The West Wing has become reviled and loved for the wrong reasons
Aaron Sorkin’s White House drama was a rebuke to Clinton neoliberalism, but the show is now wildly misremembered by both liberals and the socialist left
“These are the kind of scumbags who watch West Wing, and think that’s a really great representation of how government should work. A bunch of very clean-cut, well-educated people with no particular values, working the levers of bureaucracy... I have never met a Democrat who didn’t think that show was great ... And it’s actually a very disturbing show, if you look at the underlying vision of government that it has. It presents it as a career gig… They don’t have any core values or principles. And that’s a reflection of politics that could only appeal to the professional managerial class. And that’s what these people [in the video] are, that’s what they aspire to be, and all they care about is how they diversify the elites.”
- Russell Dobular, co-host of the Due Dissidence podcast, commenting on a video shown on a Jan 31, 2024 livestream (1hr, 1min), in which the managers at a Kamala Harris speaking event stopped two Muslim women, who were wearing hijabs, from entering the arena, despite having been invited
In 1992, I volunteered and worked on a local campaign for a new Canadian political entity called the National Party. The upstart movement was founded and led by a former Liberal Party advisor named Mel Hurtig, who, after he left the party, dedicated his life through the 1970s and 80s fighting against what is now called globalism. The National Party vowed to prevent sell-offs of entire sectors of the Canadian economy, stop privatization of public utilities, and bring an end to corporate funding of political parties (to be replaced by public subsidies on a per-vote basis), among other left-populist policies. Hurtig was Canada’s Bernie Sanders, with the difference being that he gathered his movement within a new party rather than shepherding them into the political establishment.
Hurtig and his party were fighting against rightward global trends that saw no or little resistance from liberals and the left. After the party’s collapse, after only one election, I watched the Liberal Party in Canada cut healthcare funding, while Clinton Democrats squeezed welfare recipients, increased mass incarceration, amped up Reagan’s “trickle down” income inequality policies, and deregulated media — allowing media ownership to be consolidated within nine corporations (and today six) instead of in fifty. Tony Blair of the in-name-only British Labour Party did much of the same, continuing Margaret Thatcher’s privatization of public services, and later helped guide liberal powerbrokers toward pro-war agendas when he provided an international foundation for America’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In this context, in 1999, I became an immediate fan of a TV show that seemed to be rebuking the right-leaning compromises of the Clinton administration, and by extension the failings of global liberals to protect the poor and the working class.
I later viewed The West Wing’s idealism as a template for the Bernie Sanders movement, which, after it was sabotaged by the Democratic establishment, bled into today’s socialist-left podcast universe. So as a viewer of Due Dissidence, the Jimmy Dore Show and related online broadcasts — and being aligned with their brand of progressive anti-war, anti-corporatist leftism — it pains me to have heard these shows’ regular hosts and their guests portray The West Wing as the opposite of my own experience watching the show several times.
I get that the show can superficially resemble American and Democratic Party propaganda: The hyper-patriotism aroused by the opening theme can be nauseating to some (it sends me reaching for the fast-forward button), and yes, the overly handsome cast, and of course the way the program is revered in some circles. A boilerplate impression of the show that lives on in the collective memory probably is “Democrats save the world.”
What’s easily forgotten, though, is that The West Wing did not begin (or end) as a celebration of elite centrism, but originated as a critique of the Clinton Democrats. By the end of the 1990s, left-leaning liberals had witnessed seven disheartening years of Bill Clinton signing “more consequential conservative legislation than any president since — and perhaps, anyone before him.” So we certainly weren’t craving a television drama that portrayed the depressing reality of our fading optimism.
Many of us naively accepted the emerging neoliberalism of the 90s as a cache of necessary compromises that had to be made in the face of inevitable change. But The West Wing, on many occasions, told us that liberals and the left should have pushed harder against this rightward shift as it presented a more progressive alternate reality. At the very least, when The West Wing’s President Bartlet and his donor-class Chief of Staff caved to center-right corporatist power, they would be challenged from within the administration by progressive staffers who dramatized the corruption within the system.
