« The Legacy of The West Wing | Main | 'West Wing' drama comes full circle »
April 11, 2006
A timely 'West Wing' victory
By CARL P. LEUBSDORF
The Dallas Morning News
It may have been just a coincidence, an unplanned correlation between fiction and reality.
But in the very week that massive demonstrations put the national spotlight on the potential political clout of millions of Hispanic immigrants, the presidential election on a popular television show was won by a Mexican-American Democrat because he carried the Southwestern states with large Latino populations -- including Texas.
The show, of course, is "The West Wing," the NBC version of life in the White House, now nearing the final episodes of its seven-year run. The winning candidate, by a razor-thin margin, was Matt Santos, a congressman from Houston.
He achieved his narrow victory with a slim victory in Nevada, the final state to be settled. But his total of 272 electoral votes, two more than needed, included 63 from five states with growing Latino populations: Texas (34 electoral votes), Arizona (10) Colorado (9), New Mexico (5) and Nevada (5).
In the real world, all five of those states were among the "red states" that gave President Bush his 286-252 electoral vote victory in the 2004 election. But some Democratic strategists see all of them except Texas as potentially winnable as early as 2008 if their party can mobilize enough unregistered Latino voters.
To be sure, Mr. Bush showed in both of his presidential elections - and in his gubernatorial races in Texas before that - an ability to attract Hispanic voters. His fluent Spanish undoubtedly helped, along with his stance on immigration and other issues of interest to the large Mexican-American population in Texas.
But many experts feel that the current immigration debate, and the leading role taken by some Republicans in opposing any provision providing ultimate citizenship, could damage the GOP in the way that former Gov. Pete Wilson's hard-line anti-immigration stance hurt the party in California.
In Texas, many Democrats see the Hispanic growth as their way to overcome the current Republican majority.
In the real world, that's for the future, if at all. On television, it happened this week.
Of course, the producers of the show admitted they only made the election come out that way for entertainment purposes, fearing it would be too great a blow for the show's Democratic viewers if Mr. Santos lost on top of the death of the party's vice presidential candidate due to the real-world death of actor John Spencer.
Posted by Jo at April 11, 2006 05:39 PM