The Liberal Imagination

This mildly successful show premiered last fall, but in the past month it has caught fire in the press, with cover stories in major magazines and articles in major newspapers. This is as it should be, because the media are liberal and The West Wing is an escapist fantasy for them. Creator and writer Aaron Sorkin has modeled his series on the glamorous early years of the Clinton White House. Nearly every character in The West Wing has a real-life parallel from Clinton’s first term — Rob Lowe as George Stephanopoulos, Bradley Whitford as Paul Begala, Allison Janney as Dee Dee Myers, Richard Schiff as Gene Sperling, and Moira Kelly as Mandy Grunwald.

But the central character, the president himself, is nothing like the real man. And there’s a good reason for that. The West Wing, you see, is nothing more or less than political pornography for liberals — made up of equal parts unrequited longing for and rage at Hollywood’s not-so-obscure object of desire, William Jefferson Clinton.

There’s been a lot of talk about how meticulous Sorkin and team have been in recreating the charged atmosphere of the White House. But that’s a lot of nonsense, given that you never see anybody in The West Wing on the telephone or in tedious meetings — which is how real White House aides spend their days and nights. Instead, it’s full of endless shots of people walking down corridors, around corners, into offices and out of offices, all of which conveys a sense of terrible urgency. Exactly the same sort of urgency is on display in Sorkin’s other show, the sitcom Sports Night, which is set in the offices of a cable television program.

The show’s fans concede that some of the atmospherics are wrong — for instance, that the glamorous working quarters depicted are far larger than the tiny spaces and narrow hallways of the real West Wing. Still, they say, The West Wing succeeds in speaking deep truths about politics and the people who work in politics. Former Clinton administration official Matthew Miller, in a cover story for Brill’s Content titled “The Real White House,” claims that the show “presents a truer, more human picture of the people behind the headlines than most of today’s Washington journalists.” Mike McCurry, Clinton’s ex-press secretary, told Miller he watches The West Wing because it treats “those who work in politics . . . as human beings.”

Human beings? These characters aren’t human beings — they’re noble soldiers in a noble cause, and they have been washed clean of every impurity because of it. The West Wing makes Miller, McCurry, and others like them into American heroes. Sorkin’s staffers are wonderful in almost every possible way — or at least in ways that Hollywood considers wonderful. On the first episode, the George Stephanopoulos character picks up a woman at a bar, goes home with her, and later discovers she is a high-priced call girl. Rather than fleeing in fear for his job and the reputation of his administration, he spends the rest of the season trying to save her. When the press starts to sniff around the call-girl story, the Dee Dee Myers character expresses outrage — not at her colleague’s irresponsibility, but at this intrusion into his private life. And when she gives a lecture to the reporter who loves her, he agrees to stifle the story.

Meanwhile, the Paul Begala character gets into a fight on a Crossfire-type show with an officious minister from the Christian Coalition — because our Lochinvar is so honest he can’t abide the supposed hypocrisy of a minister who opposes abortion and supports the death penalty. (Later, the pastor reveals he is not only an anti-Semite but so ignorant he doesn’t know “Thou shalt not kill” is the sixth of the Ten Commandments.)

There are no staff conflicts of any consequence in Sorkin’s West Wing, no turf battles between these White House aides. They love each other, admire each other, support each other. No one is hungry for power, perks, or privilege. No one is motivated by ambition, anger, resentment, fear, or the hunger to run other people’s lives. There’s not even a stock villain or a comic foil with such ambitions and hungers. No, the characters have come to save America and the world.

And if you think they’re wonderful, just wait until you meet the president. The occupant of Sorkin’s Oval Office is an immensely thoughtful, infinitely wise, deeply caring, thoroughly monogamous, and unambiguously principled Nobel-Prize-winning economist (yes, Nobel-Prize-winning economist) named Josiah Bartlet — an appellation worthy of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Bartlet means nothing but well. This is not a president whose conduct forces his aides to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars they don’t have on personal defense lawyers. There’s no Monica Lewinsky, no Kathleen Willey, no four-way phone-sex call with Dick Morris, no bouts of foul temper, no jokes about dating the mummified corpse of a 14-year-old Inca girl. In the Bartlet White House, you’re not even allowed to curse. (“This is the White House, Seymour, not the Jersey Turnpike,” the chief of staff says to a profane visitor. “Watch your mouth.”)

Bartlet makes chili for his staff, and boy, is it good. He plays poker with them. He feels his staffers’ pain, each and every one of them. Concerned that his young African-American assistant isn’t having enough fun, the president insists that the Paul Begala character take the kid out for a drink in Georgetown. “The man’s like a camp counselor,” the Begala character protests, but you know he loves the Big Guy.

