“DO WE EVER really get to govern?” asks the naive young U.S. senator of his more experienced chief of staff as they stand on the Washington Mall, staring across the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Monument.
“You do,” she replies. “Sometimes.” She smiles. “And when you do, it makes it all worth it.”
This familiar exchange takes place near the end of the second episode of “Mister Sterling,” a new television series that premiered on January 10. But it could just as easily have been lifted from “The West Wing,” the three-year-old TV show that inspired it, or from any other work of popular art with a Washington setting (save, perhaps, for the 1960s spy parody “Get Smart”). It has all the usual elements–the beautiful pictures of D.C. landmarks, the hushed voices, the gravitas leavened with rueful humor.
Something odd happens whenever Hollywood touches the subject of politics in Washington: Things get gooey. That’s true even in the case of “Mister Sterling,” which is the first television series about D.C. created by a Washington insider. The show’s writer, creator, and executive producer is Lawrence O’Donnell, who was once a senior adviser to Sen. Pat Moynihan and more recently a terrifically sensible talking head on MSNBC and “The McLaughlin Group.”
O’Donnell understands how the Senate works and how Washington works, and there are delightful riffs on both. Sterling arrives in Washington and is met at the Hay-Adams Hotel by a veteran aide who leads him out to the driveway. The new senator sees a limousine parked in front and makes a move toward it, whereupon his aide cuts him off. “Senators don’t get limos,” the horrified aide says, and pushes Sterling into a modest D.C. cab.
Sterling wants to be assigned to the most powerful Senate committees, Appropriations and Finance. He visits the chairmen of the committees and is given the identical tough-guy talking-to by both men in successive scenes: “You never offer an amendment to my bills. You always vote for my bills. And you never surprise me.” When Sterling says he needs $38,000 to pay for a penitentiary teacher, the Finance Committee chairman–who manages billions of dollars a year–has a giggling fit.
A Democratic staffer catches sight of a senator who switched parties two decades earlier and speaks bitterly of the “traitor.” The party-switcher is a Native American (a thinly disguised version of the Senate’s real-life wild man, Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell) who offers Sterling a hit off a peace pipe in his office. That leads Sterling’s terrified staff to wonder whether the stuff in the pipe is peyote and if so, whether smoking it might be legal, given the senator’s Indian heritage.
A kid in charge of the mail insists that he be called the office’s information-management specialist. The kid’s roommate is a gorgeous young researcher for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call who comes across as a combo of real-life NBC correspondent Norah O’Donnell (herself once a Roll Call staffer) and every blonde pundit in a Washington booker’s Rolodex.
That’s the good stuff, and it’s all infinitely truer to the spirit of the Senate than the fantasy presidency on “The West Wing” is to the real White House. But the good stuff must share time and space with the hoariest of pop Washington clichés. We’ve seen several of “Mister Sterling”‘s scenes before, most famously in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra’s 1939 film. Indeed, with “Mister Sterling” O’Donnell has basically updated “Mr. Smith” and thrown in some of the 1972 Robert Redford movie “The Candidate” for good measure.
Just as in Capra’s movie, Mr. Sterling is a young idealist who is appointed senator in an act of raw cynicism by a corrupt governor, and whose honesty and ingenuousness prove threatening to the Washington status quo. Mr. Smith got the job because he saved lives in a forest fire and because his first name, Jefferson, sounds patriotic. Mr. Sterling gets the job because he’s come up with a new way to give prisoners hope through schooling and because he has a famous last name (his father is a former California governor).
Just as in “The Candidate,” Sterling is suffering from some undefined psychological issues relating to his father. Our hero gives a puzzling speech in the second episode about how he never did drugs because he didn’t want to give his father the satisfaction of getting him out of jail.
Mr. Smith is an apolitical worshipper of American greatness. Mr. Sterling is so apolitical that he is actually a registered independent–a fact unknown to the sitting California governor responsible for his appointment, who simply assumes that the elder Sterling’s son must be a Democrat.
This leads to some Jim Jeffords-like hijinks when it transpires that the appointed senator has it in his power to shift control of the Senate to the Republicans. And though Sterling seems like a rube, he manages to outfox the Senate majority leader and those pesky and annoying committee chairmen.
It’s at this point that “Mister Sterling” takes an unfortunate turn into fantasy land. No one like Sterling would ever be appointed senator from any state save Jesse Ventura’s Minnesota, and then only for a few weeks. Certainly, a California governor would do a little more checking up on his choice.
O’Donnell, like every other Hollywoodian who takes on Washington, cannot resist the temptation to create a mythically wonderful figure whose views and ideals happen to dovetail completely with his creator’s. Once a partisan Democrat, O’Donnell now speaks very much like a disaffected independent–as does Sterling. Sterling approves of military tribunals and is open to the notion of digging for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. He opposes the death penalty and is pro-choice.
The fact that these are not party-line views means “Mister Sterling” could prove more interesting as an exploration of political ideas than any other TV series before it. But still, wouldn’t it be exciting if somebody, just once, made a show about a politician who actually loves being a politician–who enjoys raising money and trading votes and glad-handing and haggling with lobbyists–and yet still manages to hold true to his principles most of the time?
Wouldn’t it be fun, for a change, if the villains of these works were less villainous? Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the scene between the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and Mr. Sterling were played in such a way that Sterling came off like a boob and the Appropriations chairman came off like a wise old soul? Wouldn’t it be something if the hero of a Washington movie or TV show were to drive by the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial without giving it a second glance, the way actual Washingtonians do?
Only when a producer has the courage to emerge from the “Mr. Smith” goo will we ever see a work of popular art that engages with the real Washington.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
