March 01, 2001
The Feel-Good Presidency
By CHRIS LEHMANN
The Atlantic Monthly
The pseudo-politics of The West Wing
In the heat of Campaign 2000, NBC's publicity department began an ad campaign trumpeting its own version of "a president we can all agree on."
The man in question, of course, was Josiah Bartlet, the embattled chief executive played by Martin Sheen in the network's runaway nighttime-serial hit, The West Wing. At about the same time, cars in southern California reportedly began sporting bumper stickers that read BARTLET FOR PRESIDENT.
When the Democratic National Committee scheduled a party on the set of the show, in Los Angeles, during the Democratic Convention, more than a few wags commented that the Democrats would be far better off with the charismatic, principled chief executive that television had produced to wide popular acclaim than with the unpersuasive populist crusader who was sopping up bucketloads of Hollywood's political largesse, to dangerously mounting popular indifference.
It's tempting, of course, to write off such goofy talk much of it the handiwork of publicists to our pop culture's always dubious engagement with reality. After all, hadn't there been speculation earlier, in the heady, celebrity-ridden primary season, about presidential runs by Warren Beatty and Cybill Shepherd? Isn't it but a turn of the screw to propose an entirely fictional character as a suitable leader of the world's only superpower much as Pat Paulsen mounted his successive satirical campaigns, and Robert Altman filmed a cult mockumentary around the imaginary candidate Jack Tanner?
But the problem here is that the notion of a Bartlet presidency struck and continues to strike many influential observers as a perfectly sound idea. Countless devotees of the show, both in TV journalism and on its many reverent, unofficial fan Web sites, regard the weekly doings on The West Wing as anything but satire. The clear critical verdict is that this Wednesday-evening set piece of frenetic Oval Office intrigue presents a far more edifying vision of America's political soul than anything that has wafted out of the Grand Guignol of our scandal-addled, impeachment-scarred, ballot-challenged national government.
In any event, the mere persistence indeed, the continued, mammoth popularity of the show signals a curious sort of social contract, ratifying and institutionalizing one of the striking themes of America's post-1960s civitas: the selective (yet ever didactic) liberal retreat into political fantasy. After all, it had long occurred to the show's legions of fans that a Bush victory could revoke a good part of its earnest purchase on topicality. And one leitmotif of press accounts of The West Wing over the protracted election of 2000 was to broach the question of how the show which over its first two seasons has played as a sort of higher-minded, conscience-haunted upgrade of the Clinton White House might change in the event of a Bush victory. The consensus, as the show's creator and chief writer, Aaron Sorkin, announced, was that no such reality-based revisions would be required: a Bush victory "hasn't played in my mind at all," he said in a lavish cover story on the show in the November George. Come December, however, Sorkin did confess to Michael Wolff, in New York magazine, that the show couldn't help benefiting from the unsightly overall condition of America's democratic experiment: the time, he said, "is just right for the cavalry to come riding in." This pair of remarks captures the curious cognitive balancing act The West Wing has introduced into our popular culture. On the one hand, it claims no ambitions any grander than those of any other television show to divert and entertain viewers and (usually in special holiday episodes) to produce agreeably broad and radiant installments in the nation's continuing sentimental education. But on the other hand, it has an overt agenda so breathtaking in its sweep that "ambitious" hardly begins to sum it up: The West Wing sets out, week after week, to restore public faith in the institutions of our government, to shore up the bulwarks of American patriotism, and to supply a vision of executive liberalism at once principled and pragmatic; mandating both estimable political vision and serious personal sacrifice; plying an understanding of the nation's common good that is heroically heedless of focus groups, opposition research, small-bore compromise, and re-election prospects that exists nowhere else in our recent history.
How, exactly, has this come to be? On the most obvious level The West Wing appeals to liberal viewers as an exercise in wish-fulfillment fantasy, pointing a way out of their post-Clinton predicament. Indeed, the most common theme in the many celebrations of the show's political virtues has been that it gives us a version of Clintonism with both moral gravitas and political backbone, while editing out the more risible parts of the Clinton legacy an act, commentators say, of "empathy" unthinkable in the normal rounds of political reporting. The former White House aide Matthew Miller wrote in a wide-eyed appreciation of the show in Brill's Content last spring, "By the seemingly innocuous act of portraying politicians with empathy, The West Wing has injected into the culture a subversive competitor to the reigning values of political journalism" which Miller views as rife with "cynicism." This bold subversion turns the weekly melodrama, by Miller's lights, into a sort of pluperfect documentary, redeeming a hopelessly fallen political culture by sheer force of its "humanizing instinct."
