Some of my pieces about
the election will also involve pop culture and as has been my method throughout
many of my political pieces, The West Wing will be involved. A little
background before we get stated.
As you can imagine when
you look online, The West Wing has its share of threads, some of them
about the episodes, some about the characters. Because this is the internet,
rankings are inevitable and I’ve seen rankings of the characters, sometimes by
subjects such as likability or how frustrating they were. I have my opinions on
both and I may share some of them in this article but let’s shift the paradigm.
I’ve never seen a ranking of the most lovable characters on The West Wing and
in my opinion that’s because it’s a wasted exercise because since the series
first year that decision was made in a landslide victory and that character is
still the undisputed champion. I speak, of course, of Donatella Moss played
wonderfully by Janel Moloney for seven seasons.
I’m pretty sure at the
start of the series Aaron Sorkin had no intention of doing much with Dona: her
few scenes in the pilot show her as remarkably frail, as if a weak breeze could
knock her down. At most she seemed destined to be part of the secretaries on
the show. That would have been fine on its own: one of the joy’s of the era of Sorkin’s
tenure was how much the secretarial staff not only gave substantial
contributions but how many of them became interesting personalities. (I may write
about that in a different article.)
But Sorkin clearly saw
something in Moloney very quickly. By the third episode, she had begun to
develop a personality. By the sixth episode, the world loved her. And by the
time the first season was over, everybody wanted Josh to realize what an idiot
he was for not realizes how great Dona was. The decision to make her a series
regular by the second season was one of the smartest choices the producers ever
made.
Dona’s clear attraction
for Josh was apparent very quickly and it would have been too easy to just make
her part of the show the ‘will they-won’t they’ one of the series. Sorkin had
something far cleverer in mind. Dona Moss very quickly became the voice of the
audience on the show, someone who asked the questions of these powerful people
with no filter, someone who could read the mood far easier than anyone else,
someone who would blurt out what the audience was thinking should be said but
everyone else was too diplomatic to say. Dona very quickly stopped being merely
an adjunct of Josh and became a personality in her own right, and many of my
favorite moments on the series come from her interactions with the other characters.
Some of them were funny (her timidly raising her hand in the White House and
Leo saying: “We don’t typically do that) and some of them were comforting
(there’s a scene between Sam and Donna when Sam is dealing with a betrayal in
his life and she’s the one who talks sense into him.)
Because Dona was both an
insider and an outsider on the show, she was far closer to the world that the
staff on the show was governing over and worry about how they’d vote but not
really thinking much of. This was clear
in what was one of Moloney’s finest hours on the entire series: the fourth
season premiere ’20 Hours in America’.”
Now I have to give some context.
Season 3 and the first third of Season 4 deal with President Bartlet’s
reelection campaign. Halfway through Season Three, the Republican opponent that
Bartlett will be facing is Robert Ritchie, the governor of Florida. Clearly
modeled after George W. Bush, Ritchie is a lightweight who clearly doesn’t have
the intellectual bandwidth of Bartlet. The problem is Ritchie clearly has the
appeal of the South and the team knows that Texas and Florida are going to go
for the gop that November. (This is discussed at length in ‘Stirred’ when Josh
and Toby discuss that because of this, they should consider dropping the Vice
President, who helped deliver the South last time, from the ticket.)
Josh (Bradley Whitford) and Toby are both handling the campaign and
both men have a different approach to how to handle Ritchie, and in both cases
it shows the differences between their approaches. Toby (Richard Schiff) who is
frequently condescending to people he thinks are beneath him (which is honestly
most people), thinks that Ritchie is a lightweight and is not only offended
that he is going to be the nominee but that people like this man in the first
place. In an episode that takes place during the New Hampshire primary, he
makes it very clear to the President that he wants Bartlet to win because he is
smarter than Ritchie. (“Make this about smart and not,” he tells Bartlet over
chess.) There are many times it can be difficult to like Toby and this is one
such occasion: in his character you see the all too frequent attitude of
Democrats and the left to look down on their opposition as intellectually
lacking. He also has an all too common extremist habit of being angry at anyone
who does not meet his impossibly high standards: he gets into more arguments
with the President than almost any other
regular.