One form of pushback was seen in the first season’s 12th episode, which took a swipe at Bill Clinton’s much-criticized 1996 State of the Union line that “the era of big government is over.” In the episode, that same line is slipped into an early draft of Bartlet’s first State of the Union address after testing well in a focus group. House Democrats then queue up to take turns chipping away at the most objectionable parts of the address — namely, any mention of programs that hint at “big government,” such as support for the National Endowment of the Arts.
Frustrated by the continual watering down of his speech, Communications Director Toby Zeigler reverses course. Realizing that “big government” arts programs were behind the greatest achievements in American culture, he tells the president it’s time to stand behind principles and drop the line. In other words, to take the stand that Clinton didn’t have the courage to take:
“We’re running away from ourselves. And I know we can score points that way. I was a principle architect in that campaign strategy... But we’re here now. Tomorrow night, we do an immense thing. We have to say what we feel... Government can be a place where people come together and where no one gets left behind … An instrument of good. I have no trouble understanding why the line tested well, but I don’t think that means we should say it.”
In the fifth season, the tone hardens, as — for instance — when Press Secretary CJ Cregg discovers, and is appalled, that Chief of Staff Leo McGarry scrubbed criticism of the coal industry from an EPA report (episode 5). Considering the EPA’s independence to be sacrosanct, she lets slip in her briefing — to reporters who have the original draft and are calling her out on the changes — that “any interference would surely be a mistake.” When hauled into Leo’s office, they have this exchange:
CJ: They had both drafts. There was nothing I could do.
LEO: I gave you the line, who said you could drop it?
CJ: Coal is the dirtiest energy on the planet. That’s worth censoring out of a report?
LEO: What wasn’t in that report was any mention of clean coal.
CJ: Clean coal is an industry myth.
LEO: They turn it into gas and steam. It’s better for the...
CJ: Clean coal is like saying “healthy botulism” or “child-safe plutonium.”
The show’s hardest-hitting critique of the Democratic establishment, in my view, came later in Season 5 (episode 19), from 2004, which had dual storylines taking turns excoriating globalism and media concentration. Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman begins the episode riding high after successfully negotiating a free trade deal with (it’s implied) parts of Europe and western Asia.
Josh soon realizes he was duped by his own superiors when India signs onto the pact at the last minute, having made a backroom deal to take away not the “low-paying, old economy” jobs trumpeted by the agreement’s American advocates, but 3 million high-tech jobs that Josh and the president promised union leaders they would protect at all costs in exchange for their endorsements. Expecting conservative pushback against the deal’s labor provisions, Josh is devastated when Republican leadership gives the deal their blessing, saying the labor provisions are toothless, and half-jokingly invites him to run as a Republican. Josh ends the episode making a fruitless attempt to talk the president out of the deal, and then faces a union leader and a soon-to-be-unemployed tech worker in his office. He is left with nothing substantial to say, except an utterance of what could have been an antidote to globalization:
“I worked for this senate candidate. He had this idea that health care, pensions, even vacation time ought to be portable. It should follow you from job to job because everyone was gonna work fifteen jobs in a lifetime. And we talked him out of it, told him he was scaring the bejesus out of people. Who wants to know about fifteen jobs? Maybe we should’ve done that. I don’t know.”
Josh was once against globalization, but when asked how he became a free trader, he says, with a look of regret, “By coming to work for one.”
Modern political realists on the left would have also surely gotten behind the parallel plot, as Press Secretary CJ Cregg struggles to get reporters in her press room to cover how conglomerates conspired with the Federal Communications Commission over a bill to concentrate media ownership among a few giant players. “You don’t want to write this because it’s about your owners,” she says, in one of a series of fights with reporters. To hammer her point home, she has the briefing room reduced to seven seats, and tells the incredulous gaggle of reporters:
“The White House briefing room will now offer one seat per corporate owner. One seat for MertMedia, one for GE, one for Disney, Viacom, News Corp, Clear Channel, Tribune. You’ll have to flip a coin to see who gets to sit.”
