The West Wing

Conclusion: “We Had It Good There for a While”: The West Wing Legacy

Conclusion “We Had It Good There for a While” The West Wing Legacy 115 Even a show as successful and as groundbreaking as The West Wing runs its course. Viewers defected, ratings slid, and a principal actor unexpectedly died before NBC decided to call time on the beltway drama. Thus President-Elect Matthew Santos took the presidential oath, and President Josiah Bartlet left office and returned to his New Hampshire farm for the last time on Sunday, 14 May 2006, at 9:00 PM. With the single word “Tomorrow,” the series completed its seven-year run on NBC. The West Wing remains unique. It is a landmark television show precisely because nothing else quite like it exists—then as now. In 2005, ABC debuted Commander in Chief, starring Geena Davis as MacKenzie Allen, America’s first female president. But the series went the way of other political dramas. It had a tough time finding an audience, and, with stories mired in the sewer of slimy Washington ambition, it was canceled after only one season. Politics on television returned to where it began, as real news or the subject of TV satirists. American politics operates in a highly mediated realm, where celebrity culture collides with the political and where television satire (particularly on cable, where it has flourished) seems better able to provide insight. It may seem a far cry from those early days of The West Wing 01 McCabe text.indd 115 9/12/12 9:22 AM 116 Conclusion and its soaring rhetoric that spoke of America’s highest ideals of democracy, but TV satire like The Daily Show shares similar broader ambitions to stimulate a lively civic culture. I started researching this book at the very moment when the 2008 presidential campaign started to ignite genuine excitement . When The West Wing concluded its run in 2006, it did so before a hotly contested presidential campaign between an aging maverick Republican senator from a western state and a Democratic African American outsider. Looking back, the show somehow prophetically predicted the real political contest only two years away. Just as President Bartlet, and later Representative Santos, seduced viewers with oratory of uplift, urgency, and unity, so did a young mixed-race senator from Illinois with his promise to heal a divided, post–civil rights, post-9/11 America. Barack Obama tapped into that side of the nation that sees itself as idealistic and inspirational, a side that for seven years The West Wing never stopped talking about. And then there was Arnold Vinick. Never conservative enough for the Republican base, the fictional senator from California fought not only for the presidency but for the very soul of his party. Like that of Senator John McCain, Vinick’s legacy seemed to be that of kingmaker to an obscure socially conservative governor able to energize the party base in ways that he could never hope to do (“Institutional Memory,” 7:21). However, the fictional West Virginia governor Ray Sullivan (Brett Cullen) always seemed more plausible than the real-life forty-four-year-old mother of five from Alaska. It did not take long after McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, to the bewilderment of political observers everywhere, for her to start dominating the headlines with stories involving abuses of power and an unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter five months pregnant by her high school boyfriend. The Republican PR machinery sprang into action, turning an unplanned teen pregnancy into a political testimony of Palin’s pro-life convictions . As U.K. journalist Jonathan Freedland shrewdly ob01 McCabe text.indd 116 9/12/12 9:22 AM 117 Conclusion served, “A race that began as The West Wing now looks alarmingly like Desperate Housewives” (2008, 27). It may have been just another day in the polarized and partisan life of Palin, but it reminds us of what The West Wing never let us forget: namely, America remains deeply embroiled in its culture wars. Michael Wolff claimed that “The West Wing could well earn a historic place in the reinvention of political culture” (2000, 44). Of course the victory of Obama at the ballot box took decades to cultivate, beginning with the legacy of civil rights. But somehow The West Wing paved the way for how we have come to read the machinations of political power, as well as how we expect our politics to “look” and sound. Nancy Franklin said...