It's true that the show eagerly displays its own stirringly "human" themes on its sleeve as is the case in the nighttime-TV "workplace" serials about hospitals, law firms, and police investigative units on which The West Wing is clearly modeled. But since its subject is the nation's politics (and its tacit mission is to revive sagging liberal spirits), The West Wing steers wide of the thorny moral conflicts that turn up in those life-or-death TV venues, in which petty personal agendas kick up disasters and catastrophes galore. Instead it offers a pointedly sunny weekly fable about the unassailable motives and all-too-human foibles of the nation's governing class which verges on the Capra-esque.
Reportedly, Sorkin who developed the show out of material left over from his screenplay for the Rob Reiner feature film The American President had not intended the President to be a central character on The West Wing. But here as in American political life, the President has swollen over time to soak up most of the dramatic interest, even though the formulas that Sorkin favors (previously his most celebrated writing credit was the military-courtroom drama A Few Good Men) make Bartlet a two-dimensional glyph of implausible virtue. He is charismatic and quietly omnicompetent, a la Bill Clinton, but viewers are forcefully reminded that he does not share Clinton's (or John F. Kennedy's) priapic weaknesses.
But all this tight moral choreography comes up considerably short of serving as a prescription for even a convincing imaginary liberal revival. In fact, sustained exposure to the logic of the show's plot conventions, the jittery policy patter of its characters, and (perhaps most of all) its sonorous faux nobility inspires a singular distrust. In particular, the way the show strives to dramatize the earnest inner torments of what Christopher Lasch called "the caring class" produces a civic emptiness far hollower than that resounding through either of our major parties.
The show's obsession with feeling also clearly impels its choice of subject matter. The Bartlet Administration's key internal conflicts and legislative rallying cries oscillate mainly within the narrow register of lifestyle liberalism, the stealth ideology that fuels Hollywood as it did the Clinton presidency. The heroic outbursts from The West Wing's lead characters are almost always directed at the forces of cultural reaction gathering in the heartland: the religious right, anti-gay moralists, creationists, advocates of anti-abortion terror, tough-on-crime yahoos, and shrill defenders of the Second Amendment. Bartlet himself has been a collateral victim of a white supremacist's assassination attempt on his black aide, Charlie Young (Dule Hill). His White House dotes on hate-crimes legislation and also longs, bizarrely, for a high-profile showdown with the religious right over the currently moot constitutional question of school prayer. These symbolic posturings can only spring from the Administration's sense of itself as a missionary outpost in a hostile and benighted culture.
Of course, many of The West Wing's concerns belong on the public agenda, and occasionally they address real threats to civil liberties and social peace. But the dramatically declining membership rolls of the Christian Coalition and the results of polls tracking public opinion on the religious right's pet issues reveal that the specter of a theocratic seizure of the state, rhetorically exaggerated even at the height of the religious right's power, is a rapidly dimming mirage. Nevertheless, Team Bartlet is constantly consumed by the minutiae of high cultural warfare. Examples are legion, and multiply weekly. In a second-season episode, "The Midterms," there's a high-handed showdown between Bartlet and one Dr. Jenna Jacobs a moralizing radio talk-show host clearly modeled on Dr. Laura Schlessinger at a White House reception for various radio eminences. Quizzing her on the biblical injunction against homosexuality as "an abomination," Bartlet takes her on a rapid-fire declamatory tour of the follies of biblical literalism, a punishing performance whose like has not been seen since the climax of Inherit the Wind: "I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7 ... what would a good price be?" Now, not only is this stacking the rhetorical deck heavily in Bartlet's favor (even Dr. Laura, bigoted though she can be, does not rest her castigation of homosexuality entirely on biblical literalism). It also provokes a rather enormous question: Why is Bartlet expending such heavy artillery and so much precious time on humiliating a radio talk-show host? And why is he unable to resist a final victory dance over her seated person and prostrated intellect especially by invoking the majesty of his own presidential eminence over the discredited authority of biblical tradition? ("One last thing," he shouts. "While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tight-Ass Club, in this building when the President stands, nobody sits.") The answer, of course, is that such displays which occur nearly every week in Bartlet's White House cost the Administration precisely nothing politically while ratcheting up its sense of cultural superiority exponentially.
