were dying and there was no apparent cure was at most, something they thought they could use as a cudgel against the incumbent President.

By 2021 Hollywood may have considered that they were the winners against the President. The problem was that for the industry in general and late night in particular the casualties had been so immense that Pyrrhus himself would say: "You guys got your ass kicked."

Hollywood might have achieved regime change as a result of their work but rather then declare victory and move on they seem to have decided that there was more work to do and engaged in a surge.  They spent the next three years attacking Trump and the GOP still in lockstep behind them with the full force of their wrath. Late night continued to suffer as the budgets became such that most shows had to go from five nights to four nights. Other shows were cancelled outright.

The canary in the coal mine late night was becoming should have been when James Corden retired in 2023. For more than twenty five years CBS had a late night host there from Tom Snyder to Craig Ferguson to Corden. Now they replaced it not with a traditional late night show but the more cost effective After Midnight.

There had been other signs as well: NBC had cancelled its 1:30 am slot which had been filled by Bob Costas and Carson Daly after Lilly Singh proved disastrous. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee was cancelled in 2022. The Daily Show spent nearly a year with no official host before they managed to get Jon Stewart to come back part time. All of this happened even before the 2024 election.

In the aftermath of Trump's reelection Hollywood yet again should have considered if they were having the desired effect. Instead they seem to have taken the argument that the ends justified the means and choice to abandon even the pretense of civility.  Every late night show (with the exception of Jimmy Fallon) thought it was their duty to attack Trump with the most vehement angry and ghastly terms. Anyone who even suggested that they were isolating half the country – as Jay Leno, who had been the number one name in late night for 20 years did in the aftermath of the cancellation of Colbert – was considered giving aid and comfort to the enemy. That by this point the enemy was a majority of the electorate was not part of the discussion: they were denying election results the same way their greatest adversary was but the Democrats hadn't.

By this point Hollywood had begun to attack its own house and this was true with late night especially. They decided that the businesses that had given them their livelihood were now untrustworthy because they were choosing profits over telling the truth. That the industry was struggling on multiple fronts and that one of them might well have been the War on Trump for the past decade was irrelevant to the talent. That they themselves were taking paychecks from their corporate companies even as they increasingly attacked them as being lapdogs to the President is just as out of touch as every time the President says that his failures are fake news. The difference is, that he's still President despite everything the Colbert's of the world  have thrown at him. Ten years in, they still deny his legitimacy in a way that makes them look as oblivious as the people on the right they still excoriate on a daily basis. If you were to tell them that despite everything the Republicans were still in charge, I guarantee you Colbert would say: "So?!"

 

Hollywood has fought the War on Trump for nearly a decade. By any metric you want to use it has been nearly as big a disaster for the industry as the War on Iraq was for everyone involved. If anything it has failed because they haven't even achieved their apparent goal which was to remove Trump as a political threat. He managed to win reelection in 2024 by a bigger margin of any of his three campaigns, the Republican party has essentially been filled with loyalists to him and as of this election they control both houses of Congress and a supermajority on the Supreme Court. How Hollywood was supposed to stop any of this from happening with speeches on red carpets or posts on social media or jokes on late night is something that you'd think a group of people who claim to be as smart as they are should have thought about before they engaged in this war. Its only slightly forgivable because their entertainers and not a branch of government.  But its because they've never been a branch of government that it was always going to end in failure.

The reason I don't mourn Colbert's departure is he'll be fine. He's a rich white guy in Hollywood: the sky's always been the limit for him. I mourn the fact that during the last decade millions of Americans needed escapism more than ever. This is a role that throughout the 20^th century when it comes up Hollywood has always been able to answer the call. This time when it did America got voicemail that told them: "We have no time to entertain you. We're too busy protecting you from yourselves." That no one but Hollywood elected themselves to this role is an irony that the Stephen Colbert of the Report would have picked up on. The Colbert who's leaving Late Night on Thursday no doubt thinks that there was a coup d'etat even though he was the only one who declared himself the authority.

I know that Jon Stewart is scheduled to be one of Colbert's last guests. I almost wonder if he will walk up to him and say with no irony as he surveys the wreckage of late night. "You did a heckuva job, Stevie."  Twenty years ago, they'd have said it ironically. If they said it today they'd mean it and be just as oblivious as the man who was once their greatest adversary said in that same context.

