Presidentilal reality is even beter than the very good fictionalized one.
Writers have always known that pomp and ceremony and court intrigue are sure fire winners. There was King Priam of Troy and King David of Israel and all those Shakespeare Plantagenets and assorted other princes, like Hamlet. In modern dress are “Dune” and “The Crown”, “Game of Thrones” and, my favorite, “The West Wing”. What they all have in common is that accomplished people in comfortable settings get to be punctilious in their decorum until those are interrupted and maneuver with high degrees of cleverness to achieve their high or dastardly ends. It is true that the residents of those worlds face tragedy and defeat but it is fun to think for a while to be involved in such elevated things. These are phantasies while ordinary life is for plumbers and dentists. Oh, if I were that clever and so cozened in materiality and did something important while strutting on the stage! “The West Wing”, complete with highlights and sadness, has a very vivid sense of the majesty of surrounding the office of President because so many of the writers and advisors were people who had worked in the Clinton White House or with near adjacent Presidents and knew how it worked and so provided a somewhat realistic view of very high office even if I still think dubious that people in the West Wing bustle about quite so quickly. Let us just write that off as an image of just how harried and overwhelmed people in the West Wing would be about their responsibilities
There is much pomp and ceremony in “The West Wing”. People address their leader as “Mr. President” or “The President” whether or not he is present. People have heated discussions but never raise their voices or curse in his presence. When the President dismisses people from his presence, they say “Thank you, sir”. Every so often, the high level staff aides speak of their loyalty to him and that they serve at his pleasure. Even short trips are enveloped with large motorcades and if he walks down Pennsylvania Avenue the sharpshooters who accompany him are redeployed. The staffers fly the luxurious accommodations of Air Force One and get dressed up to go to elaborate balls and are assembled to hear in the White House world class musicians and eat gourmet meals.
The ticket for entrance into this elite circle of courtiers is the cost in divorce, strained family relations, girlfriends and boyfriends who have to be encountered on the fly and forever subject to the demands of the work. Entrance is also fiercely meritocratic. Staff members are able to know in their memories details of legislation and all the nuances of policy and policy negotiations as well as which member of the House of Representatives is;leaving for the weekend or is ailling as well as have a sound grounding in American and world history. Everyone is familiar with Gilbert and Sullivan. Story lines work in that the senior staff members have fancy Ivy League college degrees and prestige law degrees. They can be nerdy or awkward but are super competent, capable of running the free world, and having been anointed to do so. Oh how wonderful to be in this charmed circle, to be so overly adequate, despite the miseries of the heavy responsibilities! It is a dream to be in that fantasy world for a little while, though it would be quickly exhausting and overwhelming in real life.
The issues dealt with in the West Wing during the Clinton years seem many to be the same as concern the nation today. There is a need to manage the Arab Israeli conflict and to manage Arab terrorism and guide Arab countries to democracy. Hostie enemies engage in recurrent attacks. Domestically, Republicans and Democrats vie on gun control, climate change, taxes up or down, more or less entitlements, including social security, the war on crime and drugs,and openness or not to immigration. But leaders in both parties are patriotic and principled even if distrusting the principles of the other party.
The difference from that time to this is the status of women. Though there are some high positions for women, such as a woman national security advisor and a woman press secretary, the top places are men while very able women serve as secretaries and assistants, carrying out the duties of male made directives. People in the West Wing are liberated in that 6hey can have a variety of arrangements. The President is loyal to his wife; the chief of staff gets divorced because of the pressure of his work. The deputy chief of staff and his assistant are devoted to one another but do not think of themselves in love but everybody around them knows otherwise. Women can have multiple sequential boy friends without being considered sluts, the practices very different from thirty years before when Mary Richards in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was secretive about not being a virgin and was quite adventurous in having a boyfriend whose only virtue was that he was sexy. However the appearance in “The West Wing” of new or sometimes recurring romantic interests may less be a comment on evolving sexual mores than an artifact of a long lasting tv series: new people arrive or reappear so as to make the series fresh, a recognizable figure showing up for a few episodes so as to show off their personalities. There is in the air, though, of a definite time and place in that “The West Wing” still has a tinge of third generation feminism in that women assert themselves as “stiletto” feminists in that they assert being feminine and attractive rather than as Bluestockings and the President admires the women around him as somehow remarkable for them being that, just like the men. There is no racism or antisemitism in the mixed White House staff.