The West Wing, in other words, plies a resolutely insular, therapeutic vision of presidential politics, one that often renders policymaking indistinguishable from the conduct of an encounter group. Indeed, in the thickets of controversy that crop up in the Bartlet Administration, the strongest objection to a policy or a decision to overstep protocol is usually that it doesn't feel right. And when the members of Team Bartlet chart a new policy course, it is because they agree that it suits the perceived national mood or because it springs (in the grand tradition of TV serials) from a profound personal experience. If one of the sixties' most enduring if dubious notions is that the personal is political, The West Wing operates from the converse: the political is, above all, personal. In perhaps the most decisive, melodramatic installment of the show a late-first-season entry called "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet" the President announces his determination to secure two key reform-minded appointees to the Federal Election Commission. His rationale has little to do with the current political playing field, or even with the prospects for meaningful reform, but turns, rather, on his plaintive appeal to his chief of staff, Leo McGarry (John Spencer): "I don't want to feel like this anymore."
Amid such high drama it requires a considerable effort of the will to recall that liberals belong to the strain of American political debate that has traditionally prided itself on skepticism about how matters of state power get minted into brute personal agendas. To put things another way, it's hard to imagine any of the show's champions or scriptwriters evincing much concern over, say, Richard Nixon's many funks on the job let alone endorsing them as a sound basis for executive policymaking. But in furnishing its imaginary, cultural platform for the revival of liberal politics in America, The West Wing has also slipped into an uncritical cult of personality much as the adoration of Bill Clinton has in the real-life house of liberalism. In so doing, The West Wing reminds us, down to the smallest details of character and plot resolution, of the very forces that have hollowed out the American liberal faith. In lieu of the majority-forging certainties of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society (and their campaigns against "economic royalists," "isolationists," segregationists, and the like) we find anxious self-examination, second-guessing of the news cycle, and protracted agonizing over the appearance of scandal and conflicts of interest. In place of stirring crusades for equality and justice (about which there is plenty of rhetoric) we see careful chartings and recalibrations of marginal, provisional influence by an executive branch that is unshakably wedded to a view of itself as "under siege, twenty-four hours a day," as Bartlet's chief of staff explains to a recently hired Republican legal aide.
The logic of these morally obtuse but deeply sentimental preenings of high-office holders is disturbing on many levels, but principally because it dramatizes something real: liberals, long sundered from the lineaments of any majoritarian politics, have succumbed to the worship of getting and holding power for its own sake. One saw this not merely in the Gore campaign's diehard (and ultimately self-destructive) scorched-earth efforts to recast the Florida vote in Gore's favor but also, more pivotally, in the dramatic force with which Clinton recast the presidency's reasons of state into reasons of self.
Indeed, the moral calculus of The West Wing's presidency is identical to that perfected by Bill Clinton: all the expenditures of political capital, all the day-to-day trench warfare over Capitol turf, the long-term health of the party and the short-term calendar of the national legislature, were subordinated to the expansion of executive self-regard, to the meaningless conceit of "not feeling like this anymore." Herein resided the stem-winding, therapeutic logic of the year-long national "conversation on race"; the periodic presidential apologies for world-historic wrongs which were usually strategic evasions of actual legislative responsibility; and the fussy feel-good conferences on teen violence and the media. And, needless to say, here sprang the fathomless victimology that choreographed perjury, suborned testimony, concealed evidence, and mounted dubiously timed bombing raids to prolong a grip on executive power that had long atrophied when it came to steering federal policy and national debate toward any meaningful goal beyond the bunker.
As one might expect, Bill Clinton is among The West Wing's biggest fans. He played host to members of the cast at a White House press-corps dinner, and cast members have turned up at DNC fundraisers, providing entertaining photo ops that illuminated the grand yet confused ambitions of both the TV show and the Clinton White House. He reportedly told Rob Lowe (who plays Bartlet's deputy communications director, Sam Seaborn) that the show is "renewing people's faith in public service." It's all a bit curious, since the high-minded Josiah Bartlet would seem to be such a pointed rebuke, in both his person and his policymaking, to Clinton. But in life, as on TV, claims of civic loyalty and reckonings of power, legitimacy, political right, and moral trespass the stuff of history provide feeble competition for the blinding power of personality. And it has been a long season of indulgently sentimentalizing the abuse of power. Augurs of the Boomer zeitgeist, from Toni Morrison to Joe Eszterhas to Tina Brown to Greil Marcus, agree that Clinton represents an emanation of a noble American tradition, a Huck-like backwoods avatar of charmingly transgressive appetites. He is half the sybaritic, exoticized, Elvis-style son of the South, tweaking the grim moralists and inquisitors who police the right's DMZ in the nation's culture combat, and half the aw-shucks poster child of the new global information order, cocking back his head and biting his lip wistfully as he conjures abiding visions of a bridge over the millennium. Before the nation's scandal-weary eyes Bill Clinton became a pop-cult fable of his own fond imagining, a fantasy figure for liberal partisans who have lost the taste for almost any politics save the full-throated prosecution of meaningless culture wars. It is but a short step from these sorts of reveries to the wholesale invention of a republic ruled by a benevolent great leader, briskly resetting our moral compass and flattering our lifestyle politics in the safety of our living rooms. In this sense, then, it is entirely fitting that Bill Clinton's most immediate legacy should be a TV show that lodges the structure of his personality firmly in our collective unconscious, even while strategically erasing its substance.
