Bartlet4America News Archive

A true believer in The West Wing

By NANCY HAUGHT
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Television creates a president whose faith is real — and so are the struggles that result

Aaron Sorkin, the man who brought us "The West Wing," has a confession to make: He is not a deeply religious man; he just creates one for TV.

"I'm Jewish, but I never went to Hebrew school," says Sorkin, 39, who grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. While he spent the seventh grade attending friends' bar mitzvahs, he didn't have his own. "In our family, when the men turned 13, you had a big party." He's making up for it now.

Religion has a recurring role on "The West Wing," one with enough depth and character to earn the Emmy-award-winning series praise from Catholics in Media Associates for its portrayal of Judeo-Christian values and the Humanitas Prize for affirming the dignity of all people.

As real-life politicos ponder President Bush's religious references, about 18 million "West Wing" fans tune in weekly to see firsthand the struggles of a president who — unlike most of his movie and television predecessors — is not just generically Christian.

Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, whom Sorkin apparently did not create in his own image, is religious in particular terms. Played by Martin Sheen, Bartlet is a Roman Catholic, an economist who almost became a priest, a man who prays the rosary in the Oval Office, personally opposes both abortion and capital punishment, publicly defends gay rights and a woman's right to choose and takes on all Scripture-quoting comers, trading Bible-verse volleys with born-again fervor. He's a true believer in both God and the Constitution, and a little battered for being caught between the two on more than one occasion.

As a writer, Sorkin says he looks for these points of conflict for their dramatic tension and the depth they add to his characters.

"The West Wing" bucks the trend in prime-time television, says William Romanowski, author of "Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture." It's more common for television shows to shy away from the particulars of religious experience in favor of a more general approach to spirituality, Romanowski says. In that way, programs such as "Touched by an Angel" appeal to baby-boomer interest in spirituality without risking detailed portrayals of any particular religious tradition, he says. Other shows, such as "Law & Order," may deal with religious issues from time to time, but it's still rare for a popular prime-time series to feature religion prominently, consistently and in particular terms.

"If the president on 'The West Wing' is Catholic, practicing and consistent about it, that's a positive thing," says Romanowski, who teaches at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. Although 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, he says, far fewer know much about their faith. A show such as "The West Wing" can educate as well as entertain.

It can also chip away at what pop-culture critic Robert Thompson calls "this age of hip irony."

"To make this guy a practicing Catholic who crosses himself before major events in his life creates a powerful sense of the earnest leader," says Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. As Bartlet's character unfolds from episode to episode, Thompson says, "we get a sense that he really believes in God, that he's not using him as a campaign consultant or dropping his name in speeches. . . . One gets the sense that this isn't just stained-glass window dressing."

For Sorkin, making Bartlet a deeply religious man and weaving religious themes through "West Wing" plots are a way of redeeming religion.

"Growing up, it was very easy for me to think, as it is very easy for a lot of people to think, that religion — that most often one should be suspicious of it. That most often it's an instrument of hypocrisy or, worse yet, of bullying: 'You're not living your life the way I would have you live it, the way God would have you live it. Therefore, God is going to punish you; you are somehow less in God's eyes.' Obviously, that kind of thing is insidious and terrible, and I point to that often on 'The West Wing,' " Sorkin says. "But what I want to make sure to point to just as often is the way in which faith can be magnificent, an enormous comfort and an incredible road map."

It is also, for Bartlet, complicated. "We hear in the pilot episode," Sorkin says, "that he doesn't like abortion and that he goes around the country encouraging young women not to have them, but that he absolutely does not believe that is something that the state can legislate."

In other episodes, Bartlet spars with the Christian right over gay marriage and school prayer. He wrestles with his own conscience over the death penalty. He lashes out with Scripture when it suits him, and sits humbled before a Chinese refugee whose command of the New Testament puts Bartlet to shame.

Sorkin relies on an informal network of consultants to help him flesh out religious arguments and find the language of faith. When, last season, the Bartlet White House wrestled with whether to stay an execution, Sorkin e-mailed his own rabbi.

"I said, 'This is what I'm writing about right now. Do you have any thoughts?' And oh, boy, did he." The result was a passionate speech by a rabbi to Toby Ziegler, Bartlet's communications director (played by Richard Schiff). For that same episode, Sorkin talked to a Catholic priest, a Baptist minister and a Quaker.

Sorkin is delighted that his Thanksgiving episode on the plight of persecuted Chinese Christians sparked morning-after questions about the biblical origins of "shibboleth" (Judges 12:6), and that Bartlet's tirade against a conservative Christian radio personality (borrowed from an Internet open letter to controversial radio host Laura Schlessinger, an Orthodox Jew) had viewers turning to Exodus and Leviticus to see for themselves what the Bible says about selected crimes and punishment.

