Today, America is one huge television studio, in which the respective spirits of two great drama series are locked in mortal combat: namely, The West Wing and 24. Aaron Sorkin’s seven-season saga of the presidency of Jed Bartlet was a form of televisual therapy for a liberal elite disillusioned by the reality of the Clinton years. It described, in gripping and beautifully-scripted detail, the lives, loves and ideals of a White House staff committed to all that is best and noble in the American Democrat tradition, always trying to do the right thing in the face of necessary compromise. Its patriotism was unashamedly left-of-centre, a sort of leapfrogging of the Kennedy ethos over Watergate and the Reagan years into the Nineties. It famously obsessed Tony Blair’s team, too, which modelled itself all too self-consciously on the Bartlet staff. Now, in Obama, liberal America has its youthful Congressman Santos figure, the Jimmy Smits character elected to the White House at the end of Season Seven.
John McCain actually played a brief walk-on part in 24, the all-action real-time series starring Kiefer Sutherland as the apparently indestructible Agent Jack Bauer of CTU. Unlike Bauer, McCain is resolutely against torture. But the world-view of the series – a no-holds-barred post-9/11 vision of America under attack from all sides – chimes with the hawkishness of this Vietnam vet. Jack and “the Mac” have much in common, not least their long periods of incarceration (the fictional character in China, the real politician in Hanoi) and their refusal to accept defeat. In McCain’s last frenzy of appearances, in his obsessive and kinetic manner, one almost expects to see the LED time code of 24 flickering across the screen as the deadline draws near.
On this occasion, America seems to have gone for Sorkin’s saccharine rather than 24’s tough guy. We shall see which is better suited to the dangerous reality of the 21st Century world.
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