Josh’s approach is more
practical that Toby’s; as deputy chief of staff he has to be more pragmatic
when it comes to legislation or winning campaigns. He has a similar level of
arrogance to Toby but he has enough sense to usually keep in check. He has many
of the same feelings Toby does towards Ritchie but he also has the common sense
to know that part of winning is building a coalition. Josh also knows that
winning the election is different from winning the argument – in fact, he tried
to make that point clear in a fight with Amy that led to them breaking up in
the third season finale.
This leads to the fourth
season premiere. The Bartlet campaign is campaigning in Indiana. At the start
of the episode Toby is openly complaining about this to anyone who’ll listen saying
they already lost Indiana, so what are they doing here? At a critical point in
the opening, a teenage girl who is on a farm that is struggling starts talking
to Toby asking for guidance and wanting to tell her story. Toby cuts her off by
saying: “We already lost Indiana.” The woman tries to withhold how cutting this
remark by telling them not to give up on small farms but Toby, in what will increasingly become a
trend in the episode, isn’t paying attention. Eventually Josh, Toby and Donna
realize something horrible is happening – the presidential motorcade has left
them behind.
20 Hours in America is a
two hour premiere and much of the comedy surrounds the frantic efforts of these
three people to get back to DC. Everything that can possibly go wrong in this
episode to stop this does so – the comedy highpoint comes when they get on a train
that their young guide has assured them will lead them to where they need to go
- and then starts heading in the opposite
direction of where he’s pointing.
But there’s an underlying
message here that may not strike the viewer on first, or even fifth viewing. It didn’t occur to me even though the President
actually says it when he learns that two ‘critical members of the administration
have been left behind. Indeed, another big joke in the episode is that when
they back to DC, everything just keeps puttering along without them and CJ is
amused to learn that they have been left behind than anything. Sam spends the
episode briefing the President, which he isn’t qualified to do (he’s the deputy
director of communications) and he seems to do a decent job, along with writing
a critical speech for a dinner in the motorcade. (“Freak” the campaign manager
says in admiration when he learns this.)
Bartlet is himself amused
that these two smart people will be helpless away from DC and says, “They’re
lucky Donna is with them.” Indeed Dona is the one who spends the entire
episode doing everything in her power to get the two of them back to DC, and they
spend most of the episode either mocking her failures or ignoring her entirely.
I don’t think this is deliberate; both Toby and Josh are understandably
concerned about getting back to DC and things just keep getting progressively
worse. But there is a deeper message.
See the 20 hours in America
are spent almost entirely in the Midwest. This is the area of America that
Democrats and the left traditionally either look down or pay little attention to
(as true then and it was in 2002) and it’s clear that they can’t wait to get
back to DC where ‘things matter’. There’s a running joke that after a bet Josh
got Toby to end every speech with: “I work at the White House.” And its being
done not only to humiliate Toby but to also show how important the two of them
think they are compared to the average voter. It’s also telling that, in the
midst of a campaign for reelection given the opportunity to talk with the
average voter, neither of these men can even be bothered to do so and tend to
talk down to them every chance they get – and always about the election. Not
about problems that might matter to them, not about what is going in their
lives. The election.
And every time Toby and
Josh are alone together, they are chewing on each other about their issues on
the campaign. Josh keeps saying that he’s doing everything in his power to get
Bartlet reelected but Toby clearly doesn’t think that’s good enough. He spends
the entire episode calling Ritchie not just an idiot, but anti-Semitic, a racist
and mocking every phrase he uses. But he’s actually angrier than whenever
Ritchie says something that he thinks is stupid, people applaud it.
What we see is the
fundamental difference between so much of the left and the Democratic
establishment: it is not enough for you to win and your opponent to lose but to
mock and deride not only him but the people who are stupid enough to vote for
him. It’s not much of a reach to go from Toby’s remarks here to Hilary
referring to Trump voters as ‘a basket of deplorables’. Toby clearly thinks as
much. The fact that he and Josh are among them is clearly what chafes them the most,
and it may be the reason that Sorkin had the campaign swing take place in Indiana
rather than on either of the coasts. There they could at least be talking among
people who are in their intellectual equal rather than these ‘yokels’.