In her part of the story, CJ preaches the dangers of letting conglomerates control information and erode free speech. We are living with the nauseating reality of that today, as “news” has been reduced to hysterical partisan propaganda comprised of “authorized” stories that reporters refuse to challenge lest they upset their government-tied corporate owners.
These warnings about globalism and media concentration were aired at the time by academics and leftist writers in obscure books and periodicals that had to be sought out. But that West Wing episode was the only time I had heard these arguments aired in the mainstream, aimed at the broadest possible audience.
I could be accused of cherry-picking just a few good moments from The West Wing, but I have come to know the show thoroughly, having watched its entire run about once every six or seven years — something I do with a few of my favorite series when suffering bouts of homesickness and nostalgia while living abroad. I can’t spend this essay recapping all 156 episodes, but I aim to honestly convey the true gist and spirit of the entire series with a few more examples. (Extra episodes are summarized in the postscript.)
What has amazed me about the show is not just how well it once commented on the failures of centrism, but how well its stories hold a mirror to present-day politics. Little nuggets in West Wing plotlines show how issues that are today considered products of “right-wing conspiracy theories” were indeed once concerns of the left — European farmers protesting over globalization; CJ rolling her eyes at having to change a reference to a passing Supreme Court judge from “a great man” to “a great person,” (“Unless that offends other mammals,” Toby retorts); a black chairman of the Joint Chiefs being confronted with an identity politics issue and replying, “I’ve got real honest-to-god problems to deal with. I don’t have time for the cosmetic ones.”
In much larger ways, The West Wing demonstrates by comparison how many wrong turns both Democrats and Republicans have made since the show’s initial run. Take, for example how, in Season 1 (episode 12), the British ambassador suggests resolving a military crisis between India and Pakistan by “buying” India’s withdrawal, with a pledge to fund a high-tech infrastructure program. He tells the president and Leo:
“You’ve been paying the world off since the industrial age. Foreign aid during the Cold War was you paying dictators to be on your side. To this very day, you pay North Korea not to develop nuclear weapons.”
When that episode aired in early 2000, the US was indeed providing “sanctions relief, aid, oil, and two light-water reactors for civilian use” as part of a 1994 agreement that froze North Korea’s nuclear arms development. It was an era in which Washington and Pyongyang hosted goodwill visits by leaders and administration officials, while the North and South held inter-Korean summits. Only two years after that episode aired, George W. Bush tagged North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil” in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, and the deal was off. In 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon. Today, we have only this little TV show in the mainstream ecosystem to remind us of the forgotten benefits of “paying off dictators” and what the world might still look like had the West maintained some level of diplomacy with countries it doesn’t like.
North Korea might have become a write-off, but at least Barack Obama tried to preserve some peace with Russia. He canceled Bush’s plans to build a European missile defense shield that had soured relations with Russia. Furthermore, according to Hillary Clinton advisor Robert Kagan, Obama believed that: “Ukraine is part of the Russian sphere of influence, and [Crimea] means more to them than it means to us, and therefore we shouldn’t escalate a situation like that. That’s why he doesn’t want to send arms.” In fact, it was the supposed “Putin puppet” Donald Trump who was “the first president to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine,” while he continued NATO expansion by signing off the entries of Montenegro and North Macedonia, and ballooned the budget for the anti-Russia European Deterrence Initiative.
Just as Lord John Marbury was able to talk some sense into Bartlet to get Indian troops off Pakistan’s border, he might have also had similar advice for Joe Biden as Russia was lining up along Ukraine’s: “Give them something they want. A pledge to bar Ukraine from NATO, and make some effort to get your European allies to uphold the Minsk peace accords.” Argue whether that would have been reasonable, but hey, we’re talking about a fictional TV show with its head in the leftist anti-war clouds, right?