 

Margo's Got Money Troubles: David E. Kelley at his David E. Kelleyest

 

 

One of the first reviews of Margo's Got Money Trouble, the hysterical new comedy on Apple TV said it was the first David E. Kelley project since Big Little Lies that wasn't an adaptation of a mystery novel. Having got around to see the first two episodes this weekend, I'll go further: this is the most David E. Kelley like project he's done since he left network TV to start adapting best-sellers.

This isn't to throw shade on the work he's done for HBO and streaming over the last decade; my readers know how much I've worshipped his work in that form since Big Little Lies debuted. I mean that Margo is the first project Kelley has done in a long time that has the closest parallels to his incredible work in the 1990s and 2000s.

We've long since forgotten in the era of Peak TV just how much Kelley was willing to push the boundaries of network television from the moment he started Picket Fences with Tom Skerritt catching his teenage daughter having sex in her bedroom as he's about to call her down for breakfast.  Lost under his topicality that drove so much of his legal dramas was just how much Kelley pushed the envelope when it came to sex on network television for the 1990s and well into the 2000s, particularly from the female gaze. Ally McBeal was as much about women being dominant in how they flaunted their sexuality even as some of them resisted the act itself; Lara Flynn Boyle's Helen Gamble was an openly sexual woman (the scenes between her and Dylan McDermott pushed the limit on Standards and Practices in 1998) and Kelley spent much of Boston Public dealing with the sexuality of teenagers and their ignorance of it ("Who thinks STD is a motor oil?" a teacher asked in the pilot) and as we saw in Boston Legal, both men and women were sexually active well into their sixties and seventies.

So while I'm aware that Margo's Has Money Troubles is an adaptation of a bestselling novel, just watching the first two episodes it has proven to be so much in the model of Kelley's kind of TV during that period that it almost seems like a series he could have had lying around in the 2000s for ABC that the bosses wouldn't touch and he finally sold it to Apple last year after they bought his adaptation of Presumed Innocent.

Margo is the title character, a prospective writer the child of a single mother and a father she hasn't seen for years. When she writes one of her stories for Fullerton College, her professor asks why she's here rather than Harvard. Margo assumes she's going to mentor him. Her best friend is weary and says he's want to sleep with you. "He does not want to sleep with me." Cut to the two of them having the kind of sex I'm very familiar with from Kelley's 90s but with the kind of nudity you get from streaming and cable.

It's clear from the start that this won't end well, even before we learn that the professor is married with kids of his own. Margo, perhaps because she has been raised practically by her mother alone and the two have a strange relationship ("I wanted to grow up to be my mother's leg" she tells her professor after coitus) she really thinks that this is going to work out somehow despite all advice to the contrary. Needless to say this lasts until she vomits at her job and goes to the professor who immediately tries to pressure her into having an abortion.

Margo then goes to see her mother Sheyanne who is understandably appalled. She tells Margo in no uncertain terms that she has thrown her life away, something Margo doesn't want to hear because this is how she was conceived in the first place. Sheyanne makes it very clear Margo has to do this on her own.  We see the next several weeks as Margo continues to get more pregnant and somehow more sexual, all while her college roommates continue to judge her. Finally she goes to Bloomingdales with her mother to buy a baby carriage and runs into her professor who commits the sin of first denying paternity and then checking out Sheyanne as she walks by.  Sheyanne is infuriated and tells Margo to get out of the car so that she can give a primal scream. "It's going to be bad for the baby."

At the end of the Pilot Margo gives birth. Eventually she asks when the stitches will come out. "Will it get back to normal?" "No," Sheyanne immediately says. "No matter how many Kegels you do." This is exactly the kind of line Kelley would've had one of his characters say in 1997 if he could have gotten away with it.

