Political theatre in the West Wing

Julian Thomas Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology

Broadcast on Lingua Franca, ABC Radio National, 5 May 2007

EXTRACT 1

SAWYER How many jobs would you create in your first term, Senator?

VINICK None.

The audience again reacts in awe.

VINICK In fact, I'll cut jobs. I will reduce the number of jobs in the federal government. Now I know I'm supposed to tell you that my tax cuts are supposed to stimulate the economy and therefore create jobs. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Business creates jobs. The President's job is to get out of the way.

SANTOS Do you want a President who will get out of their way when corrupt executives are plundering a company like Enron?

VINICK Hey, I'll go after corporate crime. My running mate, Ray Sullivan, was very tough on white-collar crime when he was a prosecutor and my Attorney General will be just as tough.

SANTOS Do you want a President who will get out of the way when airline executives are putting their companies into bankruptcy so that they can avoid the pension responsibilities to the workers that have dedicated their lives to those companies?

VINICK Some of our older airlines are having trouble meeting their huge pension obligations at the very same time when they're facing intense competition from low- cost airlines that are so new they don't yet have pensions to pay. Now, an unthinking liberal will describe the airline bankruptcies as the evil capitalists screwing the workers.

SANTOS I didn't say that Senator and I don't think you should put words in my mouth.

1

VINICK No. Of course you didn't say it. You're not an unthinking liberal. Are you?

The television drama of the West Wing is over, but as the tempo of Australian political life increases in the run up to an election, the programme has a few things to say to Australian audiences. If the show’s appeal to thinking liberals was partly about revealing an imaginary alternative world of American politics — the Clinton administration without the sleaze, the post-9/11 challenge managed prudently — then in this country it has also played as a set of ideas about political culture and what it might be.

That educated eloquence, that sassy, smart dialogue, takes us back to the verbal comedy of Howard Hawks, but it says also that politics should be worthy, a serious, intelligent form of public service – an idea still a little startling to Australian citizens, who are more accustomed to seeing political figures as rogues or hacks. Challenging also is the central role of the West Wing’s political game. The complexity and sophistication of the numbers business says that here everything is contestable, that everything is at stake. Then there is the show’s deep respect for the rituals, occasions and symbols of office. Here is a rich civic code that can draw a nation together. In the Australian political scene rituals such as those surrounding the White House are elusive. The residence itself, a sacred space in the series, has no analogue here, where our Prime Minister has moved his principal home from the nation’s capital to its largest city.

And there is also that special value the main characters place on the nation’s founding text, the constitution. Here is a political world of rights and freedoms and underlying principles, where the arguments about them deeply matter. One of President Bartlett’s final acts is to give his father’s copy of the constitution to his aide Charlie, who is off to study law; while Toby the communications director, facing jail for divulging military secrets, is obsessed with finding a misprinted comma in the same text.

The West Wing is very much about political communication. It’s not the media messages themselves that are the focus, but how the characters arrive at them, through refined argument, where rhetorical skills count: the ability to make a point quickly and directly; to present the succinct, convincing detail; the ability to summarise and personalise an issue, to make it part of a story; the ability to deflect a difficult issue with humour and to ask the question that seems to settle things.

The verbal zest of characters like Alison Janney’s CJ and Richard Schiff’s Toby Ziegler provide the West Wing’s wit. These are characters whose roles

2 are to craft the President’s message and to communicate with the media. Their humour is fast, wordy, very dry, and poised. In the midst of the chaos of politics CJ is composed and disarming; Toby radiates an acute sense of absurdity. Words are the currency of politics and they provide much of the West Wing’s comic zip. Typographical errors are a continuing theme. Is America stronger or stranger after twelve months of the Bartlett administration? As the president says, it could go either way.

The wit of characters like these also helps to demonstrate that politics can be educated. Things may be bad on so many levels, as speechwriter Sam Seaborne would say, but the issues of government are real, engaging problems, demanding attention and concentration. Whatever we think ourselves of talismanic American issues like gun control or energy security or free trade, doesn’t really matter because these are just examples of a special sort of political talk. Communicating what needs to be said should not be spin, or at least spin should not be cynicism.