Echoes of Gaza, meanwhile, can be seen in the West Wing’s third episode. President Bartlet, in a fury after an American military jet is downed by Syria, is disturbed by the “proportional response” recommended by the Joint Chiefs — bombing a few “ammo dumps” and transmitters essential to the Syrian defense network. Bartlet, much like Netanyahu today, demands “a disproportional response”: “Let the word ring forth from this time and this place, you kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportional response, we come back with total disaster!” Bartlet is barely talked off the ledge by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when presented with a plan that would involve thousands of casualties and “cripple the region’s ability to receive medical supplies and bottled water… this strike would be seen at home and abroad as a staggering overreaction by a first-time Commander in Chief. That without the support of our allies, without a Western Coalition, without Great Britain and Japan and without Congress, you’ll have doled out a five thousand dollar punishment for a fifty-buck crime, sir.”
The climax of that episode might seem to contain a glorification of American supremacy, but it also cautions that world dominance comes with a moral imperative that has been forgotten by recent administrations. Bartlet parries with Leo, his Chief of Staff, about the virtues of proportional responses:
BARTLET: I’m talking about 286 American marines in Beirut. I’m talking about Somalia, I’m talking about Nairobi.
LEO: And you think ratcheting up the body count is gonna act as a deterrent?
BARTLET: You’re damn right.
LEO: Then you are just as dumb as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins, as if drug kingpins didn’t live their day-to-day lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours, and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So my friend, if you want to start using American military strength as the arm of the Lord, you can do that. We’re the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne, but you better be prepared to kill everyone, and you better start with me because I will raise up an army against you and I will beat you!
On the subject of the Middle East, even one of the most ham-fisted parts of the series (a Camp David summit between Israel and Palestine; Season 6, Episode 2) showed symmetry with Dobular’s own thoughts on Israel. “Jerusalem, at the very least, should be managed by the UN, because you have three different religions focused on it as their holy land… It should not belong to any nation,” he said in a recent podcast (Feb 19, 2024, 1:42:15).
This is the solution that is proposed in the show’s fictional Camp David talks. However, the scriptwriters deviate a bit and say that UN peacekeepers would be unwelcome by Israel, and that the force must be American. But this proposal seems to be have been included as a vehicle for the argument in favor of the UN and against American troops to be voiced. Leo tells the president:
“We’d be throwing ourselves into a conflict we don’t understand and give religious fanatics even more to scream about … For a short period we may be welcome but what happens when we have to start kicking in doors, declare martial law? … You’re committing American lives to something that may go on for decades … This is your own League of Nations. And it’ll ruin you like it ruined Wilson.”
As for The West Wing presenting politics as a “career gig” with characters who “don’t have any core values or principles,” Dobular and others should have paid attention to an ongoing storyline from seasons 5 through 7, in which Vice President “Bingo Bob” Russell is portrayed as an empty suit, gearing up for a presidential bid that he sees as owed to him, given that it’s “his turn” (the same way many believed it was Hillary Clinton’s turn in 2008 and 2016). The speechwriting staff describe him this way, in a text that accidentally ends up on Bartlet’s teleprompter: “In a triumph of the middling, a nod to mediocrity, and with gorge rising, it gives me great nausea to announce Robert Russell, Bingo Bob himself, as your new Vice President. This lapdog of the mining interests is as dull as he is unremarkable, as lackluster as he is soporific.” As a replacement for an outgoing VP who resigns in a sex scandal, Russell is portrayed as an inept opportunist foisted on the administration by a Republican Congress that refuses to confirm anyone but the most beatable Democrat should he run for president, which he does.
Staffers who line up behind Russell’s presidential bid are ridiculed throughout three seasons for propping up a feckless candidate to fulfill their own empty career ambitions. This was exemplified in one in particular episode (Season 5, Episode 20) that could have been referring to Joe Biden as easily as easily as Russell. Here, Toby confronts Russell’s chief of staff and campaign chair Will Bailey:
TOBY: If you keep this up he might win.
WILL: Thanks.
TOBY: It wasn’t a compliment. You need to get the hell out of there. You’re grooming this clown for a win, and then what?
WILL: Four more years. A better prescription drug plan, maybe the educational overhaul you guys can’t seem to get off the ground.
TOBY: With Howdy Doody at the helm?
