In the last decade
there has been much reevaluation of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing; I
myself have done a fair amount of it overtime. There has been a fair amount of
criticism about how so many of the characters were idealized versions of the
kinds of leaders we wanted in D.C., from Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlett on down.
There has been an argument that the series gave a very false picture of what
government could be like, even though by the time the show debut, the divides
of partisan government had started to become locked in. There were arguments
that government could solve problems if you just made the right argument and
that the divides in our policies were more between the members of the party
than the party system itself.
All of these critiques
are valid. But what is frequently forgotten is that for all the idealism constantly overwhelmed the cynicism of
politics and for all the ways the characters seemed to symbolize the virtues of
The White House rather than the vices, at the core the characters very
frequently kept running against the limitations of the system. And particularly
in the first season, but quite often throughout Sorkin’s four years running the
series, the characters were incredibly frustrated and maddened by the system
they worked in. We might want to
consider Jed Bartlett a saint and the ideal President, but the series made it clear
over and over that he was a politician, and like all politics cared
fundamentally about his poll numbers and about reelected. As a result, this
trickled down throughout his entire staff and throughout Sorkin’s tenure,
showed them as people who were frustrated against the limitations of their job
– many of which they had imposed upon themselves.
Because I know the
series in the Sorkin era very well, I’d like to use this piece to demonstrate
that as much as The West Wing may seem to be to much of an idealistic
fantasy at times, Sorkin made it very clear he knew how D.C. worked. The Bartlet Administration more or less
paralleled that of the Clinton one as that while the White House was a
Democratic Administration, both houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans. By setting up this scenario, he wanted to
draw a parallel to the DC of the 1990s. It is also indicated that the previous
administration was a Republican one and that Bartlet won the White House with
less than fifty percent of the popular vote (this is meant to parallel Clinton’s
first term and his reelection) and it’s clear given the divided government that
he does not have a mandate. Bartlet’s approval numbers, in what is a
foreshadowing of the divided government of this century, are not incredibly
high when the series begins: he’s around 48 percent and there’s already talk of
someone challenging him in the primary.
Bartlet does not state
this directly until near the end of the first season, but it is clear this is
governing every action he takes. And while everyone in the inner circle from
the Chief of Staff on down is aware of this, most of the time they are too busy
trying to deal with the business of the day for it to be a factor. But every so
often that frustration becomes very obvious and they are more than willing to
share it – though critically, not with the President.
In ‘The Short List’,
Bartlet’s staff is about to fill a seat on the Supreme Court for a retiring
justice. The candidate has the perfect background, he’s certain to be confirmed
and they’ll be a five to ten point bump in the polls. However when Bartlett has
his meeting with the justice about to retire, the retiring Justice is very
frank of how little he thinks of his choice or the President:
“You ran great guns in
the campaign…and then you went right into the middle of the road. I waited four
years to retire because I wanted a Democrat in the White House…and instead I
got you.”
The President takes it
to an extent, mainly because he knows he’s about to be rid of him. But later in
the episode, another crisis develops. A counsel is raising charges that a third
of the White House staffers are using drugs. Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman
(Bradley Whitford) mocks the idea at first and is annoyed when Toby Ziegler
(Richard Schiff) the Communications Director tells him to investigate and to
take it seriously. His speech shows more frustration than the current problem:
“We’ve doing this for a
year and all we’ve gotten is a year older. Our approval rating is 48%, I think
that number’s soft, and I’m tired of being captain for the team that couldn’t
shoot straight!”
Even at this point in
the series, Toby’s character is that of perpetually put-upon by life. This is
the first time we’ve seen an example of a deeper frustration than his
co-workers screw-ups. The episode ends with Bartlet decided not to go with
their safe appointment but rather a Justice who might be better served for the
court who will be tougher to confirm. This decision fuels much of the action
that go for much of the first season.
Later in ‘Take Out The
Trash Day’, the White House is about to sign a hate crimes bill after a gay
teenager is Wisconsin was murdered by two Skinheads. They have invited the
father of the murdered teenager to be present but he has not commented about
the bill and C.J. is afraid he is homophobic. Late in the episode, she asks if
he’s embarrassed by his son. His reaction is stunning:
“I want to know how
this President can have such a weak-ass position on gay rights. I want to know
why this President who never spent a day in uniform – I served two terms in ‘Nam
– thinks my son is unfit to serve in the military. I’m not embarrassed by my
son. My government is.”
