Call it palliative care, if you will. Since George W Bush entered the White House, the collective pain of the left has been slightly eased once a week by the soothing balm of the recently departed West Wing.
There is, however, a fine line between day dreaming and losing one’s grip on reality, and the West Wing came perilously close to crossing it. It is not so much that Josiah Bartlet’s administration didn’t spend its days trying to overturn congressional bans on torture, conspiring to redistribute the national wealth to the richest one per cent, or attempting to turn Alaska into a giant oil field.
It is not even that the words ‘I’m the decider and I decide what’s best’ never crossed Bartlet’s lips or that currying favour with a curious hot-potch of modern-day robber barons, religious fundamentalists and gun fanatics were not high on his list of priorities. For none of these things are unreasonable expectations from a mildly progressive occupant of the Oval Office.
Rather, it is the largely unexplained fact that Bartlet actually reached the White House in the first place, which marks the point where the West Wing tipped between wishful thinking and downright implausibility. It is true that this fact is pointed to by the narrowness of his initial victory, but Bartlet’s biography – the direct descendant of areal-life signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a Nobel Laureat in economics turned two-term governor of New Hampshire – paints the president as the very epitome of a patrician, north-eastern liberal Democrat.
And just how many of those have reached the White House in modern times? The last three Democrat presidents – Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson – were all moderate southerners of humble origins. It’s been over 40 years since a north-eastern Democrat won a presidential election, and Jack Kennedy’s Irish Catholic immigrant background made it difficult for anyone to cast him as an elitist. Not, in fact, since the plain-spoken Missourian, Harry Truman, won in 1948 has a Democrat from outside the south made it to the White House, as the fate of the party’s candidates from Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry can testify.
Of course, the rather more smooth, philandering southerner who Bartlet pipped to the nomination in 1998 and went on to serve as his vice president, John Hoynes, might easily have made it to the Oval Office. But that would have been a case of art imitating life.