I got that feeling all the way through Margo's getting home and her initial taking care of the baby. I know I may be being sexist to say this but I laughed hysterically during Margo's tearful monologue in which she describes just how much her breasts have becoming misshapen and deform because of how horrible her son Bodhi is at breastfeeding. She gives a realistic, tearful and wondrous rant using all the terms that I associate with the scribe of Ally McBeal. That is just as realistic as her roommates increasing contempt for the baby's non-stop crying. "They wouldn't let us keep a dog, but they let her keep a screaming baby," one says. And of course one of them tells her that the baby is her responsibility and that she has to pass her biochem exam the next day.

All of this is Kelley-Esque as is the fact of her father being a professional wrestler named Jinx who's been out of touch for years, is still wrestling even though he's being told its time to retire and is willing to trade his championship belt for a motorcycle so he can see his daughter.

In quick succession Margo loses her job, can't afford a babysitter, her roommates move out to stick her with more rent and she decides to extort her professor. The second episode ends with his mother demanding to negotiate and I know it won't end well.

I have described how wonderful this is without getting to the cast. Elle Fanning in the title role is no stranger to comedy and nudity as she did both in playing Young Catherine in Hulu's The Great, loved by many, if not by me. I found her work like so much of the actual series cold and unrelatable. Here Fanning has yet again thrown caution to the wind (along with her clothes) and is hysterical and lovable in every scene she's in and she's in most of them. She's on the shortlist for an Emmy nomination this year and this time I have no problem with it.

I've been joking ever since Big Little Lies debuted that every actress of a certain age has appeared in one of his show except his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer has basically been taking a step back from acting for the last decade or so and only the past few years has she finally ended up on TV. Here she is absolutely divine as Shayanne, the definition of GMILF and almost immediately I remember why I'd loved watching her in movies in the 1990s.

Even in her sixties Pfeiffer still has the raw sexuality she had twenty five years ago and her work as Shayenne is incredible as a woman who has made every mistake in the book and now realizes her daughter has made the exact same ones. Almost from the start she draws a line in the sand that she will not help Margo raise this child. She seems determined to leave her alone to do so, out of a mix of love and good parenting. She clearly loves Margo, even though she is the product of a one night stand at a Hooters and she clearly wants to stop making mistakes.

So she's gotten involved with a fairly religious man (a wonderful Greg Kinnear) who for all his relative conservatism clearly worships the ground Shayanne walks on. Despite being ham-handed he goes out of his way to ask for Margo's blessing before he proposes to her mother and then does so with a very straight forwardness that show's why there so different. (In Kelley fashion, it happens at an Applebee's.) Of course minutes after that Margo's father arrives having finally gotten her text message. "I thought you were dead," are the first words out of her mouth.

Jinx is played by Nick Offerman who gets to lean into his physicality and brawn in a way he rarely has over his impressive career. (Ron Swanson could have just as easily come from Kelley's pen as Amy Poehler's by the way.) He's clearly running from something as much as to his daughter and Offerman gets to measure seriousness while chanting the lines of any WWF fighter.

I know that there's a lot more that's going to happen in a few episodes (the Only Fans part hasn't remotely come into this) but honestly  I don't need any more details to love this show. Every level of it, from Kelley's writing to the incredible cast, is one of those sheer joys that I rarely get in even the best comedies. It's come in Abbott Elementary and Only Murders in the Building and I've seen it more than enough in Shrinking (I will get to Season 3) but Margo's is somehow on a different level.  And I think its because it has the perfect combination of Kelley's gifts of dialogue and getting incredible actors to read them in a way he hasn't in a while. I haven't even gotten to how much fun it was to see Marcia Gay Harden back on the screen and of course Nicole Kidman is here as well (because what would a Kelley project be without her?)

The decision to both renew Margo's Got Money Troubles for a second season and turn it into a comedy for the Emmys this year are absolutely the right ones, at least after two episodes.  Perhaps I will regret that decision down the road but nothing he's done has led me astray. (Season 3 of Big Little Lies is on its way this year!) In this case it's because Kelley has remembered what he did so well for so long during the 1990s: make us laugh at life's absurdities. And what's more absurd then sex, certainly from how he showed it then and today?

My score: 4.75 stars.

Landmark TV Episode Anniversaries: The West Wing 'Two Cathedrals (25TH Anniversary)

 

Almost from the moment it ended critics knew that the Season 2 finale of The West Wing was something special. There were articles about it papers and publications.