WILL: This isn't a dictatorship. There are hundreds of people running this White House. The salient detail being they’re all Democrats. You most of all.
TOBY: There are no launch codes at my desk! At the event of what I perceive to be a threat, I can’t deploy troops to invade so much as a 7-Eleven. I don’t care who you surround this guy with, he’s going to wield a tremendous amount of power.
WILL: He’ll be fine. The party wants a win. Sixty million Democrats want...
TOBY: Winning is easy.
WILL: You only hit it once, and maybe never again.
TOBY: Because you back the guy who should win, not the guy who will win. I backed a man of vision, who’s still hanging on to his integrity with his teeth. You’re damn straight I won’t win again.
This storyline was warning Democrats against a “Vote blue no matter who” strategy. Russell’s moronic attempts to convey gravitas — repeating flat jokes and dull anecdotes verbatim at every event — provide both comic relief and warnings against nominating pragmatists who show no signs of loyalty to particular values or beliefs.
This is presented against a David-vs-Goliath story arc in which Josh struggles to manage the campaign of a progressive underdog (a Hispanic eerily prescient of Obama) in a fight for populist values. Of course, having seen where Obama went, we know that President Santos would have sold out his universal healthcare plan (“scrap the age restriction on Medicare”) and stacked his cabinet with appointees dictated by Citibank. But at the time, it was an inspiring thing to see on mainstream television, and might have primed audiences for both the Obama and Bernie Sanders movements. (Unless that’s my favorite podcasters’ real objection — that the show acted as a sheepdog by creating false hope. But if anything, I believe that was a side effect, not an intention.)
Dobular and Dore have also talked about how Democrats today admire the show for its portrayal of the modern party’s virtues. If I were to meet any such people, I would challenge them, also, to actually watch the show. Again, The West Wing was not a celebration of Democrats but a call to hold them to values that they have fallen impossibly further from since the show’s final episode — back when there was some ray of hope (or false belief) that the party could reform itself.
In fact, the show might have served as a warning as to how dangerous the Democratic Party was or would become. The progressives in the show often lost their battles — the administration, realistically, lumbered on with its it continual compromises to the right. But the show admirably presented the arguments and the debates that liberals should have been making more publicly, and as forcefully, as the show’s characters. Nonetheless, it is understandable that many have confused fiction with reality and look back on the series as a promotion of the Democratic Party, and not as an exposé of how the proverbial sausage is made.
Liberals today might want to consider that Biden, in comparison with the intellectual heft of the fictional Nobel laureate Bartlet, is an empty shell of a leader, who makes G.W. Bush seem prosaic in retrospect and Bob Russell look like a heavyweight. The White House in 2024 is not what The West Wing aspired to be. So it’s impossible to see how anyone who loves the show today would regard Biden as any kind of Jed Bartlet, or would align themselves with the hawkish, elitist, and divisive version of so-called liberalism that has infected the globe. In that regard, The West Wing has come to be misunderstood and misrepresented by everyone to the left of Mitt Romney. Only Republicans hate the show (or ignore it) for the right reasons, according to their values.
Watching the entire seven seasons of The West Wing might seem like a huge ask of Dobular, Dore, and their co-hosts. I don’t expect them to do it, but I wish they wouldn’t comment on the show if they can’t cite specific storylines or thematic threads that support their view. I’m certain there are nuggets of objectionable material to be found within its episodes. The cozy and sometimes incestuous relationship between the White House and the press (who would reliably feed on CJ’s strategic leaks) was presented realistically but without much criticism. And while there were one or two attempts to expose the corporate interests that rule Washington, it was certainly not hard-hitting enough.
But it still seems obvious to me that The West Wing served as an escapist hope for an extinct breed of leftist Democrat who thought the White House should serve the electorate and not simply act as the chief administrative office of global capitalism. I’m certain that today’s party elites view the show as a problematic artefact, and are glad that nothing like it is informing present-day audiences of their monumental abdication of purpose and principles.