In an episode from the final season, a televised debate is staged between the two presidential candidates, Democrat Congressman Matt Santos, played by Jimmy Smits, and Republican Senator Arnold Vinick, played by Alan Alda. In the US, the show was broadcast live to air to capture the tensions and immediacy of a real debate. There is a dramatic moment, right at the beginning. Vinick stops two sentences into his rehearsed, formulaic opening speech. There are several seconds of tense silence – but Vinick has not frozen, he wants to renegotiate the terms of the debate. He says:

EXTRACT 2 (near the beginning)

VINICK You know, I've watched every televised Presidential debate that this country has ever had. And every time I heard them recite the rules, I always thought that meant they're not going to have a real debate. When the greatest hero of my party, Abraham Lincoln debated, he didn't need any rules. He wasn't afraid of a real debate. Now I could do a 2-minute version of my Sensible Solution stump speech and I'm sure Congressman Santos has a memorized opening statement ready to go. And then we could go on with this ritual and let the rules decide how much you're going to learn about the next President of the United States, or we could have a debate Lincoln would have been proud of. We could junk the rules. We could let our able and judicious moderator ask us questions. And we could forget about whether each of us has the exact same number of seconds to speak. We could have a real debate if that's all right with you, Matt.

3 SAWYER Um, Senator, according to the rules, candidates may not direct...

SANTOS No, please. [to Vinick] You mean like a Senate debate? What are you going to do, filibuster me? Are you going to grab the microphone for a whole hour?

VINICK No, no, no. We tell the American people what they need to hear, no more, no less. I suspect the audience will reward brevity.

The audience laughs and claps.

SANTOS Okay, let's have a real debate.

Vinick’s reference to Lincoln seems to wrap the debate in tradition, but debates between candidates very rarely occurred before television, and are actually the product of post-war broadcasting. Debates are TV shows, although they’re usually not very good ones. Vinick’s idea of a real debate is a debate where the candidates can speak more directly to their audiences and each other, without the protection of tightly monitored time limits and speaking rights. He says ‘we tell the American people what they need to hear, no more, no less’. It reflects the view that political communication is obfuscated by protective management that serves no public interest. Here the show is cleverly picking up on the real politics around presidential debates, which have been for some time the subject of lively argument. US presidential debates were once organised by the non-partisan League of Women Voters, which abandoned the role in 1987, accusing the campaign organizations of attempting to turn the debates into ‘campaign trail charades, devoid of substance, spontaneity, and answers to tough questions’.

Since 1988 the debates have been run by a Commission controlled by the two major parties, and funded by large corporations. After Ross Perot’s spoiling role in 1992, third party candidates like Ralph Nader have not been allowed to participate, and the commission has been challenged by alternative non-partisan organizations. During every presidential campaign a complex memorandum of understanding between the parties is produced setting out rules in intricate detail. Under pressure, the Commission for Presidential Debates publicly released the 2004 election rules. These governed not only format and structure but also what candidates could actually say, or not say. Candidates were prohibited from asking each other direct questions or from challenging each other to make pledges.

In the West Wing’s debate they do both, and the arguments flow freely with a minimum of intervention. The candidates are presented as relaxed, speaking frankly and with some passion about what they believe and what

4 they propose to do in office. Senator Vinick is too relaxed — he makes what will become a fatal mistake when he wholeheartedly endorses nuclear power. But with fewer rules, and two brilliant actors, the West Wing’s ‘real debate’ was infinitely better television than most actual political debates. It was both more instructive and more entertaining. The show is saying that a more open political conversation could engage more viewers and citizens in the substance of the issues being discussed.

This then raises the question: the West Wing’s rhetoric, rituals and occasions certainly elevate the grubby business of politics into higher theatre, but do we want a civil religion which may be too easily swayed by rhetoric? Tony Blair was not President Bartlett, but he has been an eloquent, knowledgeable, persuasive Prime Minister for a decade; and while he has clearly used those formidable political skills to the full, it’s not clear that this has produced better or more principled policy outcomes, and of course it hasn’t prevented him from making some of the same errors as the querulous and less articulate incumbent in the White House.

Here in Australia, our 2007 federal election campaign looks more quasi- presidential than ever: the major parties and the media are encouraging us to see it very much as Howard versus Rudd. But after the West Wing we know that John Howard is no Alan Alda and Kevin Rudd is no Jimmy Smits. We know from past experience that we won’t have an open, free- ranging debate between the leaders. We’re unlikely to have more than one debate; it will be very controlled, and there’ll be no debate between the deputies. Australian politics does not come with the ritual occasions of American politics, those celebrations of the republic so well exploited by television. But unthinking liberals and unthinking conservatives are everywhere. One thing we can take from political theatre as good as the West Wing is a spark of interest in public affairs, and respect for the seriousness of the political decisions we make.

5