Hollywood Fantasyland

Sorry for the long delay but I've been a bit out of the blogging mood. Plus, its been all baby, all the time in my mind and Mrs. X provides much better commentary on that than I do.

The West Wing has been referred to as “if Hollywood had run the Clinton White House.” Last night, Hollywood stepped in again and tried to claim that they were still in touch with the American electorate. To make a compelling storyline for this season’s election, they decided they needed to show a liberal Democratic candidate win the White House against a moderate conservative who was going to win California, thus proving that the country is more liberal and that a Democrat can win the White House without winning California.

Their plan for this involved a standard electoral map from the 2000 election with swaps in six key states: California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and South Carolina. They also had this moderate Republican win Maine and Vermont but those electoral votes are small enough that it was only to make it more dramatic at the end.

That California and Texas would swap colors is possible, but rather unlikely. California has been receiving more and more liberal Easterners, inflating its population and driving it more to the left. Texas, meanwhile, hasn’t gone for a Democrat since it voted with the rest of the South for Jimmy Carter in 1976. But, Texans are definitely puffed up when it comes to native sons. A liberal candidate from Texas has a much better shot at winning the state than say a liberal from New England.

The idea that Santos could win Arizona and Colorado is tied into the mistaken idea of race block voting. Because African-Americans tend to vote 90% Democrat, there is this mistaken belief that Hispanics and other minority groups are this big voting block where if you convince one, you win them all. In fact, the two most recent elections showed that Hispanics especially are very nuanced and split along many different lines depending on what issues are important to them, much like many portions of white America. BTW, Colorado hasn’t gone Democrat since 1992.

Missouri has been a bellweather state for a long time. However, it has been trending more Republican over the last four years. In terms of the state of the country, a state like Ohio is a little more indicative of the mood of the country. Its fun to stick with trends so it’s easy to see why the writers gave Santos Missouri, however, in a real election, if Santos had won Missouri, he would have probably also won Ohio and Florida, ruining the storyline.

South Carolina is another non-sequitor. SC hasn’t voted Democrat since 1976, even when Bill Clinton won several states among the old Confederacy. Simply because a candidate visits a state many times during a campaign, that doesn’t mean you can necessarily reverse overlying trends. Again, if a Democratic candidate could carry a conservative state like South Carolina, they should nail states like Florida and Ohio, where the vote is much closer.

The producers of the show claim that up until John Spencer died, they were planning to have Vinick win the election. But when they were forced to write the death of Leo into the show, the writers decided that it would be too much of a downer if Santos lost his running mate and the election in one night. Actually, I think it would have been more real and would have given the show a biting edge that it once had back in the first four seasons. Your side doesn’t always win and those are the breaks. When it rains, it pours, etc. Of course, despite their claims, the way the show has laid itself out since the beginning of the season has presented a strong case that they were going to let Santos win from the beginning. So their explanation doesn’t exactly hold water in my mind.

I have no real problem with Santos winning, except for the fact that it seems so repetitive of Bartlett storylines. My only real problem is the manner in which it was done. The whole thing smacks of laziness on the part of the writers and only further exacerbates the cry of Mrs. X and myself, “Bring me the head of John Wells!”