When the Emmy nominations came out a few months later Martin Sheen would be nominated for Best Actor for it (though he inexplicably lost to James Gandolfini for the second straight year). I can't say with confidence that this was the episode the writers chose to submit for consideration for Best Drama (considering that no less than seven actors would be nominated for Season 2, there were a lot of contenders playing threw Emmy voters minds during that period) but considering the show would deservedly repeat for Best Drama and win another seven Emmys alongside it. The episode would win for Best Single Camera Picture Editing. It was inexplicably not nominated for Best Dramatic teleplay  - Two Gunmen was the only non-Sopranos episode nominated for writing  - but Sorkin would win share in the Humanitas Prize and it would be nominated by the WGA for Best Dramatic Teleplay that year.

It currently ranks on imdb.com as the highest rating episode by fans of the entire series. In 2009 TV Guide would list it as one of the 100 greatest episodes of all time and a decade it would be ranked as one of the 100 best of the 20^th century. And what I find all the more remarkable about a quarter of a century later is that it does all of this by building all its drama to a cliffhanger that any viewer knew shouldn't be one.

Consider this. For the second half of Season 2 the Bartlet staff has been prepared for the reelection campaign. What they don't know is that because of Bartlet's MS he promised Abby that he was only go to serve one term. Not long after the State of the Union that year Abby and Jed got into a fight because she believes he's decided to run for reelection without telling her. She's very clear about what his MS will do to him in a few years' time and she's concerned that if he stays in office it will kill him.

In the leadup to this there have been signs Bartlet has been thinking otherwise. The biggest tell came when Hoynes began planning a trip to New Hampshire. In the landmark '17 People' episode Toby realized something was up and confronted Bartlet on the lies he has told the public and just how much trouble he's in. During the final three episodes leading up to the season finale Bartlet has been revealing to his staff his diagnosis while meeting with White House Counsel Oliver Babish (Oliver Platt, who deservedly was nominated for an Emmy for his work) about whether he'd involved 17 people in a conspiracy to rig a Presidential election. The last few episodes have dealt with the entire staff learning the truth, prepared for multiple investigations from a special prosecutor and Congress and most devastatingly Joey Lucas doing a poll (without telling the details) that show Bartlet would be annihilated if he were to run having disclosed his health for reelection.

So much of the conflict that has unfolded during these final episodes is whether Bartlet will run for reelection. The thing is, even at 22, I knew that Sorkin was trying to create drama where there wouldn't be. I didn't know the term 'schmuck's bait' in 2001 (the idea of writers trying to get viewers to believe in something that, if it were to happen, would completely rewrite what the show they were watching was) but I knew that The West Wing was being watched by anywhere from 20 to 25 million viewers a week and that it had just swept the Emmys for Best Drama the previous year as well as the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards. If Bartlet didn't run for reelection then according to the Constitution NBC would have to end its hit show in one season, two at the most and considering that in the spring of 2001 ER was still on the air after seven years and Law & Order was about to end its first decade on the air I knew NBC had no intention of doing that. Therefore Bartlet was going to run for reelection and to try and bring drama out of that decision should have been a fool's errand.

To be clear none of the senior staff know in the days leading up what that decision is going to be and in the penultimate episode they make it very clear to Leo that they need an answer because it's going to be the first question out of any White House reporter after Bartlet reveals his diagnosis.

And then at the end of '18^TH and Potomac', Sorkin throws the darkest twist he will do as showrunner.

During this episode Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten) has been concerning herself with buying her first new car. To this point we know she and Bartlet go back a while but we don't know much more about her then any of the other secretaries like Donna or Margaret. (When Janel Moloney was made a series regular we began to learn more about her but Joosten wasn't one.) It's only in this episode that we learn her first name: Dolores. Before Mrs. Landingham leaves to buy her car Bartlet tells her they need to talk when she gets back. He wants to tell her about his diagnosis personally.

In the final minute Charlie, who knew her better than most, tells Leo that Mrs. Landingham was driving back home and was hit by a drunk driver at the corner of 18^th and Potomac. "She's dead," he says stunned. Leo then has to tell Jed about this.

