A presidential race between a young Democrat of color from Texas and a maverick Republican from California formed the spine of the final season of “The West Wing.” It’s a once-plausible scenario that with real-life congressional gerrymandering happening, pushes the Emmy-winning drama closer to the realm of science fiction.
The relevance and resonance of the beloved political series, which ran from 1999 to 2006, has, for many, grown during the Trump years. For some, it’s been a refuge from bombastic real-life headlines seemingly emerging daily. For others, it’s an evocation of what we once aspired to, even as its resemblance to reality slips further into the rear-view mirror.
As the 2008 presidential campaign took shape, many lauded the last episodes of the show for how prescient they were in setting up the face-off between Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) and Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda), which seemed to unerringly predict the dynamics of the election pitting Barack Obama against John McCain.
The parallels proved striking enough to prompt the U.K.’s The Telegraph to run a pre-election headline declaring, “Barack Obama will win: It’s all in ‘The West Wing.’” For its part, CNN marveled at the time, “Fiction has, once again, foreshadowed reality.”
Today, however, with California seeking to counteract Texas’ efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of electoral existence — contorting political districts to prevent the other party from winning congressional seats — the show’s idealistic patriotism keeps losing its real-world toeholds. Faced with those hurdles erected to disenfranchise voters, the prospect of someone like Santos getting elected in the Lone Star state, much less emerging as a national candidate, becomes as remote as California electing a GOP senator, much less securing the Republican nomination.
“It’s sad to see the turn that our politics took,” Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC host who served as an executive producer on the show during those climactic seasons, told TheWrap, noting that one of the motivations in conceiving the Santos-Vinick matchup was to present candidates “coming from a geographic position of strength in the other party.”
Today, O’Donnell conceded, the tribalism associated with modern politics has rendered such depictions ever more fanciful, and “a mixing of the policy bag across the parties is no longer possible.”
The sense of nostalgia surrounding “The West Wing,” and the uplifting vision of public service that the show advanced, has reared its head frequently in recent years. That included a special reunion episode in 2020 with a staged reading of the episode “Hartsfield’s Landing” during COVID to raise money for When We All Vote. Last year, a mini-revolt ensued after HBO Max removed the show from its library as a cost-cutting measure, before angry subscribers forced the service to reverse the decision.
Last September, First Lady Jill Biden hosted the cast at the White House for an event commemorating the show’s 25th anniversary. Martin Sheen, who portrayed President Jed Bartlet, addressed the crowd about being “uncompromising” in fighting for worthy causes, and the actor and activist, 85, will be featured at an MSNBC event in October.
To the extent people have clung to “The West Wing” because of its ennobling view of committed White House personnel, wrestling with dire matters with a sense of duty and compassion, the polarization and anger that has seeped deeper into the body politic make the show’s elevated ideals seem almost quaint.
After all the angst surrounding Supreme Court appointments, can anyone imagine a Democratic president with two picks using one of them to appoint a well-qualified and principled conservative, as Bartlet did in “The Supremes,” in order to secure confirmation for his liberal choice for Chief Justice?
Trump: A character Sorkin couldn’t write
While “The West Wing” derived its strength from those aspirational qualities — the way things should work, not necessarily the way they do — the Trump era has cast those images in a different light. During the first Trump term, series creator Aaron Sorkin told “Nightline” he couldn’t imagine writing a “West Wing”-type show around a Trump-like figure because “I don’t find him to be a terribly interesting character. He is exactly what he looks like … There’s no nuance. He only ever talks about two things: himself and his enemies.”
O’Donnell agreed, noting, “As a dramatist, your menu of options has just collapsed in the Trump era, because what he did was remove consequences. Drama needs consequences. ‘If I do X, then Y is going to happen.’”
In terms of scripting Trump, O’Donnell continued, “You can’t do it for drama because there’s no consequences, and then you can’t do it for comedy because it’s too ridiculous. I mean, ‘Veep’ isn’t funny if it’s real, right? It’s like, wait a minute. These people are in charge of Medicaid and Medicare, and they’re in control of nuclear weapons? That’s not funny.”
On a more practical level, O’Donnell sees the sharp rift between states returning the U.S. to a pre-Civil War footing, where citizens have markedly different expectations of their rights based upon where they live.
Need to get a vaccine in Florida? No. On the West Coast? A consortium of states are moving to ensure “yes.”
Yet if that speaks to fractionalization of the country, it comes during a modern period when air travel makes it much easier to overcome geographical boundaries. In a dose of 21st-century irony, individual states are being thrust further apart at a time when it’s so much easier, at least logistically, to come together, whether that’s in person or through the ping-ponging, instantaneous conversation on social media.
Perhaps the most lingering question regarding “The West Wing” is whether its poetic qualities and inspirational vision of government still have a purpose, or if it’s simply too Pollyanna-ish to feel relevant in the current political climate.
On the eve of the 2024 election, Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara called the show’s optimism “heart-breaking,” noting of Santos and Vinick’s principled campaign, “What seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky in 2006 seems literally impossible in 2024.”
O’Donnell conceded he had often been reluctant to discuss the show as being “important,” saying that while he relished his time working on it, when all was said and done the producers delivered a primetime series designed to entertain people on a broadcast network — back when “broadcasting” still meant something — despite the baggage that became affixed to it.
He wants them to see what human decency in that line of work looks like.” –Lawrence O’Donnell, quoting the writer Patrick Radden Keefe
More recently, though, O’Donnell said he spoke to the author/journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose books include the award-winning true crime novel “Say Nothing”), who said he originally wasn’t a fan of the show, considering it naive. Now, O’Donnell said, Keefe told him he was watching the series with his teenage sons because “he wants them to see what human decency in that line of work looks like. Because those boys are growing up in the age of Donald Trump as president, and that’s the president they know.”
From that perspective, O’Donnell said, “Those poor kids are living under the profane, dark shadow of Donald Trump every single day. To have this alternative in front of them strikes me as more important than ‘The West Wing’ has ever been.”
That’s true even if, or perhaps because of, the fact that something resembling the Santos-Vinick contest couldn’t happen again in our jaded, gerrymandered reality.