Of course, it may seem, with the show's enduring appeal in the dawn of the W. years, that these organizing tropes of the Clinton era are already moldering into harmless TV nostalgia, not unlike the imagineered 1950s of Happy Days, or the wide, loud, and burnt-out Ford and Carter caesura of That '70s Show. But this casual view of things underestimates the half-life of Clintonism in both reality and pop culture. George W. Bush demonstrated in his faux-empathic campaign of the conservative heart that Clintonism, being postmodern and post-ideological unto its innermost parts, works as deftly on the tax-cutting, privatizing right as it did within the often unruly union-and-activist ranks of the Democratic Party.
In much the same manner The West Wing continues to renew the peculiar, powerful cultural brief by which Clintonism has thrived and will continue to thrive in the aftermath of the Clinton years. In 1992 candidate Bill Clinton proudly acknowledged that he "always wanted to be in the cultural elite"; The West Wing has extravagantly granted his wish, by apostrophizing his Administration (while, of course, airbrushing out its more embarrassing policy failures, crimes, and lapses of morality). But more than that, the enduring appeal of the show, in our popular and political cultures alike, is that it has performed a trick more powerful than probably even Clinton could have imagined. It has made him that most quintessentially American liege of that most desirable American dominion: as an archetype, a fable, a prototype for Jed Bartlet, Bill Clinton, through the good graces of Aaron Sorkin, has become the President of Television. We need some satire, and fast.
Do you recognize the Clinton West Wing in The West Wing?
Four members of the Clinton White House staff share their thoughts.
Lowell Weiss
Lowell Weiss served as a presidential speechwriter from 1997 to 2000. Before that, he was a speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, wrote a book with political consultant James Carville, and served on the editorial staff of The Atlantic Monthly.
Yes. In many ways. Various plot lines on the show are taken directly from real life "ripped from the headlines," as network announcers like to say. The frenetic racing and nervous pacing in the West Wing halls is oh-so-familiar. The photographs of President Bartlet shaking hands with world leaders which appear on the walls in the TV show are actually Photoshopped versions of real Clinton photos, and the daily presidential schedules that appear on Bartlet's "Oval Office" desk are close approximations of Clinton's own. President Bartlet and President Clinton may have vastly different roots, but they are intellectual soulmates on most of their policy positions. Each man has an accomplished, ambitious wife and a young-adult daughter. Both men are great, empathetic communicators. They're both policy wonks. And they have similarly likeable personas.
Of course, there are major differences as well. Clinton chief of staff John Podesta likes to say that Bartlet's chief of staff, Leo McGarry, is not nearly mean enough. That's not true (Podesta's a very nice guy). But it is true that the characters on the show don't really attempt to capture their real-life counterparts. As with ER, the characters on The West Wing are distillations that is, they each do the work, and have the density of experience, of ten or more people.
Also, the show's depictions of the President's interactions with his staff stray quite far from the mark. In reality, Oval Office briefings are rarely rolling repartee sessions (although second-term morning staff meetings in John Podesta's office, which did not include the President, often devolved into gallows-humorfests for aides Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala, and Joe Lockhart). Clinton is as unstuffy and down-to-earth as Presidents get, but we, the hired help, would never think to address the President of the United States in the casual, insouciant way you see on TV every Wednesday night. But the biggest difference between the two is simply this: The West Wing is a fairy tale. Instead of watching sausage-making, we see souffle-creation. Instead of ugly but unavoidable compromises, we get neat, tidy, chaste solutions. Now, of course, it's precisely this fairy-tale quality that launches Chris Lehmann into orbit in his Atlantic piece. Frankly, I just don't see it his way. Was Top Gun bad for the U.S. Armed Forces? Is ER bad for hospitals or emergency physicians? Is Law and Order bad for law or order? Heck no. Sure, they're fairy tales. Sure, they're less complicated and less messy than real life. But they've managed to raise interest and boost morale in important institutions, and they've encouraged many young people to set their sights on pursuing vital yet difficult, underpaid, and often underappreciated careers.