To those who are under thirty its hard to describe the impact this had on viewers in 2001. While HBO had started the practice of killing off series regulars on The Sopranos and Oz, it still wasn't happening on network TV at the same level at that point. There were forebodings of things to come: in March of 2001 Joyce Summers had died at home of a brain aneurysm in the landmark episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer 'The Body' and the week before this episode aired on The Practice ADA Richard Bey had been the victim of a hail of bullets from allies of a criminal he'd just sent to jail. But Mrs. Landingham's death hit differently. Indeed a California Assemblyman actually adjourned the session in memoriam of her death, giving a eulogy in which he called her 'a great American'.  Thomas Schlamme joked 'The California power problem will never be solved by these group of people after hearing this.

Sorkin acknowledged that doing caused him to be hated by a lot of people, including his dentist. But he admitted the decision was that this was the best way to take the President to the edge at a critical moment in his life. And as a creative decision it’s a masterstroke.

'Two Cathedrals' works because the Bartlet administration is at a crossroads and no one in senior staff is in a position to ask the question. Sam spends much of the episode saying that the decision of Bartlet to reveal his diagnosis is one they should call off because they don't know the answer to the question and considering that they are dealing with both the funeral of someone who was one of their closest friends and someone Bartlet has known for forty years no one wants to ask him until after the funeral. And Martin Sheen, who usually plays Bartlet with a kind of dynamism, spends the first half of the episode looking like he's barely present. It's a lie in a sense – he's still able to talk about a coup in Haiti and attend a meeting in the situation room about it – but when it comes to a decision he has to make he's barely there.

And the second part of what makes this episode a masterpiece is that we spend much of it in a flashback that we've never seen: Bartlet when he was a teenager attending prep school, when he first met Dolores, who was then only in her twenties and how they began to form their relationship. More importantly we see something that's critical to his psychology: Bartlet's father who he's never so much as mention in two seasons even though we know about his brother, his children and even his mother.

This also serves as a critical point. For most of those flashbacks we think we're getting one of those nostalgic moments that is now meant in tragedy that tells the story of how Jed and Dolores first met and how she brought out the best in him even at a young age. And in the final flashback it reveals a trauma that Jed's been hiding his entire life, that explains some of what he's doing even now – though it's not until the final extraordinary five minutes we realize it.

And that is for something that makes 'Two Cathedrals' something that even for a show that has dealt with what was even more unthinkable then dealing with politics: a scene in which the leader of the free world has a confrontation with God. In a sense that's even more radical then anything that was to follow in all the great shows that were to come.

Faith would be important in some of the TV series that were to come in the next decade, particularly shows such as Lost and Friday Night Lights. But increasingly God was seen either as a symbol for the worst actions of humanity, such as in the terrorists on 24 or something that couldn't last in America, such as the physical decline and eventual death of Reverend Smith by Al Swearengen in Season 1 of Deadwood. And as we were about to enter a period where religious orthodoxy was going to be used as a sign of American exceptionalism in politics (this episode aired less then six months before the attacks of 9/11) so much of religion would be framed in a strictly good or evil concept with no gray area in our national dialogue. So its telling that arguably the greatest episode in the show's long tenure centers on an incredible scene where the leader of the free world engages in a three minute monologue where after the ceremony and before he has to go back to the White House he asks Leo to seal the cathedral.

It was already established that Bartlet was a practicing Catholic and Sorkin had make it very clear just how important Bartlet's faith was to him multiple times. We'd seen him dealing with it in 'Take This Sabbath Day' when he had a meeting with his former parish priest, we'd seen him challenge a TV conservative on her interpretation of the Bible but never had we seen anything like this.  We see in the flashbacks just how important Dolores was too him at a young age. She tells him: "You need a big sister." And in a critical conversation: "You're a boy king. You're a foot smarter then the smartest kids in your class. You're blessed with inspiration."

To this point we've only seen Leo sense the greatness in him, most notably at the start of the season in a previous flashback when he encouraged him in the early days of his campaign for President. The flashbacks make it clear Dolores knew it right off. This crisis has done much to test his faith but he's basically kept it all in and now that Dolores is gone, Bartlet spends much of the episode, particularly involving his drive to the National Cathedral, barely present as Abbey tries to say that if he gets behind Hoynes they have a chance of holding the White House.

