How “West” Won Our Hearts

Students and White House veterans alike bid farewell to America’s favorite non-existent administration.

Fans of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher may remember one hilarious sketch, where he ostensibly called the phone number of “Liberal Liaisons,” a sort of left-wing phone sex service advertised in the classified ads of The Nation. “I’ll make you scream like Howard Dean!” panted the voice at the other end. Some progressives may need to call Liberal Liaisons for the first time now that the progressive wet dream known as The West Wing is going off the air. For progressives of all ages and geographic location, The West Wing has been an hour a week of sweet dreams since its 1999 premiere and especially during the nightmarish Bush years. In this dream world, the president is a stocky, forthright, moderate progressive, former governor of a rural New England state, with a temper, a deep sense of morality, and a practicing doctor for a wife. Yes, he was Howard Dean, with better skills, before anyone knew who Dean was! In this alternative universe, the Deans of the world win elections despite routinely telling the pollsters to go perform anatomically impossible acts because “goddamnit it’s the right thing to do!” The series at times represented not just the progressive Platonic ideal in terms of the policies the White House espoused but in the vision of a functioning democracy that the show represented. Throw in snappy dialogue, a few cute stars (even if their outfits and hair all too accurately represented the dull fashion sense of D.C.), and you’ve got a franchise.

To commemorate the momentous occasion of the show’s passing, Campus Progress has commissioned a handful of reflections on The West Wing, including two from veterans of the Clinton White House, on which the show was largely based. Maybe they will give our readers some solace as they ponder life after The West Wing.

Through the Looking Glass Rosy
By Dee Dee Myers

Not long after I moved from Washington, DC to Los Angeles (my hometown) in 1997, I got a call from an agent. Would I talk with Aaron Sorkin, who had just written a pilot for a television series about the White House? Sure, I said. I’d met Aaron while I was working as press secretary to President Clinton and he was in Washington writing a movie called The American President. He was smart and clearly interested in politics; not just the how-a-bill-becomes-a-law mechanics, but the way power and personality and history shape events. I knew the script would be interesting, and it was. But by now it was early 1998, and the Monica Lewinsky story was the talk of the country. I just didn’t see how a show about a slightly romanticized White House could succeed in the era of impeachment. But I told Aaron I liked the pilot and would be happy to serve as a consultant if and when the show got made. I didn’t think it would.

A year passed before I heard another word about The West Wing. But on a spring day in 1999, I got the call. Warner Brothers had made the pilot, NBC had picked it up, and show would be on the air in September.

Across the next several months, I spent time with Aaron, the other writers, the directors, the producers and props people, helping to make the show as authentic as possible.

"What happens when the President walks through a door," they would ask. "Where are his secret service agents?"

"That depends," I would try and explain.

"What do those secret service pins the staff wears look like?" I would bring mine in.

“What’s it like to brief the press?”

“How much time do you have?” I’d say. And so it went.

Just before the first episode aired, I got a bunch of calls from friends and former colleagues back in Washington. "Why are you working on this show?" they’d ask. "It can’t be any good, because Hollywood knows nothing about Washington."

"Watch it," I’d say. And some of them did. The first round of reviews weren’t great.

"Why are there so many people walking fast through the halls? You know the West Wing is much quieter—and more serious—than that."

"The White House is a busy place,” I’d answer. We’re trying to convey the sense that there’s a lot going on. Don’t be so literal." But they couldn’t help it.

But then, slowly, over the next several weeks, I started getting a different kind of calls. Now even the skeptics wanted to talk substance. They liked a certain policy debate; it showed complexity. They remembered a similar moment, an equally tough choice. They could identify with a particular character (and sometimes wanted to know if a particular episode was based on them!) Pretty soon they were converts, even Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Washington ’s resident sphinx. Why?

Clearly, the show didn’t get everything right. But it got the big things right. Most importantly, it gave us characters who weren’t perfect, but they were real. Sometimes the show’s heroes and heroines made mistakes and got things wrong. But they got up the next day and tried to do the right thing; they tried to make the country a better place. And because we could believe in those men and women in the West Wing, we could feel good about politics, even if only for an hour on Wednesday (and then Sunday) nights. It gave us hope – maybe enough to try again.

Dee Dee Myers is a consultant and contributor to The West Wing. She was White House Press Secretary for the first two years of the Clinton administration, from January 1993 to December 1994.

Why Conservatives Love The West Wing
By Brandon McBride, University of Utah

Conventional wisdom holds that The West Wing is a liberal fantasy land where the left is king. But it isn’t. I’m a progressive and I do not care for anything involving Martin Sheen, beyond him voicing Sly Sludge on Captain Planet, so I do not watch the show. That being said, every Sunday night my apartment is overrun with popcorn, Diet Coke, and a steady, palpable level of tension as several people, most of whom I do not know, sit glued to my large TV along with one of my roommates. If you have read anything else by me you know that I, hailing from Utah, run with an awfully right-wing crowd. These West Wing geeks are no exception. They are self proclaimed right wingers and yet they live for the show. Why is this? According to one of them, it’s simply because it is “smart people’s TV.”

