As the newly elected president ascended the stage in a blaze of lights and glory, the crowd began to roar. The Democrats had retained control of the White House in a race without suspense, as America rallied to the party of passion and principle, rejecting the bumbling Republican challenger and his "Greco-Roman wrestling matches with the English language." Voters had chosen a president who stood against the death penalty and school vouchers and who defined his fundamental mission as opening "new doors of opportunity and justice" and "ensuring the promised birthright of all the people."
The good guys won. There were good guys in the first place. And America acted as one, embracing justice in a landslide.
Boy, I love TV.
Election day came Wednesday on NBC's The West Wing -- and not a day too soon. The results, of course, diverged sharply from those of the real-life elections, in which disillusioned Democrats stayed home and energized Republicans embraced the vision of a party led by, well, a bumbling president with a penchant for Greco-Roman wrestling matches with the English language.
So we liberals had to take refuge, as we have frequently during the last two years, in the world of The West Wing. But now there is a twist: The West Wing, we learned several weeks ago, has been busily losing its own weekly elections, known in television as ratings. Since September, when The West Wing won the Emmy for best drama, the show's audience has decreased by more than 20 percent. Among young women, the losses are closer to 30 percent. It is true that hardcore liberals still love the show and probably always will. But The West Wing has always managed to reach a broader range of Americans than the relatively small percent who consider themselves progressive political wonks. No one knows for sure why so many viewers have stopped tuning in, but here's one guess: The West Wing is losing its wider audience for exactly the same reason the Democrats lost Tuesday's election.
The show's creative mastermind, Aaron Sorkin, apparently constructed this season as a critique of the "demonization of intellect" in American society, as he recently told Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly. "Being tagged as the smartest kid in your class turns into both a sense of arrogance and a sense of weakness -- that an 'egghead' [can't] see us through a world war," Sorkin said. But instead of an abstract argument promoting intelligence as a virtue, each episode has become a scathing critique of the Bush administration as a cult of stupidity -- despite Sorkin's rather unconvincing protests that the show's Republican presidential candidate was not modeled after a specific contemporary politician.
And therein lies the problem: In the past, Republican and Democratic viewers alike could identify with the White House of Jed Bartlett even though they may have disagreed with some of its policy decisions. The sincere commitment to creating a stronger, healthier democracy displayed by Bartlett and his senior staff -- not to mention their effective melding of idealism and politics -- resonated with everyone's better instincts. It was pleasant fiction for all. Though the show was unabashedly liberal -- and staked out controversial positions, on issues such as the death penalty, that even some real-life progressives shrink from -- everyone could find inspiration in the fictional administration's independent and cohesive worldview. Whether you agreed with it or not, the Bartlett vision could be the basis for discussion. And it was a robustly affirmative vision of what America could be and how it could get there, as opposed to a vision based on criticizing or aping or tweaking someone else's agenda.
But in declaring war this season on the "demonization of intellect" in America -- code for declaring war on George W. Bush -- Sorkin has fallen into the same trap that also snared the Democratic party this past Tuesday: He and his fictional creations have begun defining their political agendas in terms of Bush. Of course, real-life Democrats may have hastened to align themselves with Bush -- on issues such as Iraq and even the tax cut -- while Sorkin has bent over backward to create distance. But in the end, the problems with this approach are the same: Bush has put the issues -- the importance of intelligence and passion for the presidency, the appropriate response to foreign threats -- on the table, and Democrats have fallen over themselves to respond. Like children stamping their feet to be heard, they have mimicked or rejected the positions of Republicans in a vain search for approval, too timid to strike out on their own. I think we should go to war with Iraq, too! Criticism is not the same as anti-patriotism! Intelligence is important! Stamp, stamp, stamp.
To be sure, the fact that the Republicans control the real-world White House gives them an advantage in setting the agenda, both in actual politics and in the world of fiction. But it need not be that way. In 1994, for instance, the Newt Gingrich-led Republicans succeeded in hijacking the national agenda even though a Democrat was in the White House. Now the Democrats will spend the coming weeks and months debating whether their new agenda should be liberal or centrist. But in the end, whatever it is, it must be bold and affirmative. And above all, it must be more than a mere response to the frat boy in the White House. If an agenda based solely on being the opposite of Bush isn't enough to keep a TV show's ratings afloat, surely it isn't going to be enough to propel the real-life Democrats back to the real-life West Wing. All of which will leave out-of-power liberals no option but to tune to NBC every Wednesday at 9 p.m. and take comfort in a fantasy world where being an anti-Bush is enough. In the real world, as Democrats learned this week, it's not.