His advisers do fret about the political consequences of various hot topics — but not Bartlet, who has yet to do a single thing wrong. He is good-humored, but also full of righteous anger. After an antiabortion group threatens his teenage daughter, he tells the Christian Coalition minister and his lackeys: “You’ll denounce the Lambs of God and until you do, get your fat asses out of my office.”

When trucking companies and Teamster officials won’t compromise on a new contract, he informs them that at 12:01 A.M., “I’m using my powers to nationalize the trucking industry.” He gets them to negotiate by saying, “Talk to me for five minutes apiece and we’re going to settle this. Remain standing.” And doggone it if they don’t make a deal.

Bartlet is tough too. After his doctor is killed in a Syrian terrorist attack in Lebanon, he vows to strike back “with the fury of God’s own thunder.” His anger is so pure that his chief of staff must talk him down into an unsatisfying “proportionate response” — and his willingness to control his righteous anger is yet another mark of his greatness as a man and a president. Bartlet’s loving wife tells him he has “a big brain, a good heart, and an ego the size of Montana. . . . You don’t have the power to fix everything, but I do like watching you try.”

For reasons known only to himself, Sorkin firmly denies that his show has a leftward bent. “I would disagree this is a liberal show,” he told Entertainment Weekly. Why? Well, Bartlet wanted to bomb Syria, which isn’t a very liberal thing to do, and “we know now he’s not particularly vocal about gay rights.”

Referring to the didactic but speedy debates that take place on the show about such scintillating matters as census sampling and human-rights violations in Indonesia, co-producer John Wells told Matthew Miller, “Nothing goes into the show without a full pro and con.” Wells did admit there are no two sides of the issue when it comes to gun control — “I don’t think any of us really believes in the other side of the argument very much,” he said. But in the end, that’s the case with every political debate on The West Wing. The liberal argument always, always, always prevails.

If the same had been true inside the Clinton White House in its first term, there wouldn’t have been a second term. But that’s the pornographic appeal of The West Wing to liberals. The unholy fantasy of it!

Bill Clinton must have seemed like a fantasy come true back in 1991, when he and Hollywood began their long and rocky romance. The Arkansas governor wowed the biggest names in Tinseltown with his comprehensive knowledge of popular culture. So what if he called himself a “new Democrat,” supported the death penalty, and talked about welfare reform? He surely didn’t believe all that right-wing stuff, he was only saying it to win, and Hollywood was hungry for a Democrat in the White House. Showbiz titans raised huge sums of money for him, with Barbra Streisand alone pulling in a cool $ 1 million; she even sang at his inauguration despite her notorious stage fright.

Remember that inauguration, a meticulously planned three-day function intended to suggest that a newer, younger, hipper, and more culturally aware generation was finally taking charge of America? Streisand serenaded Clinton with “Some Enchanted Evening.” Michael Jackson, not yet the subject of pedophilia allegations settled out of court, was surrounded by little boys as he sang “Heal the World.” Fleetwood Mac, the 1970s California-pop supergroup, reunited to sing the campaign anthem, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” Easy-listening, boomer-style, was represented by the saxophonist Kenny G (who was said to be Clinton’s favorite musician, in case you were wondering whether the pop-culture-crazed president’s taste for pop culture is any more elevated than his taste in women).

Bit speaking parts were handed out by the dozens to Goldie Hawn and Sally Field and Geena Davis. Throughout the inaugural festivities, Warren and Annette, Barry Manilow and Macaulay Culkin, Cosby and Nicholson wandered around Washington as though they were the American army liberating Paris.

Yes, it seemed a new era had dawned. (For 12 years the only song performed at Republican functions had been Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”) And though Clinton had run as a moderate, in those heady early days he gave every indication that he was going to govern farther to the left. The Hollywood elite thought it had died and gone to heaven when the first major issue to arise in the Clinton administration was the president’s wish to end the ban on gays in the military. None of them had actually been in the armed forces — though most of them had produced or written or starred in or directed movies in which American military men were villains — but they sure knew a lot of gays. Or were gay themselves. And they thought they had a true friend in the White House.

The Lincoln Bedroom, not yet up for sale on a nightly basis, was a home away from home for Clinton’s earliest and closest Hollywood intimates — like sitcom producers Linda and Harry Bloodworth-Thomason and actress Markie Post, the star of the Bloodworth-Thomason program Hearts Afire. So many celebrities were traipsing through the White House that a starstruck Paul Begala kept a camcorder handy to record their presence. In April 1993, when Clinton was in Vancouver for a summit with Boris Yeltsin, he stayed up late with Sharon Stone and Richard Gere in Richard Dreyfuss’s hotel room — and, according to W magazine, he “briefed” celebrities “on how they could help him ‘rebuild America.'” This, confesses George Stephanopoulos in his memoir, All Too Human, “inevitably and justifiably led to clucks in the press for hobnobbing with Hollywood stars at a super-power summit.”

