Rose Garden Strategy

by Steve Erickson

(Issue: March, 2001)

CONSERVATIVE SPOILER AINSLEY HAYES IS THE WEST WING'S MOST RECENT COUP

WITH ANY LUCK, BY the time you read this Aaron Sorkin will have freed Ainsley Hayes from the White House basement. Like a lot of people, I've been obsessed with Sorkin's television series The West Wing since it premiered a year and a half ago, and I think nothing speaks more to how much it means to its audience than the curious criticism frequently lodged against it. "It's a fantasy!" people exclaim, chagrined that writers and directors and actors are just making it up, unlike all those documentaries about existential emergency rooms and ruminative police precincts and haunted high schools that otherwise dominate network programming. Even as were drawn to The West Wing, we feel betrayed by the show in a way that we don't by ER or NYPD Blue or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that betrayal begins at the witching hour of 9:59, when President Martin Sheen turns back into Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or any other president who has to do the things that presidents do to get and keep the job.

The West Wing elicits from us a more complicated love than any television show in recent memory. Of course we take pleasure in something written and acted on such a high level, and we're also just a little pleased with ourselves for being riveted by heated discussions of the Fourth Amendment in prime time. But The West Wing is more: an American psychodrama played out not so much among its characters as between our own aspirations and compromises, doomed as we are to a real-life politics where the fallen angels of our nature always win out over the better ones. It's no accident the show has skirted the question of how Sheen's Josiah Bartlet--his wisdom and demeanor as expansively and thunderously Old Testament as his name--was elected president in the first place, because creator-writer Sorkin understands we would jettison a candidate as unvarnished as Bartlet by the first round of primaries, let alone the convention or the fall campaign. Which is to say that when we complain The West Wing is a fantasy, what really unsettles us isn't the way the show betrays us but the way it reminds us of how we betray ourselves.

I assume what some people mean when they talk about the fantasy of The West Wing is the politics. Although I know conservative Republicans who would consider the Bartlet White House a cabal of Bolsheviks if they bothered to watch the show at all, to those of us whose persuasions aren't given to such gusto the Bartlet crowd are just liberals, of a sort perhaps not seen in presidential power since the late '60s. Actually, President Bartlet seems the least liberal of his administration, having revealed some hawkish impulses in his conduct of foreign policy along with some reservations about abortion so vague I can't be sure I haven't just imagined them. The West Wing's politics represent both what's exhilarating about the show and what's problematic, but neither the exhilaration nor the problem has as much to do with liberalism per se as with ideology in general. I'm probably kidding myself, but I would like to think that if a conservative version of The West Wing was as forthright in its convictions as the liberal version is, I would find it just as exciting, assuming it had the same wit and capacity for ambivalence and self-deprecation. Because Sorkin knows his stuff--in terms of the intricacies of a school voucher plan, say--and is also tactically savvy and intellectually honest, he tries to give the political right its due from time to time.
 
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