The scene starts after he waits until the cathedral is empty and no one can hear. The moment its done he looks towards the heavens and says simply: "You're a son of a bitch. You know that? She buys her first new car and You hit her with a drunk driver?  What? Was that supposed to be funny?!

And then it begins:

You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the Mercy of God," says Graham Greene. I don't know whose ass he was kissing there cause I think You're just vindictive. What was Josh Lyman – a warning shot? That was my son. What did I ever do to Yours but praise His Glory and praise His name?

There's a tropical storm that's gaining speed and power. They say we haven't had a storm this bad since You took out that tender ship of mine in the North Atlantic last year. Sixty eight crew. You know what a tender ship does? Fixes the other ships. It doesn't even carry guns, it just goes around, fixes the other ships and delivers the mail. That's all it can do.

Gratias Tibi ago, Domine.

(In Latin, that translates to Thank you God, and its clearly Bartlet becoming more aggressive.)

Yes, I lied. It was a sin. I've committed many sins. Have I displeased You, You feckless thug.

That's one of the harshest things any man, particularly a devoted Catholic like Bartlet, has ever said in a TV show and its delivered more venomously then any obscenity filled oath by Tony Soprano.

Then he scoffs.

3.8 million jobs, that wasn't good. Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We're not fighting a war. I've raised three children. That's not enough to buy me out of the doghouse.

And then Sorkin after all that does something that was more unthinkable. He has Bartlet deliver his harshest words to God in perfect Latin with no subtitles. (He didn't even translate it in the original script.) There was no such thing as Google translate in 2001 and I seriously doubt the average TV viewer knew anything about Latin. So the next day in every paper and on TV the translation was painstakingly written. Here is what he actually said:

Am I really to believe that these are the actions of a loving God? A just God? A wise God? To Hell with Your punishments. I was Your servant here on Earth. I spread Your word and did Your work. To Hell with Your punishments. To Hell with You!"

And then Bartlet deliberately lights a cigarette and grinds it out on the floor of the Cathedral. Then he looks at the heavens and says with perhaps the most contempt he's ever said about his Vice President: You get Hoynes.

It still strikes me as a travesty that Sheen didn't win the Emmy for this episode: Gandolfini had won the previous year and would win again two years later. (I don't even he thought he had a chance; when his name was called he wasn't even there to pick it up.) On its own it would be the powerful segment of the episode but as Leo will tell us in the next sequence: "We're about to get one to beat it."

The staff still has no idea and has been preparing what they call 'Answer A' and Answer B:  the two possible responses Bartlet will give when he's asked about reelection. Before the final commercial break CJ tells Toby. "It's Answer B."

It's keeping with The West Wing that haven't spent so much of the last several episodes worrying about the consequences of what happens when Bartlet reveals his diagnosis that we never actually see the interview in any form: just hear a clip of it being played over the TV.  While this is going on Toby talks to Leo and says: "You think he's going to run again, don't you?"

Much of the next few minutes deal with CJ telling Bartlet that when the press conference begins to go to the medical reporter for the Times who'll ask him questions about his diagnosis to prepare him before the inevitable question about reelection. Not long after that Donna – who to this point we've never seen in a scene with Bartlet – is called into the Oval Office. Donna, its worth remembering, was the first member of the secretarial staff to be told about Bartlet's MS and Toby famously said: "If the rest of America takes it like this, we may be okay."

She's the only person in the episode to this point who doesn't treat Bartlet like a piece of China. She comes in with the information about the tropical storm. Bartlet says he knows there's a season for tropical storms and this isn't it. Donna confirms there hasn't been one in May for the last hundred years.  In Bartlet's mind this storm has been sent by God to mess with him. And that explains the final flashback and all of what follows.

In Young Jed and Dolores's conversations she has been trying to tell him about the differences between the salaries of the female staffers and the males one. His father is the headmaster and she knows that if he talks to him it would have influence. In the scene that follows he's clearly about to do it but his father (who we only know as Dr. Bartlet) is upset for a different reason.

In the school newspaper Jed has given a quote from Henry admonishing the books that the English professor has censored. Jed tells him that the professor had banned Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room for being too homosexual. "He banned Fahrenheit 451 which is about banning books!"