Trouble in paradise! Around the same time as the president’s consultation with Sharon Stone, a gaggle of Clinton contributors from Hollywood were invited to the White House to share their ideas on how to promote health care reform with Hillary Clinton’s task-force chairman Ira Magaziner and James Carville, among others. There were several emperors of Hollywood around the table in the Roosevelt Room — most prominently TriStar Pictures chief Mike Medavoy and MCA president Sidney Sheinberg.

These were men accustomed to being listened to, sucked up to, having their every idea praised, their every whim satisfied. But it was not to be, because in the middle of the meeting, Carville lost it. He hurled imprecations at them for being rich dilettantes with no sense of the true woes of middle-class folk, using the language of the Jersey Turnpike. No one had ever said such things to these people — at least not since they were in the mailroom sucking up to the abusive superiors they would soon dethrone.

Carville behaved like “Anthony Perkins playing Fidel Castro on acid,” said sitcom producer Gary David Goldberg, who hurled his notes at Carville and shouted, “How dare you speak to us this way?” After all, he and the others had been invited — and had flown to Washington on their own dime! They were a task force! Besides which, Goldberg said, his mother had “died because she didn’t have adequate health care”! (Goldberg had made $ 100 million from the syndication sales of his show Family Ties.)

The administration put out word that Carville was in the doghouse for his behavior, but the truth was very nearly the opposite. There was a method to Carville’s madness, as there always is. The Clinton administration’s intimacy with Hollywood had become a political liability for a New Democrat who claimed to be a spokesman for culturally conservative values and not the knee-jerk limousine liberalism of the Hollywood elite. Clinton was close to seeming like a starstruck swain, not the Leader of the Free World, and Carville provided his president the cover to keep his distance. This became especially important after the May 1993 flap on the tarmac of Los Angeles International Airport, when Clinton was said to have held up air traffic for 90 minutes by having his hair cut by coiffeur-to-the-stars Christophe on Air Force One.

Clinton avoided Hollywood for months, until December 1993, when he attended a fund-raiser at the headquarters of Creative Artists Agency, then the most powerful institution in Hollywood. Barbra sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” to him. Then, after pocketing $ 250,000 in soft money, Clinton pulled a Sister Souljah by challenging Hollywood executives to consider the impact their mindlessly violent films and television shows were having on innocent children.

They initially swooned. “He’s like a prophet because he speaks completely from the heart,” said producer Brian Grazer. Echoed Mark Canton, then head of Columbia Pictures: “I’m going to really take Sunday to put things in perspective.” But there was a certain irritation in the room. Screenwriter Gary Ross complained that Hollywood had been unfairly “whacked by the media” in the first months of the Clinton administration. And director Rob Reiner told the Washington Post, “I do think it’s a little simplistic to say there’s a cause and effect between TV and movies and violence.”

At the time, Reiner was preparing to film a romantic comedy about a widowed president and his new love, with Aaron Sorkin as his screenwriter. The American President, which came out in 1995, features a Clinton-like Michael Douglas whose pragmatic politics have succeeded in getting him high approval ratings — but have made him a cautious and tentative leader. Through the love of environmental lobbyist Annette Bening, Douglas casts aside his centrism. He delivers a speech to a rapt press corps in which he says he will seek legislation to ban the ownership of all guns, proudly declares himself a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and says he will end global warming. The message to Clinton from Reiner, Sorkin, and the Hollywood they represented was unmistakable: Don’t be you. Be this man.

The problem is that Clinton was that man, or as close to it as any president was likely to come, in his first two years in office. And it nearly destroyed him. His advocacy of gays in the military led to an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Colin Powell and Sam Nunn. Rather than offering the middle-class tax cut he had promised during the campaign, he pushed a significant tax increase through Congress. He saw to the passage of the Brady Bill forcing a waiting period before the purchase of a handgun. Most impressively, he advocated nationalizing one-seventh of the U.S. economy with his health care plan.

And in November 1994, the Republican party ran over Clinton and the Democrats with a steamroller.