Sorkin says he hopes his characters — which he describes as "smart and sensitive and attractive," in a you'd-like-to-have-them-to-dinner way —inspire real-life people to talk more about religion, too. "That's how it happened to me," he says.

Two Presidents Bartlet(t), alike not only in name

By DAVID M. SHRIBMAN
Boston Globe

BARTLETT, N.H. -- A newspaper correspondent wrote that the countryside was "quiet and happy under President Bartlett." One of his colleagues called Josiah Bartlett "a man of integrity, firmness, economy." Most of the politicians of his time made loads of money. Bartlett actually lost money in politics.

Psst. There really was a President Josiah Bartlett.

Long before he lent his name to the president in the NBC drama "West Wing," Josiah Bartlett served as president of New Hampshire, a post known after 1793 as governor. He was one of the leading physicians of his time. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was chief justice of his state.

Today, the real Josiah Bartlett is all but unknown, a footnote in American political life, while his namesake is one of the most popular (and most compelling) figures in American cultural life. But the two men — one a figure firmly rooted in the 18th century, the other remarkably suited to the 21st century — are not as different as they seem.

And therein lies a lesson from the 18th century for the 21st.

The real President Bartlett bore a remarkable resemblance, more in temperament than in appearance, to the character Martin Sheen plays on Wednesday nights. He was strong, ethical, visionary - above all, calm. "Josiah Bartlett could not have been better suited to the task of restoring public faith to the institutions of government," wrote Jere Daniell in his classic 1970 study of early New Hampshire, "Experiment in Republicanism."

Bartlett was a reluctant politician, and in any case he was more public servant. He was skeptical of political figures with national ambitions; several times he turned down chances to serve in the Senate. He wasn't impressed with politicians who talked a lot.

And he had a career that preceded his life in politics. The television president was an economist. The real Josiah Bartlett was a doctor, based in Kingston, N.H., known for being among the first to use quinine to fight diphtheria and remembered for prescribing cool beverages (often cider) rather than hot regimens for those suffering from fever.

But Bartlett administered even more expertly and intuitively to the body politic.

A stable force

"I'm very glad that Bartlett existed," says Daniell, who teaches Colonial and Revolutionary history at Dartmouth College, not far from where the television politician hopes to locate his presidential library. "He provided a lot of stability to the state."

Bartlett played an important stabilizing role as one of the leading proponents of the idea of using written constitutions to impose limits on government; indeed, the first constitution in America was written in New Hampshire.

Bartlett was known as a moderate, but, as his view on constitutiuonal limits on government shows, he was capable of radical thought. A full month before the Declaration of Independence, he wrote his wife: "I hope the Americans will play the man for their Country & for their all, and that kind providence will give us success & victory that the wickedness and villany of our enemies will fall on their own heads, and that America may be for ever separated from the tyranny of Britain."

An appealing duo

The real Bartlett took his ideas of limited government seriously. In 1792, he told members of the Legislature they had carried out their duties so well that he could not think of anything for them to do. They packed their bags and went home. That thought must have been channeled to another New Hampshire governor, John H. Sununu, who, two centuries later, sounded a similar theme while serving as President George H.W. Bush's chief of staff, "If Congress wants to come together, adjourn, and leave, it's all right with us."

Americans may disagree about limits to government -- the television president is a Democrat and a sometime liberal -- but they do not disagree about the appeal of the two men. This, too, is a time to restore faith in the institutions of government.

Bartlett lent his name to more than a television character. This village, nestled in the White Mountains, is a living monument to him -- for an actual statue of Bartlett, you must travel south to Amesbury, Mass. -- and for two centuries it has offered hospitality to visitors, adventurers, skiers, and hikers drawn to Crawford Notch.

One of the first, Yale president Timothy Dwight, noted that "the hoary cliffs rising with proud supremacy frowned awfully on the world below." Fortunately, neither President Bartlett nor his television namesake ever took such a stern view.

An aside for purists: You may note that the TV president spells his last name as a frugal New Englander would, sparing the typesetters the final "t" (Bartlet). President Bartlett of New Hampshire, alas, knew no such economies. No matter. President Andrew Jackson once said that he didn't have much respect for anyone who only knew one way to spell a name.

A Prime-Time Success Story

By JOHN BAER
Philadelphia Daily News

WASHINGTON - Craig Snyder, lawyer, lobbyist and political insider, never really sought out Hollywood, TV, glitz or glamour, but tonight's his big debut.

The Philly native, who just turned 40, hits prime time when his story line airs on NBC's "The West Wing" at 9 p.m.

The hit series about the inner workings of the White House - last year, it won more Emmys (nine) than any show in a single season - is using Snyder's real-life tale of passing a bill to help autistic kids.