C.J. is moved by this
message but she knows that this is not the position the President can be seen
advocating. At one point when Danny, her
reporter love interest sees how upset she is, she tells him it’s nothing you’ll
learn about in the news. When he tries to tell her how good a reporter she is,
she says bitterly: “We’re getting really good at this.” The episode ends with
this bill that the White House had advocated for being put in the trash – in
2000 terms, in the news cycle no one pays attention to.
The most direct
reference we get as to the frustration in the administration is ‘Take This
Sabbath Day’. The Supreme Court has
refused to hear an appeal of a man on death row, and in a desperate move an
attorney who knows Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) calls him and puts in the President’s
lap. He wants Bartlet to commute the man’s sentence to life is prison. The
President has been out of country and flies back into the U.S. on
Saturday. The execution is scheduled for
Monday because as we learn, we don’t execute people on the Sabbath.
The episode faces two
opposing dichotomies. President Bartlet does not believe in the death penalty.
And in 2000, more than seventy percent of the population did. The episode makes
a fairly balanced argument on the subject, pointing out that major philosophers
such as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant believed in the capital punishment and
quotes The Ten Commandments and the Torah – however Bartlet’s childhood priest
tells Bartlet near the end another piece of scripture: “Vengeance is mine,
sayeth the Lord.” What is also clear is the President is looking for
technicalities in the law – “like the kid in right field who doesn’t want the
ball hit to him” the priest points out.
It comes to a head when
Sam goes to the Oval Office to make his case and Leo won’t even let him in. He
begins to argue about it saying that all of this was bungled and an infuriated
Sam says: “What would you have done different? You would have kept the
President out of the country another two days, wouldn’t you?” Leo pauses and
says simply: “Yes.” It’s the first time he’s acknowledged that he doesn’t want
the President to deal with any issue that has a modicum of controversy. Sam looks at him and says with something like
despair: “Leo, there are times when we are absolutely nowhere.” Sam is
usually the voice of optimism in the administration: now he seems used up.
The conflict in the
Administration comes to a head in the episode ‘Let Bartlet Be Bartlet’. Two
seats on the FCC have become open and Bartlet’s want to put two nominees in
favor of campaign finance reform. Actually he says: “Let’s just dip our feet.”
Josh comes up with two names, but when he brings them to Leo, he says bluntly:
“This isn’t going anywhere.” In typical Josh fashion when he sees just how
pissed the Republican aides are, he gets completely onboard.
Simultaneously Sam and
Toby are having a meeting with the military to discuss ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell’. Sam shows his usual determination until one of the army soldiers calls
him on it, saying that if he meant business he would have made a proclamation
or signed an executive order, not met with relatively minor brass. The official then tells Sam: “Is this meeting
anything other than a waste of time?” And Sam acknowledges it.
The administration is also
dealing with a memo that a member of the staff put as opposition research about
all the weaknesses the Administration has. C.J. finds out Danny has the memo
and is going to print it. When C.J. starts getting pissy, Danny is outraged
that they’re blaming him. They had to
know this memo was coming but they didn’t want to know it:
“You guys are stuck in
the mud. None of this the fault of the press. I know you’re disappointed, but
it ain’t nothing compared to the disappointment of those of us voted for you.”
Donna basically sums up
the mood even before the last act: “Why is everybody acting like they already
lost?” This is before they learn that the recent poll numbers show them at 42
percent. When Leo says how could we drop five points in a week:
Leo: “We didn’t do
anything.”
Toby: No kidding.”
Toby tells them they
have managed one victory in their administration: their Supreme Court
appointment. He’s actually more upset not about the battles we lost, “but the
ones we don’t suit up for.” The rest of the staff comes in all suffering from
the same mood of depression. Leo goes into the Oval Office. Bartlet’s asks him
if he’s bothered by the memo. Leo says Yes.
Bartlet: “It’s not
true. You don’t drive me to the political safe ground.”
Leo: No. (Pause) You drive
me there.”
The next five minutes
are some of the finest writing Sorkin would ever do for the series and these
two friends and allies have a knockdown argument in which Leo basically accuses
Bartlet that ‘everything you do says I
don’t want to be a one-term President” and this friend is weak and it reflects
on everyone here.
Leo: “I’m the hall
monitor around here. It’s my job to make sure no one runs or goes too far.
