I could never really believe that the Bartlet administration was anything like the real thing would ever be, IYKWIM. Like, I thought it was a way of examining certain political stories but it always felt very…unreal, to me, IDK...
From what I understand, it got the dynamics of the West Wing as a workplace very accurately? There were a lot of Clinton Adminstration people who were consultants on the show. But in terms of what decisions they made, how they made those decisions, how those decisions were received by Congress and the public....unreal for a lot of reasons.
It's always a fascinating question, who's suited for that kind of job and who isn't…and it's often not the person who looks most ideal on paper, heh.
Yeah, that's probably a big part of the issue with The West Wing not necessarily ringing true, was that Bartlet is very much a perfect-on-paper president. He's a genius! He's a Not-A-Politician politician! His family still carries the last name of one of our original patriarchs! And that was actually a fantasy that scratched a particular itch during the Bush years, I don't want to dismiss that, but it came with narrative limitations, too.
From what I understand, it got the dynamics of the West Wing as a workplace very accurately? There were a lot of Clinton Adminstration people who were consultants on the show. But in terms of what decisions they made, how they made those decisions, how those decisions were received by Congress and the public....unreal for a lot of reasons.
It's always a fascinating question, who's suited for that kind of job and who isn't…and it's often not the person who looks most ideal on paper, heh.
Yeah, that's probably a big part of the issue with The West Wing not necessarily ringing true, was that Bartlet is very much a perfect-on-paper president. He's a genius! He's a Not-A-Politician politician! His family still carries the last name of one of our original patriarchs! And that was actually a fantasy that scratched a particular itch during the Bush years, I don't want to dismiss that, but it came with narrative limitations, too.
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