In Josiah Bartlet, Sorkin (who also wrote the movies "A Few Good Men" and "The American President") has created the president of a liberal's dreams. And let's be honest about this -- it's hard to imagine "The West Wing" being enveloped in the big, warm media hug it's received since its premiere if the chief executive had been, say, an anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-school-prayer Republican (although this season, Sorkin has hired former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan to keep Dee Dee Myers company as a series consultant).

Bartlet doesn't chase skirt. He respects the dignity of the office. He comes from Founding Father stock (he's the former governor of New Hampshire), yet bears no trace of silver spoon entitlement. He's an economist by profession, but is capable of putting a human face on the numbers. Bartlet is Clinton with a conscience, Gore with a personality, Dukakis with a heart. Oh, yeah -- and he talks like Truman and looks vaguely like a Kennedy. (Indeed, Sheen played JFK in the miniseries "Kennedy" and RFK in the TV movie "The Missiles of October."). Bartlet is the feel-good Democratic president, the antidote to all the heartbreak of the past few years. He's too good to be true, which is why they call it "fiction."

But Sorkin undercuts Bartlet's perfection by giving him a serious mortal weakness -- he has multiple sclerosis, and his illness has been kept secret from the public and all but a handful of his advisors. He also has an irritating tendency to ramble in conversation until people's eyes glaze over. And, as we learned in the Oct. 4 second-season opener, he had a long, hard climb to the Oval Office.

The episode flashed back to Bartlet's campaign for the Democratic nomination, and a haphazard campaign it was. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Bartlet hadn't yet figured out how to stop bogging down in dry economics in his stump speeches. He was surrounded by Democratic Party handlers who wanted him to play it safe and not offend big contributors and special-interest groups. Bartlet was running a distant third in the national polls, far behind the favorite, Sen. John Hoynes (Tim Matheson), a political insider from the South. The depressed shadow of Hoynes -- who eventually became Bartlet's vice president -- hangs over "The West Wing," even though the character has appeared in only a handful of episodes. So beholden to special interests and party bigwigs he can't take a position on anything for fear of jeopardizing his future presidential chances, Hoynes represents politics as usual -- politics as the way it is, in the real world.

But Bartlet -- Bartlet is something else. In that same New Hampshire primary flashback, Bartlet is giving a sparsely attended speech at a veterans hall when a New Hampshire dairy farmer stands up and scolds him for vetoing a bill that would have helped struggling farmers by raising milk prices. This is Bartlet's reply: "Yeah, I screwed you on that one. You got hosed ... I put the hammer to farmers in Concord, Salem, Laconia, Pelham ... You guys got rogered but good. Today for the first time in history, the largest group of Americans living in poverty are children. One in five children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking, gut-wrenching poverty any of us could imagine. One in five. And they're children. If fidelity to freedom and democracy is the code of our civic religion, then, surely, the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says, 'We should give our children better than we ourselves receive.'" Bartlet stops, for just a moment, untangles his thoughts and starts again. "Let me put it this way. I voted against the bill because I didn't want to make it hard for people to buy milk. I stopped some money from flowing into your pocket. If that angers you, if you resent me, I completely respect that. But if you expect anything different from the president of the United States, you should vote for someone else."

Can you imagine a candidate talking to a constituent that way? A president? The season opener crystallized the Bartlet vision -- the Aaron Sorkin vision -- of politics as a noble call to do good. With a passion that's as charming as it is corny, Sorkin has created a president who puts the greater good above special interests, who remains true to his convictions, who doesn't live in fear of polls or pundits. Bartlet remains something of an outsider, yet his propensity for laying it on the line has earned him enough personal respect to get something done in partisan Washington. Bartlet is the POTUS with the mostest, and it's hard not to get all stirred up by him.

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