Having said all this, would I be a fan of the show if it had a decidedly different worldview that is, if it were a fairy tale for right-wingers rather than left-wingers? Probably not. Most likely, I'd experience intense jealousy that conservatives had managed to find such a powerful vehicle for getting out their message. I'd get worked up to indignancy. And then I'd probably write a scathing poli-sci-major critique of the show and pitch it to a respected, thoughtful magazine like The Atlantic.
Joshua King
Joshua King, White House Director of Production from 1993 to 1997, is Vice President of Ntercept Communications.
The Clinton West Wing is woven into its television counterpart every week. Sometimes The West Wing borrows broad dramatic themes, but often it sneaks away with a long-forgotten tidbit. I know how White House reality and fantasy intertwine. For five years, I staged many of President Clinton's public events, leaving in late 1997 to produce a TV pilot called "West Wing" for Lifetime Television. A victim of bad timing (it was shot in Toronto at the height of the Lewinsky scandal), our show never got on the air, but it made me a never-miss-an-episode fan of Aaron Sorkin's version.
Thanks to the reminiscences of series adviser Dee Dee Myers and her long Rolodex of Clinton veterans who once wore the coveted "blue pass" the plastic amulet that permits unfettered access to the West Wing Sorkin's show regularly dramatizes tiny slices of reality from the past eight years in the White House.
Take the January 10 episode ("The Leadership Breakfast"). The script bulged with real-life plot points, from a fire in the White House to an aborted eviction of the press corps from their perch above FDR's boarded-up indoor swimming pool. Both really happened. In the show's first scene, the staff frets over the seating chart for an upcoming event. Will strict protocol reign, or will a breach be allowed for a guest's special need? Applying Baryshnikov's precision to simple musical chairs was a political ballet we danced every day of the week.
President Clinton, like President Bartlet, could not have cared less about such things. Put him in his seat, give him his talking points, and let him go to work. What Clinton and Bartlet both go to extremes to ensure, however, is that hometown delicacies make it on the menu. In "The Leadership Breakfast," Granite State-native Bartlet whines that Vermont maple syrup, rather than pancake topping from neighboring New Hampshire, has found its way onto the high-profile bill-of-fare. Forget the policy implications. Never mind the agenda. The President wants his favorite syrup served up to his guests. In real life, Arkansas-native Clinton made sure that his hometown was on the map for more than just his birthplace. The Town of Hope (for those not among the fruit cognoscenti) boasts America's largest watermelons. A papier-mβchι replica of 1985's record-breaking 260-pounder sits in the window of the chamber of commerce. On the South Lawn of the White House it became an annual August rite that a truckload of Hope's bounty would arrive on the eve of the town's annual Watermelon festival. The White House staff, members of Congress, and other VIPs would regularly drop their official duties, loosen their ties, and bite into a juicy noonday feast under the sun.
On a Hollywood soundstage, of course, a can of maple syrup is a more manageable prop than a truck oozing with ripened watermelon. Truth, as always, is stranger than fiction.
Jonathan M. Orszag
Jonathan Orszag is the Managing Director of Sebago Associates, Inc., an economic consulting firm. He served for three years as an economic policy adviser on President Clinton's National Economic Council (1996-1999).
An exasperated President Truman once remarked that he wanted a one-handed economist that is, an adviser who couldn't say "on the one hand this and on the other hand that." I'm a two-handed economist, and thus my answer to the question is not simple. On the one hand, the personalities and the characters on The West Wing have little or no relationship to the Clinton West Wing. On the other hand, the issues discussed on The West Wing are taken directly from the experiences of the Clinton White House.
Unlike the movies American President or Primary Colors, which included characters based on real-life counterparts (for example, in American President, Michael J. Fox's character was based on George Stephanopoulos, and in Primary Colors, John Travolta and Billy Bob Thornton played characters based on President Clinton and political strategist James Carville, respectively), The West Wing includes no Clinton Administration-based characters. On the surface President Clinton and President Bartlet have little in common. President Clinton came to the White House from Arkansas, while President Bartlet moved from New Hampshire. President Clinton was trained as a lawyer; President Bartlet was trained as an economist (which makes me partial to the show). President Clinton is big he's six-foot-two and has a personality to match; President Bartlet is neither big physically nor larger than life. (President Bartlet and President Clinton do share several characteristics, though: they both enjoy wearing college sweatshirts and blue jeans, both gain two inches of height from their hair, and both have encyclopedic memories.)
