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February 08, 2005
West Wing knows beans about Iowa
By Mark Ridolfi
Quad-City Times
My bubble burst last week.
Until then, I watched West Wing reverently, if not regularly. Those crisp exchanges among deeply drawn characters seemed to capsulize real-life politics in dramatic doses. More than once I wished Jed Bartlett was among the caucus contenders who filled our state a year or so ago.
The war room banter rang true. The Oval Office confrontations went down just as I imagined. Brainy White House staffers worked as they walked, trading barbed quips. I frequently had to rewind just to keep up.
Last week, West Wing took on the Iowa caucuses and got just about everything flat-out wrong. The look. The feel. The weather. The people. None of it.
Big-name, likable actors spoke their crisp lines with the same conviction I’d come to expect. If I didn’t know better, I’d have believed them this time too.
Except that I’ve been to those Iowa Holiday Inn banquet room campaign events that West Wing tried to approximate. Nobody uses Teleprompters to deliver policy addresses at the local motel. They grab hands, lock eyes and don’t let go. I’ve met hundreds of local candidates who swarm amidst the presidential contenders. None of them looked like the dentally impaired hayseeds cast in the West Wing version.
The name of the episode was “King Corn” and it portrayed the caucuses as a litmus test on ethanol and the candidates as shameless panderers before farm groups.
Ethanol didn’t drive this, or any of the other caucus campaigns I’ve covered.
Oh, there’s skads of pandering. God. Country. Troops. education. Even farms. Candidates unleash heartfelt but unspecific affirmations that draw cheers and show up on nightly news reports. That’s exactly what the caucuses look like from Washington.
But not here. If West Wing wanted some dramatic reality, it could have shown a zillionaire candidate pulling his custom bus into handicapped parking spaces and getting $110 in parking tickets in Cherokee like Steve Forbes did in 1999. They could have shown a candidate engaging in an online chat with students in high schools across the state and gracefully handling a question about White House interns like George W. Bush did in 2000. They could have shown a fiery populist hopping on a rickety folding chair to bark out war opposition like Dennis Kucinich did in Davenport in 2003. They could have had a foiled front-runner devolving into a screaming maniac caucus night.
Scratch that one. No one would buy it.
The caucuses are about how political big-shots hold up when they’re out of Washington and face-to-face with real, live people for whom politics is a civic exercise, not a job. In the Iowa caucus campaign, I’ve seen homeless veterans have the same access to a candidate as a CEO.
It is infinitely fascinating. Makes for good TV, too.
Just not on West Wing.
Posted by Jo at February 8, 2005 10:05 AM