Bartlet Administration ends

On re-watching "West Wing" again...

EDITOR’S NOTE: Posted from Jacksonville Airport at 6:47 A.M. Headed for Pittsburgh. Wish me luck! NOGO

You won’t read about it in the New York Times or Washington Post. It won’t come up on “Real Time With Bill Maher” or, God forbid, on Fox. But in our cozy home, Liz and my re-watching of Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant political series “The West Wing” came to a halt in our living room just the other night. And then, it was “Oops, there goes gravity…”

This is, I think, our third go-round watching the entire seven-season series. We watched the show when it was originally on NBC in 1999, it ran through 2006 and we saw the Presidency shift from Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) to Matthew Santos (Jimmy Smits), anticipating, perhaps, a minority Presidential candidate — which actually happened, not the first time they were ahead of the curve.

Some years later after it was off the air, we caught a re-run or two and decided to re-watch it from start to finish — it was WAY better than anything else on TV these days. After we saw what was happening in our American political world, we thought watching “West Wing” might be an antidote. (Don’t tell Robert Kennedy).

From the Bartlet Administration to the Santos Administration on West Wing.

Why “The West Wing” now? For us, anyhow, it was an alternate reality to the constant, unrelenting cruelty, the incompetence, the bald-faced cash grab, the embarrassing fealty of the Trump Administration. If you have even the slightest grasp of history, it’s simply revolting and I don’t know any other way to say it.

Listening to those sycophants going on and on and on about “your magnificence” at that recent Cabinet meeting, laying it on with a three-foot-wide trowel, why what they said was as untrue as it was nauseating.

Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or Barack Obama sitting through nonsense like that? Or Jed Bartlet? Or Matt Santos?

While certainly “The West Wing” was a political fantasy — imagine a newly elected Democratic President talking his just-defeated Republican challenger into taking the Secretary of State position, weeks after the defeat? — Sorkin’s characters were so well-drawn, it was easy to sink into the show. They were idealistic but very human, driven but paying a price for it. And they were loyal, fiercely loyal to President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), men who were demanding, no-nonsense characters that were ambitious but driven to a higher purpose that’s so unlike what we’re seeing today and what we saw during Trump’s first run, which people have evidently forgotten. Remember how the networks - ALL the networks, even Fox — wouldn’t air his press conferences they were so full of lies? And we put him BACK in the White House?

Those West Wing stories were superbly, intricately written, graced with humor and sparkling dialogue; it was as if we all knew and loved Josh (Bradley Whitford), understood the highly principled yet never happy Toby (Richard Shiff), admired the wit and grace of C.J. Craig (Allison Janney), hoped Josh would ultimately get together with Josh’s indefatigable assistant Donna Moss (Janel Maloney) and watched carefully how Bartlet’s personal aide Charlie Young, an African-American dating the President’s daughter found a way to navigate that and serve the President plus you had the sparkling Rob Lowe as idealistic speechwriter Sam Seaborn, sort of a counterweight to Josh and Toby, dealing with the demands of the job, his life and the President all at once.

I’ve been reading — when I had a chance — “What’s Next: A Backstage Pass To the West Wing" written by Mary Elizabeth McCormack and Melissa Fitzgerald, two cast members that reveal the inner workings of the show and how they all realized how fortunate they were to take part in such a superbly drawn weekly show.

In re-watching it now, twenty-six years after its debut, what’s remarkable is how prescient Sorkin seemed to be. Topics that came up on the show, you name it, they covered it, it was like he walked twenty five years into the future, saw what was cooking and made sure he wrote about it.

One element he did not see coming, something that was not written into the show — which is one reason, perhaps, we loved it so much — was Donald Trump.

The contrast between Trump and Sorkin’s Josiah Bartlet, the smartest guy in the room, an economist who certainly wouldn’t be farting around with tariffs, a man who respected his staff, particularly the women and minorities, again, quite a contrast with what we’re stuck with.

And as embarrassing as it is to admit, there were times near the end of an episode when I’d find myself getting emotional, so disappointed that our politics have devolved into where we are, so far from where Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison wanted it to be.

As I wrote in my book, “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump,” I just happened to walk through the National Archives in Washington on the very day that Trump was going through Impeachment No. 2. That was when Alan Dershowitz did his “whatever the President does to keep himself in office IF he thinks it’s in the best interest of America is OK” pitch to Congress.

Staring up at the portraits of these Founding Fathers, seeing the actual documents they put their signatures on, not knowing if this experiment would really work, being able to put partisan feelings aside to think of us, how different that was from our President hawking crappy sneakers or Bibles, for goodness sakes, or stupid postcards of himself in superhero poses or offering exclusive White House tours for hefty cash donations, watching “The West Wing” purged my brain of that stuff, at least for an hour or so.

The episode that really got me was “Slow News Day” in Season Five, Episode 12 where Toby Ziegler comes up with a radical plan to save Social Security (and yes, it applies to me now, not when they wrote it) and it almost backfires and in the end, the President says “We can’t take credit for it if we’re going to get it done.”

For the good of the country, not his friggin’ wallet or his friggin’ base, there was a President, fictional, of course, who actually PUT THE COUNTRY FIRST. Which, of course, was the idea that these Founding Fathers came up with all those years ago when America was a place you could really dream, a place they didn’t know for sure if it’d work.

“Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” was a dream, of course. Washington doesn’t really act that way, I know that. But dammit, it was a dream I needed. And may again.