Finally they get to
Virginia and they are still going at it. And it is here that Janel Moloney has
one of her finest moments in the entire run of The West Wing. Dona is shy
and diplomatic. When she says what she really thinks it’s almost always inadvertent
and usually she’s apologetic when she does so. She’s a voice of calm and reason.
And maybe it has to do with her feeling unappreciated for what’s she been doing
all day, maybe it’s exhaustion or maybe she’s just tired of the conversation.
Whatever the reason, for maybe the only time in the entire series (certainly during Sorkin’s tenure) she snaps:
“I have such an impulse
to knock your heads together. I can’t remember the last time I heard you two
talk about anything other than how a campaign was playing in Washington. Cathy (the
woman Toby was talking to in the opening) needed to take a second job so her
dad could be covered by her insurance. She tried to tell you how bad things
were for family farmers. You told her we already lost Indiana. You make fun of
the fair (Josh read a local newspaper) but you didn’t see they have
livestock exhibitions and give prizes for the biggest tomato and the best heirloom
apple. They’re proud of what they grow. Eight modes of transportation, the
kindness of six strangers, random conversations with twelve more and nobody
brought up Bartlet versus Ritchie but you two.”
Moloney never raises her
voice during the speech but you can feel her anger and frustration. And Toby
and Josh, these two erudite intellectual figures, are left speechless. They
walk away from the table into the bar.
They are getting a drink
while another stranger, a man in his forties talks to them. He says he’s
touring colleges with his daughter, doesn’t make a good living and is terrified
about what happens if he drops dead of a heart attack. He says he wants is what’s
best for his family. He introduces himself. So does Josh. Toby starts but Josh indicates
silently he doesn’t have to make the joke. Then Toby does say: “I work at the
White House. And we’d like to talk to you.” For the first time all day, they
are listening to the people.
It would be petty to say The
West Wing was lacking for recognition from the Emmys. After all, the series
won Best Drama four consecutive times and I have to say it probably didn’t
deserve at least one of them. I admit to being slightly disappointed that
Moloney was only nominated twice during the series seven years on the air but
even at the time I was savvy enough to know she was lucky to be getting that
many nominations. Peak TV was after all just beginning to truly flourish
and The West Wing was competing against The Sopranos almost every
year it was on the air and Six Feet Under and 24 even when it wasn’t.
Furthermore with nominations basically capped at five nominees in every
category (they branched out to six occasionally in the 2000s) it was going to
be difficult to get in anyway. To try and break in against a field that
including Alison Janney and Stockard Channing from her own series (Janney won twice
before being promoted to Actress; Channing won the year after she vacated the
category) Lauren Ambrose and Rachel Griffiths, Aida Turturro, Lorraine Bracco
and Tyne Daly for Judging Amy (she was nominated three times and won
once during the 2000s) would be incredibly difficult for anyone. Furthermore
Moloney was the definition of a ‘supporting player’ in the same way Dule Hill
(also underrecognized) was they were never flashy and often they did such a
good job making their co-stars look good, you didn’t recognize how good they
were.
But the speech Moloney
gave in ’20 Hours in America’ is one that should resonate not only with viewers
of television drama but with all political observers and pundits. The people
who live and work in the political-industrial complex, not just those in the
Bartlet administration but the political media, spend so much time eating and
drinking politics that they genuinely believe that everyone else should and
looking down on the people who don’t. I wrote in an article last year that an
MSNBC commentator bemoaned that the average American spends less than five
minutes over the course of a month thinking about politics. Those reporters –
and really anyone who deals with politics today – really needs to look at this
episode and take the lesson from it, as well as the speech that Sorkin has Dona
give. In a show that was entirely from the perspective of the Washington
insider and in the heat of a campaign that was critical to everyone’s futures,
Sorkin had an episode that showed that not everybody lives politics all the
time and that we don’t listen to people outside of that.
For all that so many of
today’s viewers might say about the dated idealism of The West Wing, Dona
Moss has not dated one bit. Politics might be better if there were more Jed Bartlet
and more people who worked in his administration but the world would be better
if we remembered the Dona Mosses. Sometimes we need those kinds of people, if
only to prick their bubbles and tell them to listen to America instead of unilaterally
deciding we know what’s best for them.
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