‘West Wing’s’ Bartlet Is the President Voters Wish For

Imagine being able to walk into the voting booth today and cast your presidential ballot for a man who is brilliant, charming, funny, compassionate, principled, exceedingly well-read and morally upright.

Well, you can’t. But, you can watch him on television Wednesday night. Every Wednesday night. His name is Josiah Bartlet, Jed for short. He is a Democrat, a former governor of New Hampshire and a Nobel laureate. Maybe you’ve seen his name on bumper stickers this fall. He already has more than 16 million followers. Well, viewers, anyway. Some NBC executives say he polls better than Gore and Bush. Big surprise.

If television is the place we go for wish fulfillment, Josiah Bartlet, the president in NBC’s Emmy Award-winning White House drama “The West Wing,” is our perfect fantasy. Now more than ever. Or at least more than ever since four years ago, and four years before that.

You don’t need all the polls to tell you that George W. Bush and Al Gore have not exactly captivated the electorate, though, apparently, one of them is going to win. One of the strangest spectacles this election season has been watching those candidate rallies on television.

You see the supporters bellowing and whooping and stomping like groupies at a rock concert and you can’t help thinking, “What in the world is making these people act so giddy?” Do Bush and Gore have this effect on anyone you know? But Bartlet, deftly played with Solomonesque wisdom by Martin Sheen, is someone to feel good about. Here is an economist (a Nobel Prize-winning economist) who can quote Immanuel Kant, St. Augustine and the Bible.

He watches women’s softball on television to unwind. He remains loyal to his chief of staff, whose addictions to alcohol and Valium are fodder for his political enemies. He has compassion for prostitutes (but doesn’t sleep with them). He loves his wife and doesn’t cheat on her. And, in one of this year’s truly crowd-pleasing segments, he elegantly eviscerates a Dr. Laura-clone, no matter what her ratings are. What’s not to like about President Bartlet?

Forget for a moment that he’s so liberal he could carry certain precincts in Boston and San Francisco and nowhere else. What is so appealing about the show is that Bartlet and his staff are shown to be motivated by a desire to do good. What a strange concept.

Aaron Sorkin, “The West Wing” creator, knows exactly how counter-intuitive his series is. As he told the National Journal, “Generally in popular culture, our political leaders have been portrayed as dolts or Machiavellian or evil. On ‘West Wing,’ they’re none of those. It’s hard to say which came first, cynical politicians or a cynical electorate. We elect them, but we don’t respect them. We assume our office-holders to be motivated by money, power, self-aggrandizement and mean-spiritedness.”

If Bush is against gun control, we believe it is because he is a puppet of the NRA. If Gore is pro-choice, we suppose he’s merely positioning himself for the women’s vote. Who’s to say we’re wrong, but “The West Wing” provides a glimpse of an alternate universe that we apparently yearn for. It’s not that the show doesn’t reveal the seamy side of politics.

There’s vote-trading, hard-to-swallow compromising and political betrayal. Yet, the strongest thread running through the show is that Bartlet and those working for him are propelled by conscience.

They know what is right and don’t lose sight of it amid the special interests and the money and the polls. In “The West Wing,” there is a conscience in politics. No wonder the show is so popular in Washington among both Democrats and Republicans. Where else in popular culture is their profession shown in a positive light?

So, you can’t vote for Jed Bartlet today. But Wednesday, after the vote-counting is done, you can dream about what it would be like to believe in your president.

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Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.