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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Why liberals can make good drama and conservatives wind up with "Red Dawn."
May 1, 2000 | Saturday's annual White House Correspondents Association dinner began with a video short featuring the cast of "The West Wing" and real White House press secretary Joe Lockhart. Later, the show got a plug during President Clinton's speech. And after dinner, the "Wing" cast was feted as guests of honor at the Vanity Fair memorial after party, now sponsored by Michael Bloomberg. In the course of one night, "The West Wing" cemented itself as the most-talked-about television program in the nation's capital.
In less than one season, the quasi-fictional NBC drama has eclipsed the popularity of "Meet the Press," "Crossfire" and even "Hardball With Chris Matthews" in this town. It has, as Brandon Tartikoff used to say, major heat. In bars people don't gossip about bumping into Sen. Trent Lott or presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal anymore. They exchange "West Wing" sightings. There's the whole cast feasting at Bobby Van's! There's Rob Lowe shooting an exterior by the OEB! There's Moira Kelly doing a scene on Constitution Avenue! And wasn't she the girl from "The Cutting Edge"?
But why is the entire city (320,000 people in D.C. watch every week) swooning over a show that is such an obvious river of liberal agitprop? The show's creator and writer, Aaron Sorkin, tried to deny that his show has any particular political bent in a recent profile in the Washington Post. However, a quick examination of the series shows his denial to be, as they say, inoperative.
"The West Wing" is such a thinly veiled roman ` clef about the Clinton administration that even most interns on the Hill know who the characters' real-life counterparts are. The featured players include George Stephanopoulos (Rob Lowe), Harold Ickes (Brad Whitford), Dee Dee Myers (Allison Janney), Mandy Grunwald (Moira Kelly), Hillary Clinton (Stockard Channing), Chelsea Clinton (Elizabeth Moss) and Bill Clinton (Martin Sheen).
But to Sorkin, a liberal Democratic activist, the real Clinton White House wasn't good enough. So he created a dream White House, starring not the real Clinton but the good Clinton who lived in the typical Democrat's mind in 1991. From there, the propaganda gushed forth. In the first season, Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen as Clinton) and his administration have come out in favor of paying reparations to blacks for slavery, using statistical sampling for the census, putting the self-described "most liberal judge in the country" on the Supreme Court, keeping a Secret Service confidentiality clause, letting gays serve openly in the military, enacting tough campaign finance reform and taking up hate-crimes legislation.
The Bartlet administration is against school vouchers, school prayer, a flag-burning amendment and the religious right. And apparently it's just warming up: In last week's episode, the president's advisors lament that they've dropped five points in the polls because they aren't being liberal enough.
But if "The West Wing" is silly as a political diatribe, it's brilliant as television. The writing -- and there is no one to credit but Sorkin -- crackles with energy. The dialogue ricochets from character to character with intelligence and precision. The pacing is swift and sure. The cast is professional and believable. And the production values are the best on network television -- from the elaborate, burnished sets to the dynamic yet smooth camerawork.
So how does "The West Wing" manage to be politically didactic and entertaining at the same time? And why isn't there a Republican version of "The West Wing"? The answer, of course, is that there couldn't possibly be a Republican version. Liberals can do drama well and conservatives can't.