How it happened is a mix of Philly links, L.A. connections and a little political correctness. Snyder, a GOP wunderkind, grew up in the Bustleton neighborhood where his parents still live. He attended Yale, graduated Penn, got a law degree from Temple. He was 5th Ward leader in Center City for three years, twice a GOP candidate: against state Rep. Babette Josephs in 1990; against then-U.S. Rep. Tom Foglietta in 1992. He got 38 percent of the vote the first time, 21 percent the second. He decided "it was better to be behind a campaign than in front of it."

He helped run U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter's less-than-electric bid for president - it ended before the '96 campaign year - and was Specter's chief of staff before joining Roger Stone's Georgetown-based Ikon Communications. Now he wears very good suits and White House cufflinks, and travels in the upper atmosphere of politics and policy.

All of which is linked to tonight's "West Wing."

Through Specter's office, Snyder was involved in legislation to build five "centers of excellence" for diagnosis, treatment and research of autism. The same approach used in the mid-'80s led to dramatic death-rate reductions in child leukemia.

Pushing the bill was fellow Philly native John Shestack, an L.A.-based movie producer, father of an autistic child, founder of Cure Autism Now. Shestack is the son of prominent Philly lawyer Jerome Shestack, American Bar Association president 1997-98. He is also a close friend and college chum (Wesleyan in Connecticut) of "West Wing" actor Brad Whitford, who plays White House deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman.

While lobbying for the legislation, Snyder recommended getting celebrities involved. Whitford, who grew up in Wayne ("I was formed on the stuck-up Main Line"), was called in. Snyder and Whitford hit it off. The results air tonight at 9.

"Craig has been phenomenally integral in helping us formulate an autism story line," Whitford said in a telephone interview from "West Wing's" L.A. set. "I knew nothing of the process. . .he's on the ground, has experience."

Snyder helped write the Children's Health Act of 2000, (the show tonight calls it "The Family Wellness Act"). And, as in real life, the bill runs into trouble and is saved only when. . .well, don't want to spoil it for "West Wing" fans.

Whitford spent time in Washington sitting in meetings to get a sense of what it's like to pass legislation. As a mark of the show's popularity and influence, he said, lobbyists approached him in the Capitol (at first, he thought for autographs) to push their issues for possible scripts: "They told me if they get 30 seconds on the 'CBS Evening News,' maybe two million people see it. If they get on our show, 20 million see it."

He added that the surprise to him is, "We never thought anybody'd take us seriously." At least part of Snyder's involvement is due to efforts to balance the show's political image. Last year, it drew criticism as too liberal, too reliant on Democratic advisers such as Dee Dee Myers and Pat Cadell. The entertainment press rode the issue. Some called it Hollywood's revenge for President Clinton's impeachment. The conservative Weekly Standard did a March 2000 cover story titled "Left Wing."

"In its first season, the show was popular but with a taint," Snyder said. In tonight's "The Stackhouse Filibuster," Republicans look more human. Said Snyder, "We give a Republican something constructive."

Whitford downplays image problems, noting the show now gets help from Republicans Peggy Noonan and Marlin Fitzwater.

Meanwhile, Snyder's been to the set (used first in the 1995 film "The American President," screenplay by "West Wing" creator/producer Aaron Sorkin). And Whitford said he expects to work with Snyder on more story ideas. Snyder's all for it. "It might lead to something down the road." And it could make this lawyer/ lobbyist/political insider a TV insider too.

TV Shows Hum With Walden's Tunes

By LYNN ELBER
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) - If you watch television, chances are you can't get W.G. Snuffy Walden out of your head.

The rousing theme of "The West Wing" is Walden's work. So is the plaintive melody that opens "Once and Again." Add the music for a half-dozen other current series and golden oldies such as "Roseanne" and it's clear that Walden has TV humming his tune.

His ability to strike just the right tone for a show or a scene has made him a favorite of leading producers like Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme of "The West Wing."

"Snuffy writes film scores for television," is Sorkin's tribute to him.

A one-time rock guitarist without formal musical training, Walden sees composing for TV or movies as a matter of making an emotional connection with the material.

"When I look at film, something happens. And something happens when I play music to film. It really feels very natural to me," Walden said, taking a break from work on a "West Wing" episode.

He's also basking in the release of his first solo album since the 1970s, "music by ... W.G Snuffy Walden" (Windham Hill Records), with original songs as well as new versions of some of his TV themes.

The genial Walden, who performs his magic at a San Fernando Valley studio and at a nearly identical setup in his home, says the Emmy-winning theme song for NBC's White House drama was a bit accidental.

A version of it originally accompanied a scene in which President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) prepares to deliver a national radio address from the Oval Office.

"Tommy (Schlamme) heard it and said 'That's our theme,"' Walden said of the melody that underscores the power of the presidency.