My roommate explained to me the draw of The West Wing. It is not the liberal fantasia aspect that some of my fellow writers allude to when explaining the phenomenon, it is simply the subject matter. “You have to pay attention” they explained, “You can’t be checking your email or doing your nails as you watch it. It demands your attention and forces you to think. Most shows on TV don’t do that.” I am aware that “smart people TV” sounds elitist and stuck up. I almost threw a salt shaker at this same woman when she said Scrubs isn’t smart person TV, but she is right. The few times I have walked into the room to find The West Wing on, I have to ask about 23 questions on the plot as well as various pointed questions about the policy making process in general before giving up and going to the kitchen for some Ritz crackers. Scrubs is hilarious even if you miss the first half of the show. The West Wing is all the drama and adrenaline of politics without the boringly long floor votes or harrowing realities that come with it. That is why my progressive colleagues, and conservative pals, won’t shut up about it. And now as The West Wing prepares to go off air, smart people everywhere will be forced to quietly wait for the triumphant return of Stacked, to finally take its place as the go-to show for intellectual folks.

Daydream Nation
By Julia Gronnevet, Campus Progress

I was walking around Dupont one weekend afternoon and I came across a store selling coffee mugs. It was right around election time, 2004, and the mugs were selling briskly. The slogan on them? “Martin Sheen is my President.”

To me, the West Wing meant an hour a week of watching smart, competent progressives engaging in witty repartée while staying true to their political ideals. These politicians are bipartisan when they can be, they make the "right choice" even when it’s political suicide, their decisions are influenced by their emotions, but only to just the right degree. They’re really, really human but they’re a bit better than that too. Their screw-ups are ultimately met with shoulder-patting and assurances that “well, [character], we all know you did your very best, and nobody can ask more of you than that.”

In short, the West Wing is a fantasy, a collective daydream for liberals and progressives. If we controlled the White House, that’s what we imagine it would be like.

Daydreaming is widely used as a synonym for frivolous time-wasting, so much so that WebMD has an article devoted to debunking that myth and touting its therapeutic possibilities. “Please reconsider daydreaming’s positive effects,” says the author, Christina Frank. Read in the context of the West Wing’s function for disenfranchised liberals, the list of purposes that daydreaming serves is really quite funny, in addition to being scarily true. Daydreaming helps you “manage conflict,” the article says. “As you review in your mind an argument you had with someone, you go back and imagine responding differently than you did. Try this a few times, responding differently each time, and you’ll begin to figure out better ways of dealing with the person in the future.” In other words, goddamnit, if only the real election had gone the other way! What would I have done if I could do it over again?

According to the same article, daydreaming also helps you “cement your beliefs and values.” Anybody who’s ever commiserated over some West Wing storyline knows what this involves. “When you daydream about scenarios in which you’re trying to convince someone of something you believe in strongly, you are also in a sense getting to know yourself and what you stand for better.”

However, something more is at play, too: the West Wing collective fantasy is completely necessary escapism when the real world gets us so down we can’t talk or think about it. In addition to being practice for when liberals again hold the reins of power, The West Wing functioned both as a safety-valve and a practice run for testing ideals and ideas, keeping them sharp and at the ready for the eventual return to power. But by this measure, the fact that The West Wing is now in its final season is good news, of a sort: we’re done the thinking and rehearsing of scenarios in our minds. Now all we have to do is bring them to life in our real nation’s capital.

We Figured It Would Be Off the Air by Thanksgiving
By Jennifer Palmieri

"A fictionalized White House about a divorced-southern-Governor-with-a-thirteen-year-old-daughter as President.”

Uh-oh. That’s how NBC’s original pitch for The West Wing was first described to me and my colleagues in President Clinton’s West Wing.

Really, NBC? Twenty-four hours of coverage on MSNBC and a daily flogging by Lisa Myers on NBC Nightly News wasn’t enough? We had to add another hour of Clinton-based drama to the schedule because Americans just weren’t getting enough?

As it turned out, the scouting report on NBC’s West Wing was wrong and we were all pleasantly surprised by the pilot. The pilot was great. It was well-written, well-acted, and earnest. Which we figured meant it would be off the air by Thanksgiving.

In one of the more surreal moments of my Clinton years, DeeDee Myers, the former White House press secretary asked Joe Lockhart, the current White House press secretary to meet with Allison Janney, the make-believe White House press secretary and talk to her about his job.

Naturally, he did.

Actually, DeeDee brought most of the cast to the White House the summer before the show aired so we could meet each other’s alter egos.

They were delightful—smart, committed, funny, earnest. We hoped they thought the same of us. Or at least some of us.

Anyway. We were thrilled when our well-informed TV predictions turned out to be wrong and the show was a huge hit.

And while we were excited for the cast, we were more excited for ourselves since there was finally something on TV that didn’t make all White House staff look like a bunch of shallow, lamp-throwing, dead-fish-sending, goons on the take.

The show depicted the truth—that most public servants are in government for the right reasons, work hard, make a lot of personal sacrifices, and try to do the right thing. Sometimes doing the "right thing" isn’t as easy or clear as it looks.

Of course, despite the show’s accuracies, it was still just a fiction, which was made pretty clear in my favorite "Hollywood White House" meets "Clinton White House" anecdote. (Yes, I know, Republicans think that’s redundant)

While visiting the actual White House, Cheryl Lowe, Rob Lowe’s wife, noted to Tommy Schlamme, the show’s executive producer, that the pagers the cast used on the show were different than the pagers we used at the "real" White House. Tommy good-naturedly responded, "It is okay. We aren’t really running the government either!"

Ah. If only they were.

Jennifer Palmieri is the Vice President of Communications at the Center for American Progress. She served eight full years in the Clinton White House, including as White House Deputy Press Secretary from 1998 to 2001.

Illustration: Matt Bors

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