To save himself and his party, Clinton was forced to move to the right — in part with his aggressive support of the V-chip, a piece of equipment that allows parents to screen television shows they consider harmful for their children. Hollywood hated the V-chip with an anger both self-righteous (threat to free speech) and fearful (would harm ratings, lower profits). But again, Hollywood embraced Clinton. How could it not? What choice did it have? Well, it could have decided not to lift a finger for him, which is what Silicon Valley decided after Clinton’s first term. But Hollywood felt itself under assault from Clinton’s enemies. Newt Gingrich was on the prowl — Newt Gingrich, the enemy of all things progressive, the man who said that the revered actor-filmmaker Woody Allen’s affair with his teenage stepdaughter “fit the Democratic platform perfectly”! And Bob Dole delivered a much-discussed speech in 1995 condemning the entertainment industry for making movies and television shows of which he disapproved (though he had never seen any of them).

Never mind the V-chip, and forget Hollywood’s disappointment with what it took to be Clinton’s obstinate refusal to rule the way Rob Reiner would. Clinton raised something like $ 10 million in hard and soft money in Hollywood in 1996 — by far the most lucrative fund-raising he did, if you leave out the Chinese Army.

Hollywood seemed to have come to a new, more sober understanding of Bill Clinton. He wanted to be one of them, but couldn’t be, not really, not with the country the way it was. Then came Monica, a scandal that was immensely confusing for the showbiz elite, who work in an industry where sexual harassment is a behavioral norm. He had sex with an intern? And the problem is . . . what could be the problem with that? “When it comes to private matters,” producer Sean Daniel said at the time, “Hollywood has made its peace with are more scandalous behavior.”

It’s also an industry where conspiracies are the norm and where the top dogs have achieved greatness by plotting against others. This is one of the reasons why political conspiracy movies are so popular and taken so seriously within the Hollywood community — because they assume everybody else schemes the way they do. Hillary Clinton’s charge that the entire business was a right-wing conspiracy made perfect sense to them.

Once again the wolves were at the door — this time led by Kenneth Starr. “Starr should be tried for treason,” cried Haim Saban, the creator of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, who raised $ 1.5 million for Clinton in a single night at his house in September 1997. Clinton needed Hollywood and Hollywood delivered. “There’s no decline in support,” said the octogenarian eminence grise Lew Wasserman. Far from it, in fact. For what Clinton pulled off in the wake of the Lewinsky business was a Washington version of a beloved Hollywood dream-come-true — the critic-proof hit. No matter how bad his press, no matter how many pundits and columnists said he was finished, Clinton’s approval ratings just kept on climbing.

Once again, Clinton had proved himself a winner, and Hollywood, as we’ve said, loves a winner. But after Clinton triumphed over his impeachers — and over the departed Newt Gingrich and the defeated Bob Dole — what was left of his presidency for his most reliable donors and friends? He wasn’t going to pursue the agenda Hollywood was so enthusiastic about. Even in the arena of gun control, Clinton’s not-so-ringing rhetoric about “closing the critical gun-show loophole” doesn’t have the pizzazz of Michael Douglas’s plan in The American President to ban all guns.

In fact, it didn’t look like he was going to pursue much of anything except Al Gore’s election in the year 2000 — and while Hollywood has gotten over Clinton’s advocacy of the V-chip, it still hasn’t quite forgiven Gore for his wife Tipper’s crusade against dirty song lyrics back in the 1980s. That’s why the entertainment industry split down the middle in 1999, half for Gore, half for Bill Bradley.

And really, when you come down to it, what has Clinton done for Hollywood aside from collecting tens of millions of dollars there? He saved the elite from the neo-Victorian monsters of the Republican party, but precious little else. The Camelot-like “brief shining moment” that began with gays in the military and ended with the haircut on the tarmac must evoke a mix of feelings inside the Hollywood breast — nostalgic reverie for what might have been and bitter disappointment in what was.

Enter Aaron Sorkin. “Sorkin is not cynical,” Matthew Miller writes, and “by the seemingly innocuous act of portraying politicians with empathy, The West Wing has injected into the culture a subversive competitor to the reigning values of political journalism.” But the show has no empathy for real politicians and their lackeys, only for fictional ones and their Knights of the Round Table. Sorkin wants to portray an elevated, spiritually superior White House in The West Wing, and too much has happened in the past seven years to make that a possibility with a character like Bill Clinton at the center.

And so Sorkin has taken the story of the Clinton White House and eliminated what he sees as its most troubling aspect. Sorkin has airbrushed Clinton from his own White House as crudely as Stalin airbrushed those he had killed from official Soviet photographs, and in his place has superimposed a paragon of virtue so unsullied by the wear and tear of politics that Parson Weems himself might feel a little abashed.

Republicans tried to impeach Clinton, and failed. The enthusiasm for The West Wing among liberals suggests that they have a fate in store for Clinton more horrifying than this legacy-obsessed president could have imagined in the depths of his troubles back in 1998: They are going to spend the rest of their lives erasing him and the support they gave him from their minds — and the nation’s.

Contributing editor John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.