When he brings up the
non-fights, Bartlet challenges him saying: “If I ever told you to get serious
on campaign finance or gays in the military, you’d tell me not to run too fast
or go too far.”
John Spencer then
delivers one of the greatest speeches he ever gives on the show and that’s
saying a lot:
“If you ever told me to
get aggressive on anything, I’d say I serve as the pleasure of the President.
But we’ll never know because I don’t think you’re ever going to say it.”
When Bartlet protests:
“You want me to go in
there and mobilize these people? These people who would walk into fire if you
told them, these people who showed up to lead, these people who showed up to
fight…Everybody’s waiting, I don’t know for how much longer.”
Bartlet finally seems
to find momentum and Leo goes into the other room and saying: “If we’re going
to hit walls, I want us to run into them full speed!” Their first act to name
their nominees to the FCC.
Now the thing is this
does inspire action and they do engage in a spirited battle for the next
several episodes. But this momentum does not last much beyond the early episodes
of the second season. I’m not saying the staff doesn’t engaged in fights and
isn’t prepared to wage them, but throughout the rest of the series, they spend
as much time backing away and compromising their ambitions as they do striving
for victory. This is made clear in a storyline that most people may have missed
in the third season when Bartlet is running for reelection and his chief
campaign advisor tells them that they should start running ads based on soft
money in politics, the very thing he appointed his nominees to the FCC to close
the loophole on. When Sam and Toby bring
this issue up, their campaign advisors basically say the equivalent of: “Why
should we play by the rules of the Republicans won’t?” Sam and Toby more or
less cave. They are willing to fight for
a cause, but like all administrations their moral values dissipate when it
comes to winning elections. This may be the most clear when it comes to a major
character who shows up in the third season that is by far one of the most loathed
characters by fans of The West Wing – though not for the reasons I’m
about to list.
There are many
characters in The West Wing that are unpopular but few who are more
purely and undeservedly loathed than Amy Gardener, the women’s rights activist
played by Mary-Louise Parker beginning in Season 3. I think a lot of the reason
for this have nothing to do with the character or Parker’s portrayal of her.
There has always been a lot of sexist attitudes towards female characters with
the strong personalities that we see in TV, and it’s only gotten worse with the
rise of Peak TV and the willingness to allow Antiheroes to literally get away
with murder while their wives who try to stand in their way to protect their
families take torrents of online abuse. Amy is a special case because she
offended West Wing fans in two ways, one very obvious, one far less so.
Amy’s most blatant sin,
of course, was that she was the obstacle preventing Josh and Donna from
achieving the love all the shippers had wanted from the start of Season 1. This hatred towards obstacles pre-dates the
hatred of the wives of antiheroes but can be no less vituperative – I remember
vividly how so many people hated Riley Finn just for existing and because he dared to come after Angel and
Buffy’s true love even though they’d been broken up for a full season.
Now I need to be clear
on this fact: I don’t think Josh and Donna would have ever gotten
together if Sorkin had stayed with The West Wing for the duration. As
I’ve said before and will say again, Sorkin doesn’t believe in happy endings or
do relationships well. It’s not what his
series are fundamentally about and when he tries to do them, they always come
off badly. (The Newsroom makes this very obvious.) Furthermore, Donna
was Josh’s secretary and there was no way they could date, and it was all
Sorkin could do to drop a hint that the relationship was anything but
one-sided until the end of his fourth season.
None of this will change the minds of
shippers, of course: in their minds, Amy had committed the cardinal sin of you
know, being romantically available to Josh when he showed no interest in Donna
at all. Josh was just an idiot who
couldn’t see what was right in front of him, and had no business dating an
attractive, available woman who wasn’t working for him at the time. (That’s how
shippers view the world and I learned long ago you can’t reason with them.)
The other reason that
many viewers disliked Amy is more serious and it speaks not only to how Sorkin
viewed the divide between idealism and reality, but foreshadowed the way so
many extremists, particularly on the left, tend to view governing and politics.
Amy was a gadfly to the administration because above all else in her job as an
advocate for her cause, it was her job to push the White House to realize its
ideals. This was always going to make her a figure of conflict not only to fans
of the show but the administration: Amy had an agenda that was
counter-intuitive for how the Presidency worked. Fans of Sorkin might remember
this conflict was at the center of The American President, a film that shows a President of the United
States decided to do the right thing for the country even though its hard and
it wins him back the love of his life. The third season of The West Wing is
far more ruthless to the idea.