Postscript
Here are a few more themes found in other episodes that are worth including in the discussion:
Standing up to Blue Dogs: The episode “A Constituency of One” (S05, E05) has Josh taking a hard line with a Blue Dog Democrat in the mold of Joe Manchin, who is blocking military promotions until he gets a proven-inoperable missile launcher built in his state. “Five years he’s voted with Republicans. Just last week he switched his vote and jammed us on the stimulus package … We give him everything, he screws us every time.” Josh ignores warnings to go soft, and he demands that the senator stand with the party, including leaking an unflattering story to the press in an attempt to force his hand. Although the plan backfires — the senator defects to the Republicans — it was nonetheless refreshing to see one character make the principled argument against continually appeasing the right wing of the party. The show seemed to leave it to audiences to decide whether Josh made a mistake, or whether the party is better off clearing out the Blue Dogs.
Visiting disaster sites: In contrast with the current president’s absence, silence, or much-delayed appearances at disaster sites in Ohio and Hawaii, the fictional President Bartlet insisted on touring the site of an Oklahoma tornado that devastated a town and took more than 70 lives (S05, E06). Despite being needed back in the White House within hours for negotiations on capital gains and a meeting with the German Chancellor, Bartlet remains in the town longer than scheduled, believing that the grieving, traumatized residents need their president at this time. He listens to the stories of victims in an emergency shelter and helps wash dishes after meals are served — refusing to let the press photograph his efforts. It’s the first time in years that Bartlet has felt personally useful to average people, but in his state of psychological disembodiment from the office of president, he overstays the moment of need. CJ confronts Bartlet after being told, a day later, “These people need me.”
“No, sir, they don’t. Maybe they did yesterday, but now they need their town back. They need their police officers working, not clearing intersections for your motorcade. They need the 50 motel rooms we took last night for people who lost their homes. And they need you back in Washington running the country, and creating the jobs that are going to help to pay the taxes to help support disaster relief and rebuilding. What are we doing here, sir?”
CJ was right — but we could only hope to see such humanity in our leaders. Two years after that episode aired, we saw G.W. Bush continue his vacation as Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and did nothing afterward but fly over the area in its aftermath. Then there’s Joe Biden, who took 13 days to visit Hawaii after wildfires destroyed Lahaina, killing 101 people, and then told an assembled audience an anecdote that compared their loss to him losing his Corvette. Not to mention the year it took him to visit East Palestine after a devastating train derailment caused an inferno of hazardous chemicals, poisoning the town’s air and water, and causing widespread evacuations.
Some of my favorite episodes, you might have noticed, come from Season 5, which has a mix of the series’ strongest and weakest episodes. While doing research for this article, I noticed that much of the criticism of this season centers on its stories being tinged with cynicism, failure, and anger. This is precisely what I liked about this phase of The West Wing. It realistically portrayed an administration in its second term running on empty, having sacrificed many of its principles and tanking in opinion polls, with staff burned out and running the show on ridiculous “message calendars.” All of this is presented for dramatic purposes; it’s not modeling the best way to run a government. Will Bailey’s defection from the communications staff to work for Russell (the vice president he once joyously ridiculed) is knocked for being completely out of character. But his turn to the “dark side” is, in fact, a result of having been mocked and bullied by Toby, who can barely contain his arrogant vitriol as he watches the administration disintegrate. Will, at least, has enough (naive) hope to think he can mold Russell into a populist candidate.
Diplomacy with Russia: “Evidence of Things Not Seen” (S04, E20) has the staff frantically trying to develop a cover story to retrieve an unmanned spy plane that crashed on the Russian coast.
LEO: The plane was taking pictures of illegal nuclear transfers in the region and we need the intelligence because they don’t think we're going to get it again.
BARTLET: Well, what do they want me to do, call Chigorin and ask if we can go in and get our spy plane back?
LEO: Yes sir. Except you can’t say spy plane.
BARTLET: Wait, you’re serious. They want me to call Chigorin? … And ask him for the plane back without telling him we were spying?
A cover story is drafted involving the craft taking pictures of coastal erosion. Bartlet thinks it’s ridiculous, but he follows the script. He makes the call from the Oval Office, with a translator and several Pentagon and State Department officials hovering over the proceedings, but the Russian President isn’t buying any of it.
