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Hail to the West Wing

Young non-White senator wins democratic nomination against the odds, and picks old Washington insider with lots of foreign policy experience and campaign nous as running mate.
They run against a veteran moderate Republican, who is disapproved of by the conservative evangelical powerbrokers and so he picks a known conservative evangelical as a VP nominee.
They are running neck and neck until a crisis fatally wounds the republican campaign.

Not the the political soap opera which reaches its denouement today... But the storyline of the last few seasons of the West Wing. The only things they got wrong was the gender of the Republican VP and the nature of the crisis that proved crucial inthe campaign. In the West Wing it was the meltdown of a nuclear powerplant. In reality it was the meltdown of the economy.

But the similarities are striking... And actually some of the speechmaking on the Obama side has been of almost West-Wing standard... There are some who say that there was quite a bit of cross-over between the production team behind West Wing and the Obama campaign team, going back at least as far as this episode in series 4 or 5...


What and whichever, whatever happens today and whoever is determined to be the President of the USA tomorrow, this is the real world, not a TV show, and whoever is elected will not be able to operate of a carefully drafted script all the time... It's from here on in that we see if there is substance behind the style.

But in the meantime, here's another little post from YouTube, by someone with even more time on their hands than me, and an even bigger obsession with the West Wing (David Porter... was it you?)





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