While I was in New Hampshire volunteering for Howard Dean, I saw him
speak at the Palace Theater in Manchester the day before the primary.
At the end of his speech, a married couple, both doctors, came on stage
to wish him well and present him with a stethoscope. Dean, surprised at
their sudden appearance, tripped on his reply: "This campaign is
nothing if not scripted," he said, provoking titters in the press
section, before he corrected himself.
Also appearing with Dean
that day was Martin Sheen, a guy who knows a thing or two about
scripted presidential campaigns. Sheen’s endorsement of Dean amused
many West Wing fans, who pointed out that Sheen’s alter ego,
President Josiah "Jed" Bartlett, was a progressive governor of New
Hampshire while Dean was the same for the neighboring state of Vermont.
On
this occasion, the lines between Sheen and Bartlett were even blurrier,
as the pair happened to be in Bartlett’s home state, casting Sheen in
the role of the token local politician (albeit a fictional one) that
the presidential candidate appears with on a campaign pit stop. (The
previous day Sheen even stumped for Dean at Josiah Bartlett Elementary
School in Bartlett, N.H.) They also looked similar, standing on stage
side by side. Sheen is five-seven and Dean is five-eight and both look
like stout former wrestlers (which Dean is), lending credence to both
Dean and Bartlett’s pugnacity.
Their physical similarity betrays
the fact that there is much more to this Bartlett-Dean resemblance than
meets the eye. And now that Dean has dropped out of the race,
Bartlett’s primary campaign can serve as an instructional reminder of
how Dean does and does not resemble creator Aaron Sorkin’s vision of a
dream president.
Bartlett’s resemblance to Dean is especially evident in a West Wing
episode I recently saw rerun on Bravo entitled "In the Shadow of Two
Gunmen, Part II." It’s mainly about the surgery on Deputy Chief of
Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) to repair a bullet wound, but it
includes flashbacks to Bartlett’s primary campaign.
Bartlett has
no war to rail against or Internet to utilize, but, like Dean, he comes
out of nowhere, riding the wave of his progressive message from
obscurity to frontrunner (Bartlett’s arc does, to his benefit, come
later in the election cycle than Dean’s did). Bartlett’s staffers tell
him that a win in Illinois – a valuable midwestern primary right before
the California and New York contests – will put him over the hump.
Similarly, Dean made last week’s Wisconsin primary – which was two
weeks before the New York and California "Super Tuesday" – his
make-or-break state.
On the day of the Illinois vote, Bartlett
throws a tantrum when his acceptance speech, written by Sam Seaborn
(Rob Lowe), refers to "my opponent" rather than using his actual name.
The incident mirrors three aspects of the popular perception of Dean:
his temper, his blunt speaking style, and his aversion to being handled
by his staff.
Afterwards, Josh turns to Bartlett’s wife
(Stockard Channing), who justifies her husband’s actions, saying, "He
doesn’t like to be handled." "I think if he looks around, he’ll see
that no one is handling him," Josh says. She replies, "He’s not ready
yet."
The stories of how Bartlett’s staffers join the campaign
are Dean-like as well. During the primaries, Josh, then a Congressional
staffer, sees Bartlett speak and immediately heads to Sam’s law firm
where he interrupts Sam’s important meeting, knocking on the conference
room window with a "This is the guy" look on his face. Sam promptly
leaves the meeting and they join the Bartlett campaign together, much
like the Deaniacs who dropped everything to join the thousands of
out-of-state volunteers in Iowa and New Hampshire. Later, Donna Moss
(Janel Moloney) walks into the New Hampshire headquarters and tries to
convince Josh to make her his assistant. Josh correctly guesses that
her boyfriend, who she dropped out of college to support, just broke up
with her, He says, "This can’t be a place for people to come to find
their confidence and start over." She says: "Why not?" Donna’s story
seems oddly parallel to the stories in the New York Times Magazine
article about how Dean’s webheads left for Vermont after similar
unlucky-in-love experiences.
True, the number of such instances
was probably not as high as the Dean campaign’s mythical status would
lead us to believe. But the campaign structure as a whole did have a
very personal feel, as evidenced by the cheery blog postings, the
network of volunteers and precinct captains, the support groups with
names like "Deadheads for Dean," and "Howards for Howard," the Meetups
that reportedly resembled therapy sessions, and generally the amount of
freedom given to those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Plus,
Dean himself, more than any other candidate I can remember, let his
personal traits show through. Even Bill Clinton, who suffered the
ultimate clash between the personal and the political, was so
exceedingly charming and hyper-ambitious, with sexual exploits so
bizarre, that he didn’t seem human. Dean and his wife Judy, on the
other hand, seemed down-to-earth enough to be my parents.
The
relationship between the political and the personal is the main theme
of much fo Sorkin’s body of work. Michael Douglas’s President Andrew
Shepherd in the Sorkin-written "The American President" dodges the
threat of election-year character attacks after his wife dies, but he
suffers through them once he begins courting the lobbyist played by
Annette Bening. When Bartlett’s daughter Zoey returns home after
getting kidnapped, he chooses to give the speech that speechwriter Will
Bailey (Joshua Molina) wrote in case she didn’t come back alive, one
that acknowledges that he’s had a rough few days, rather than one that
tries to rally the nation with false optimism. Even in the
Sorkin-scripted "A Few Good Men," official navy regulations clash with
the unofficial code that ensures that the men get along with one
another.
Such conflicts are, of course, what make all good drama
tick. Using a fictional president of the United States raises the
stakes and brings in the political junkies, but it’s the human element
that keeps the audience in their seats and tuning in each week. This is
the reason why Dean, the most human of all the 2004 candidates, made
such good fodder for news.
And, as with Shepherd in "The
American President," it’s Bartlett’s humanity that makes him a better
candidate and president. His devotion to those around him parallels his
devotion to the American people.
At the end of the episode,
before Bartlett gives his acceptance speech in Illinois, he detours
over to O’Hare Airport to visit Josh, who’s about to leave for his
father’s funeral. Bartlett gives his condolences, apologizes for
treating the staff so badly, and even offers to accompany his
dumbfounded staffer, who is impressed that Bartlett even remembers his
name.
After Josh gets on the plane, Bartlett turns to Leo and says, "I’m ready."
This
turn of Bartlett’s – which, the show suggests, leads to his victory in
both the primaries and the general election – seems to be the turn that
Dean didn’t make. I’m not nearly qualified to evaluate Dean’s
relationship with his staff, but pundits have noted that Dean did not
let himself be handled until it was too late. He shared many attributes
of Sorkin’s dream candidate: a progressive, populist reformer, with a
praise-worthy professional background (Dean is a doctor, Bartlett has a
PhD in economics), who, in my opinion at least, was motivated far more
by moral urgency and than by opportunism. But what Bartlett had, and
what Dean did not, is a sense of how to take his message and polish it
for a national audience.
As Bartlett and his entourage turn to
leave the airport, we hear a voiceover of what is presumably his
acceptance speech at the convention. It sounds oddly reminiscent of a
certain now-infamous portion of Dean’s Iowa concession speech, but in
this case, instead of listing states, Bartlett reminds us that American
Revolution was fought by an alliance "of farmers and workers, of
cobblers and tinsmiths, of statesmen and students, of mothers and
wives, of men and boys." The voiceover perfectly drives home his
populist message, as we see him striding triumphantly through O’Hare,
surrounded by his staff, receiving the occasional congrats from
passersby.
Howard Dean could only wish his campaign had been as well-scripted.