When I first saw “The West Wing” as a weekly episode, I was impressed by how effective the Jed Bartlet Presidency was in its conduct of business, people informed and decisive in their decision making despite the setbacks that come from divided government, as also the case in the real Clinton Administration. In my present second binging of the entire seven year run, I note how much the Bartlet Presidency is presented as a failure, as is true in most Presidencies, in that so little is accomplished or moved forward despite all the grunting and maneuvering. American politics are deadlocked and can’t resolve major problems. That is clear in a pivotal episode which most clearly is a roman a clef, which portrays Clinton and Newt Gingrich closing down the Government because of their inability to arrive at a budget. The TV show presents the resolution as a matter of public relations, some deft television presenting the President’s case and the public deciding to blame the Republicans rather than the Democrats for the shutdown, and that may have indeed been the case in real life, even if a bit simplified, though the episode was detailed enough to have appear a volunteer interne who brought in pizza during the shutdown, which did happen, the woman seeming somewhat dubious, the Monica Lewinski introduced into the West Wing, a danger averted by the distaste of the staff for her, while the Jeb Bartlet flaw and scandal is that he has to admit he suffers muscular dystrophy that was undisclosed and caused considerable political damage.
That episode, I thought, was even more powerful than the previous three episodes where Bartlet’s youngest daughter is kidnapped by terrorists and too far fetched when Bartlett temporarily cedes his office to a patriotic Conservative Speaker of the House so the temporary President can manage the crisis cooly, accompanied as these events are with motorcades and a flourishing of pens to invoke and then rescind the 25th Amendment, as well as poignant moments of a father distressed over his daughter’s possible fate. It struck me that a President would soldier on in his duties just as Henry Fonda does in “Fail Safe” where he has to take a nuclear hit on New York to counter a rogue US attack on Moscow even though his own wife, the First Lady, was in New York at the time. But Henry Fonda was calm and clear headed as a President, and maybe those were more reliable times.
Actually, the Clinton Presidency, in real life, was pretty successful, despite Monica, especially in foreign policy.. He tag teamed with his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whereby she moved the borders of NATO to the borders of what had been the Soviet Union, expanding NATO to the Baltic region, knowing that Russia would eventually stabilize itself and face off with the United States and Europe, while Clintfon smoothed Yelsin’s feathers, telling him it would be all right. Clinton also tried to limit the fallout of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, another border area in turmoil out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and insisted on stopping the concentration camps in Bosnia, the first since the Second World War, even if it required bombing Belgrade. Clinton arranged the North American Trade Alliance so as to have goods move freely between Canada, Mexico and the United States for their mutual prosperity until the present day when Trump threatens to scuttle it by imposing tariffs. And Clinton was within an inch of getting a two state solution at Camp David but Arafat could not say yes, perhaps because he might well have been assassinated if he had agreed to it. And Clinton’s capacity to find a middle ground brought fruit in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military as a temporary bridge to full acceptance of gays. Another temporizing phrase by Clinton had to do with abortion. He thought that it be “legal, safe and rare”, a formula I still think makes sense though the nation has moved past that to a categorical view that there are either reproductive rights or on the other hand a fertilized egg to be treated as a human being. Clinton also failed at creating general health insurance but Obama picked it up, correcting its top down bias for a conservative plan, Obamacare, that protected insurance companies, and so got large coverage in an expensive way. Clinton also got three balanced budgets and no President did so since. Not bad for the advantages of triangulation. A lot got done for a Centrist but very talented President.
Something happened, though, right after Clinton, and I don’t mean the primal force that overcame the nation when Trump entered the picture but rather one indicated by a recent chart that shows the ratio of national debt to GDP had gone up to where it now rivals the amount of debt that the United States faced just after World War II when the expenditures of the War were put on tabs and decreased as a result of inflation and the size of the national debt had been low in the Seventies through the Nineties even though Conservatives thought otherwise. What accounts for that rise? There were twelve years of Republican rule in that quarter century and twelve years of Democratic rule and so it is not a partisan issue. It could be blamed on the ever increasing costs of Social Security and Medicare, but Social Security, at least, could be easily controlled by raising the caps on the Social Security tax from its present $140,000 a year income limit by a little bit. A more serious critique is that the government has not been able to take care of business because of gridlock resulting from closely divided Congress and so the Clinton negotiations could not get much advanced, Obama able to squeeze out Obamacare and Biden on infrastructure. Trump may upset the applecart and maybe a radical response to his excesses may lead to a Democratic Administration able to manage long lingering domestic and foreign problems. I am ever the optimist.