CHIGORIN [through the translator]: There is simply no way an American UAV could have been in the Finnish part of the Baltic Sea and end up crashing in Kaliningrad unless there was a typhoon … We have experts too. And a team is looking for the UAV.
Exhausted by the cover story, Bartlet shocks the Pentagon brass by blurting out the truth, drawing from Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“We were taking pictures of Kaliningrad. We take pictures of black market nuclear materials being moved out the back doors of suppositories and into trucks. The materials are being sold to non-governmental elements and, well, that’s what we were doing. Rogue engineers, military scientists, and ex-KGB. It’s just as big of a problem for you as it is for us, but you’re not dealing with it, so we were taking pictures of Kaliningrad … So we’re going to share the pictures we got. Not the technology we used to get them. Otherwise I’m detonating it and neither of us see the pictures. We’re going to have to trust each other. Our two countries have stopped the world from annihilating itself for 60 years because of conversations like this one. Why don’t you talk it over?”
That wasn’t difficult, was it?
Insider trading: One of the most odious aspects of the US Congress is the way its members legally engage in what can only be described as insider trading, some making up to 240% profits in 2023 on a stock market that only gained 25%, with the bulk of trades being “unusually timed.” In 2011, 60 Minutes exposed how Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi and her husband bought 5,000 shares in Visa just before she blocked legislation that would have hurt credit card companies, resulting in Visa stock soaring from $44 a share to $64. In the years after, her wealth only ballooned. Visa was just the tip of the iceberg.
In this context, one West Wing episode (S01, E04) oddly sticks out. A financial disclosure report shows that Communications Director Toby Zeigler made $120,000 from a single tech stock he bought while arranging for a friend in the industry to testify to Congress — testimony which caused tech stock to skyrocket. Much of the episode centers on Toby professing his innocence and discussing with a White House lawyer how he can avoid market-conspiracy charges. In the end, Bartlet proposes that Toby make a statement that he will reduce his salary to $1 for one year and immediately cash out the stock.
What is the message of this episode? Was it propaganda designed to give the false impression that members of the US government are held to strict conflict-of-interest laws? It could be seen that way, but I’m not so cynical. This aired in 1999, long before there was public talk of congressional stock-market profiteering. I think, if anything, this episode models the ethics public servants and elected representatives alike were expected to abide by at the time. But it is funny to think of the fuss that was made over Toby’s $120,000 in contrast with the uncontested millions the Pelosis made while she was House Speaker — not to mention the US Congress as a whole.
Vanity of the elites: Many West Wing characters were indeed elitist and arrogant — Josh and Toby in particular — but these traits were rarely portrayed as virtues. Staff defections and escalations of political crises were often a result of their hubris, although sometimes their cocky behavior was a target for amusement. Characters would occasionally bring each other down a notch: Josh: “I really think I’m the best judge of what I mean, you paranoid Berkeley shiksta feminista! Whoa. That was way too far.” CJ: “No, no. Well, I’ve got a staff meeting to go to and so do you, you elitist, Harvard fascist missed-the-Dean’s-list-two-semesters-in-a-row Yankee jackass!” One of my favorite bits involved Josh going ballistic on comic magicians Penn and Teller, after they apparently burn a US flag in the White House during a performance at the president’s daughter’s birthday party. Penn respond’s to Josh’s hotheaded demand for a public apology with an eloquent constitutional defense of the performance. Josh: “Did you go to law school?” Penn: “No. Clown school.” Another early storyline gave us a window in the early days of the internet, as Josh maniacally engages with online Bartlet-bashing trolls, to his own detriment.
This is just a sample of the progressive West Wing themes that I recall off the top of my head. Several more would certainly become apparent if I reviewed the series yet again. But this has already been a lengthy article, so to prevent this from becoming a thesis, I shall spare myself and the reader, and just leave it here.
Great stuff.
Do you ever look at the layer behind/above such shows and political parties? With your forensic eye, I am sure that '1%' would feel uncomfortable.
Who, what and why?