In addition, The West Wing's deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, is not like any deputy chief of staff I knew at the White House. He is not a hall monitor like Evelyn Lieberman. He is not profane like Harold Ickes. He is not a Rhodes Scholar like Sylvia Mathews. And he is not "all business" like Erskine Bowles. Similarly, I do not recognize any Clinton adviser in Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn. Some have suggested that Seaborn is loosely based on George Stephanopoulos. But I think such a comparison is tenuous.
While the personalities are different, the substantive issues confronting the West Wing characters are nearly identical to the ones confronted by the Clinton White House. In the past two years, the show has covered topics such as statistical sampling and the decennial census; private school vouchers; hiring a controversial assistant attorney general for civil rights; hiring a Republican staffer; the rescue of an American pilot shot down over a hostile foreign country; a congressional investigation of substance abuse among the White House staff; deciding whether the President should implement a national missile-defense system; and debating whether to move the press briefing room from the West Wing. These plots should seem very familiar, since President Clinton and the real West Wing had to deal with precisely the same issues.
To be sure, I like The West Wing. It is a great show, and I enjoy watching it. But I enjoy it because it is not like the Clinton West Wing. In my opinion, it is far enough from reality to be enjoyable as fiction. If it were any closer to the true West Wing, I fear that we would spend more time dissecting its inaccuracies than watching it for its entertainment value.
Rica Rodman Orszag
Rica Rodman Orszag served in the White House Press Office from 1993 to 1997.
The West Wing is good drama. But, believe it or not, working in the Clinton West Wing was more intense and all-consuming than The West Wing portrays. President Clinton created this atmosphere. He worked "until the last hour of his last day in office," and his work ethic and long hours led to a strong sense of camaraderie among his staff.
For many staffers, the White House became their home away from home and their fellow staffers became extended family members. One sign of the tight-knit atmosphere of the Clinton West Wing is the number of White House couples who were married over the past eight years. President Clinton takes great pride in the fact that dozens of Administration staffers met their spouses working for him. I met my husband at the White House, and some of our closest friends met their spouses while working there, too.
The West Wing doesn't do justice to the interpersonal relationships of the real White House. The show has, of course, touched on characters' personal experiences in some episodes (for example, when the chief of staff's wife leaves him, and the coming together of the staff after the President is shot). But in most of the episodes over the past two seasons, the West Wing characters act simply as co-workers who (mostly) like each other, and the personal connections among staff inside and outside of the work environment are usually ignored.
Another thing The West Wing has missed is the relationship between the President and the public. While President Clinton's intimacy with the public was a key component of his time in office, President Bartlet's interaction with the public is almost never shown. President Clinton loves people. He tried to shake every hand at each event. He often surprised visitors waiting outside the White House gate by greeting them, and on one occasion the President even invited some of these visitors into the Rose Garden to listen to his radio address. The West Wing rarely shows this aspect of the presidency.
The relationships between the staff and the President also differ greatly. In the real White House, the President is treated with great sometimes even reverential respect by the staff. In Aaron Sorkin's White House, the relationship is more casual; staffers treat President Bartlet like a mere co-worker. (One exception to this point: Dule Hill, who plays the President's personal aide, accurately portrays the typical young, obliging White House staffer.) Part of this is by design: Aaron Sorkin does not want Martin Sheen to be the center of attention. As a result, President Bartlet is just another character. President Clinton, on the other hand, changes the molecules in the air when he walks into a room, as James Carville has said.
When it comes to the relationship between the White House staff and the press, however, The West Wing does bear a strong resemblance to the Clinton West Wing. On TV, The West Wing's press secretary (CJ) flirts with Danny, a journalist for a major newspaper. In real life, my former boss, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, flirted with (and then married) New York Times White House correspondent Todd Purdum. It is not surprising that this is one area where art imitates life; Dee Dee is a consultant to The West Wing.
One reason I watch The West Wing every week is the show's positive portrayal of government service. Nearly everyone I met during my four years in government was a hard-working public servant. On this issue, The West Wing gives an accurate sense of what I saw: people working to leave the world a better place.
Posted by Ryo at March 1, 2001 07:50 AM