Asked if it includes echoes of composer Aaron Copland, Walden turns to a piano to illustrate its roots. He begins by playing another of his compositions, the elegant gospel theme for the 1991-93 drama "I'll Fly Away."

Then he produces a solo version of "The West Wing" theme, whistling in accompaniment.

"It's a little bit of taps, a little bit of gospel and a little bit of Copland," the 50-year-old Walden explains, slowing the piece down to display its influences.

Walden's own roots are Southern, by way of Louisiana where he was born and Texas where he grew up. His colorful moniker is regional - William Garrett Walden, like others in his family, was nicknamed "Snuffy" after Southern snuff maker Levi Garrett & Sons.

His name won him his first scoring assignment, maintains Walden. In 1987, after two decades of performing solo and touring with Chaka Khan, Donna Summer and other pop stars (including a break when he just "burned out," Walden said), he was considering a new gig.

The idea of providing guitar scores for TV was broached by talent agents familiar with his work.

"I knew I was never going to be Eric Clapton, and what I was doing wouldn't be pretty in my 60s - playing Holiday Inns or some local beer joint," Walden said. "So I said sure, but I wasn't interested in television. Seemed like too much work."

Films proved difficult to crack (he's since done a handful), so Walden offered a piece to an upcoming series, "thirtysomething" and gained an audition.

"They weren't really interested. They just wanted to see what a guy named Snuffy looked like," he says.

When the producers finally gave his composition a fair hearing, they were hooked.

Walden's reputation was quickly established when his first work, for "thirtysomething" and "The Wonder Years," earned Emmy nominations in 1988. Among the shows he's written for are "My So-Called Life," "Ellen," "Providence," "Felicity," "The Drew Carey Show" and "Three Sisters" as well as a dozen TV movies.

His distinctive name appears in the credits when he's composed and produced the music; he oversees the work of musicians on other shows.

Walden can boast of customer loyalty. Sorkin and Schlamme worked with him on "Sports Night" before hiring him for "The West Wing," while the producers of "thirtysomething" chose him again for "Once and Again."

He calls his scoring approach nontraditional.

"Most of the time I'm playing straight into a computer, playing while the film is running," he said, with the formal recording to be made later. The approach is akin to a dialogue between Walden and the screen, one that recalls his rock 'n' roll days.

"My job with a band was being a color guy. When I played with Chaka, it was for the fiery solos and putting atmosphere inside the song because I couldn't read the charts. ... When I started looking at film, to me it was like being in a jam session."

He decided against going the traditional route when it came to his new CD too, rejecting the TV theme roundup initially proposed by a record executive.

"I didn't want to do a K-Tel kind of record where it's just repackaging every theme I ever did," he said. "I tried to rewrite and re-record everything so it lived as a piece of music on its own."

Among the album's cuts: interpretations of the "Once & Again," "thirtysomething" and "West Wing" titles and original pieces like "Angela Smiled," inspired by Claire Dane's character on "My So-Called Life," and "Love Unspoken," which Walden calls "just a little love letter."

While he may be enjoying the CD spotlight, Walden knows that his soundtracks aren't the star of a TV show or film.

"You always have to realize the job is not to write the best thing Stravinsky ever wrote, but to support the film. The whole job is in supporting the film and supporting the emotion of the film."

A ‘Freaky’ Twist on Reality Television

By MARK JURKOWITZ
Boston Globe

How's this for a dizzying blur of fantasy and reality? Former White House aide George Stephanopoulos, now an ABC newsman, visits the faux White House at NBC's "The West Wing" set in Burbank, Calif., to interview the actors playing him and his former colleagues for yesterday's edition of "Good Morning America." To make things even stranger, on Tuesday night "Entertainment Tonight" ran a piece on Stephanopoulos doing a "GMA" piece on the Hollywood version of his old workplace.

"It was really freaky," Stephanopoulos said of his "West Wing" visit during a phone interview. "Especially in the middle of the Oval Office. It's as close [to reality] as you could possibly get. It was easy to just be transported."

Asked if he believes, as is widely rumored, that Rob Lowe's character of Sam Seaborn is based on him, Stephanopoulos said Lowe "is a little bit of [economic adviser] Gene Sperling, a little bit of me, and a little bit of younger aides."

He did, however, compare himself to the sardonic and often dyspeptic Toby Ziegler (played by Richard Schiff), saying, "I always had the reputation for the dark side."

Stephanopoulos admitted the Clinton White House staff could not match the level of snappy "West Wing" White House patter provided by Aaron Sorkin, the show's creator. "Aaron Sorkin is a brilliant writer, and everyone on that show, at some level, talks like Aaron Sorkin [writes]," The Clinton Team was "not that clear and quick."

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.

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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-mâché 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.