Josh and Amy spend much
of the third season fundamentally having a fairly solid romance. The fans were more annoyed by this then the
administration was. This would change in the penultimate episode of Season 3
“We Killed Yamamoto”. The Bartlet
Administration is in the midst of trying to pass a welfare reform bill but have
had to grant a concession to both Republicans and conservative Democrats for
‘marriage incentives’. Bartlet is repelled by the idea but goes along with it –
the Administration needs a legislative win for the campaign. Making dinner that
night, Josh lets slip this information to Amy who takes this in, and then
begins to make calls to Democrats to fight the amendment to kill the bill. When
Bartlet learns about this, he calls Josh on the carper (he’s already angry
about other things which are irrelevant to this discussion) and says, “his
girlfriend is doing a better job campaigning then he is.”
In the season finale,
Josh and Amy continue their fight and Amy refuses to relent. Without going into
detail, Josh arranges to make a move behind Amy’s back that leads to the bill’s
getting passed. The administration knows that Amy will lose her job and that
their relationship is over.
For those people who
think The West Wing is a series about idealism and good-hearted people,
it’s a little disconcerting to hear just how detached everybody is when they
end up discussing what will happen. After the deal is made, Toby ‘consoles’
Josh by saying: “Amy is very hire-able’. Donna, who has never been a fan of
Amy, comes into Josh’s office and asks: “Is there a chance she’ll lose her
job?” Josh doesn’t look at her. “No. They’ll definitely fire her.” He doesn’t
stay around for the vote count; he knows they’ll win.
In one of the last
scenes of the finale, Josh and Amy have an argument that in a way is a stalking
horse for the conflict progressives have about ideals and reality. There is no
discussion about whether they keep their relationship separate or saving it:
all they talk about is politics. Amy makes it very clear that she considers
Josh’s act a betrayal of the values the administration claims to be on the side
of. Josh doesn’t try to argue otherwise. Indeed, his argument is literally: “Do
you think it will be better for women if Robert Ritchie (the presumptive
Republican nominee for President) ends up in the White House?!” In that sense
the gulf between them is unassailable. Amy can not see the point of having
power if you don’t live up to your promises. Josh can not see the point of making
promises that might end up costing your party power.
I actually may end up
writing about this is in an article on my series on political discourse later
on because I find this is the fundamental conflict that I find in the
progressive argument. The difference is, in the argument between Amy and Josh,
they see the decision as binary, and it very well may be. Twenty years later
progressives truly seem to think that they can get both. What’s different is,
in Sorkin’s world, compromise was the only way forward. In the world of today,
compromise is not only impossible in practice but should not even be suggested
in theory. I have seen more than my share of newsletters arguing that Democrats
surrender on issues that affect the voters they are trying to help and in the
next article argue that we must do everything in our power to elect more
Democrats. They seem to want
administrations to have the attitude of Josh when it comes to winning elections
but when it comes to policy act like Amy. The fact the two are mutually
exclusive will never register.
There’s one last issue
that took place in the Sorkin era that may speak more to where America is right
now. In the Season 4 episode ‘Angel Maintenance” Josh is working with a
Republican Congressman from Maryland on legislation to Clean-Up Chesapeake Bay.
It is completely non-controversial bill that he is sponsored. However, while
Josh is meeting with Landis, he is met with representatives from the DNC
telling them that the White House must withdraw its support from the bill.
Landis comes from a vulnerable district and they need to make sure that they
can pick him off. Landis has been an ally for the White House and is one of
Josh’s friends. But in the eyes of the Democrats, he’s the enemy. Landis ends
up getting his name taken off the bill to get it passed. Landis tells him that
if they keep picking off the liberal Republicans and the conservative
Democrats. Josh answered: “Those are the only ones that can lose.” Looking at our political situation these
days, I would argue that most progressives and conservatives not only wish that
we’d done that sooner but can’t understand why we don’t keep doing it every
chance we get.
The West Wing that Aaron Sorkin may
have been a government that was purely a fantasy when it comes to the ideals
that the central characters had. But to
be clear, Sorkin was not unaware of the reality of American government and how
the ideals that we come in to office with may never survive the reality. These
days, far too many on both sides believe only in the fantasy and think that the
reality is one that is one that they can change without having to deal with the
structures. In that sense, the political landscape they are permanently part of
is as fictional as the one they accuse Sorkin’s of being.
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