Dr. Bartlet: "Was that clever? Were you trying to be clever with words?"

Jed tries to explain. And Dr. Bartlet hits him. Sorkin's script reads. "It's not the first time it happened but Jed wasn't expecting it.

Dr. Bartlet: Is there anything else?"

Jed mumbles. "It's not a non-denominational service."

This is about how important being Catholic is to Jed even then..

Dr Bartlet: "You're only Catholic because you're mother was Catholic? And you're only a student here because I'm headmaster? How's that for clever with words?"

Sorkin said about this: "Bartlet is the son of a man who, we learn, is an intellectual Fredo. The father, obviously convinced he married a Catholic whore, treats his son terribly for many reasons, not the least of which is he adopted his mother's religion." Sorkin makes it clear this magnificent exhortation was delivered as much to his  father as to God.

Then the doors blow open and Bartlet shouts: "Mrs. Landingham." He realizes that he's just yelled for a woman whose been dead for two days. And then Mrs. Landingham comes in. This isn't Bartlet seeing a ghost; this is him using memories of her to make the right decision. We know this because almost all the dialogue of Kathryn Joosten are phrases she used either on the show and that their conversation has elements that we saw in the flashback. The rest is him making the arguments to run again.

God doesn't make cars crash and you know it. Stop using me as excuse. The truth is your  father was a prick who never got over that he wasn't as smart as his brothers.

Bartlet asks for numbers and he gives them himself, the things his administration hasn't accomplished, the problems America faces, what he desperately wants to do in a second term.

Finally Landingham says: "Look if you don't want to run for reelection, then I can respect that. But if you don't want to run because you think you do and you think you'll lose, then God, Jed, I don't even want to know you."

And then the final five magnificent minutes as Dire Straits 'Brothers in Arms' starts and Charlie walks in offering the President his coat. Instead Bartlet walks right into the pouring rain. "He wants this," the script says.

As Bartlet is driven to the front of the lawn – a necessity given the storm – we hear CJ answering the torrent of questions. She tells him a list of prosecutors will be given to a three judge panel, subpoenas will be issued to senior staff, Congress will no doubt investigate. While the President is driven his cigarette butt is found by a custodian. Bartlet seems to notice this.

As he arrives CJ reminds him of the medical correspondent. The camera looks directly at him for a moment. Then Bartlet deliberately says:

"Yes…Sandy

Sandy: Mr. President, can you tell us right now if you'll be seeking a second term?

We cut to the stunned staff. They didn't see this coming.

Bartlet: I'm sorry, Sandy. There was a bit of noise there. Could you repeat the question?

She does. While he does so he puts his hands in pocket and looks back at the pool of reporters.

Leo is the only one who can speak: "Watch this."

Earlier in the episode Dolores told Young Jed then when he's made up his mind to do something he sticks his hand in his pocket, looks aways and smiles. Leo must know that too.

The last shot of the episode shows Bartlet, looking to the side and a small but growing smile appears on his face.

Cut to credits. Season 2 over. Technically it’s a cliffhanger but if you've watched the episode you know that Jed has made up his mind. We don't have to wait until Season 3 (when much of this final scene is replayed) to know his answer "Yeah. And I'm gonna win."

Some have argued, despite the fact that The West Wing would repeat as Best Drama at the Emmys for the next two years, that the series critically peaked after 'Two Cathedrals'. While I understand the rationale for this argument (and will explain in a different article) I don't hold with it. Sorkin would spend Season 3 and 4, in many ways, with more ambitious storylines then he did in the first two seasons, some that were far more serialized then he'd dared do in the first two years. If they didn't work as well – and some did not – that didn't mean the cast wasn't up to the challenge or that the incredible dialogue didn't diminish one iota.

But I do agree that 'Two Cathedrals' is almost certainly Sorkin's finest hour as a writer, if not The West Wing itself in many ways because its so atypical. It's dark, grim, nearly apocalyptic and has faith put front and center in a way that he or few shows ever did. And the real triumph is not Bartlet's decision to run again. It's that his biggest battle – his faith in God has been restored. Compared to that, how can running for reelection possibly compare?