The Great West Wing Rewatch: 3.12 "The Two Bartlets"

Joel: We talk a lot about how the show does a good job of not painting all republicans as evil even though the main characters are all democrats. There are multiple times throughout the show where we get to see the thought process behind a traditionally conservative idea, and how it can still be a good idea or at least have good merits. What we don’t get to see nearly as often is a traditionally liberal idea being torn apart by our democratic main characters. CJ’s storyline in this episode hints to a larger storyline we will see later with her dad, but I like that it comes out that CJ has issues with a right that her party is frequently the champion of. The show is able to put intelligent arguments into the mouths of republican characters when it comes time to defend conservative values, and that’s impressive. But what really gets me here is that the show is able to show the issue of affirmative action not by having our characters argue against a special guest star about the pros and cons, but by showing the impact that it may have had on family members of a character we’ve spent two and a half seasons learning to love. Usually one of the “smart republican” characters will have a line where they say something about how they may not like all of their party’s values, but they still like enough to be a republican. It’s nice to see that on the other side, the democrats also don’t agree on everything just because they’re democrats.

Chris: I can’t image the mountain of self-doubt one must power through in order to run for office as well as becoming the president because even though you’re a representative of a political party that reflects roughly half of the country, there’s still a whole other half of the country you must care for and, sometimes, appease. And Toby nailed it, the president was bringing back “Mr. Fluffy” because he was trying to please everyone which leads to him saying nothing with any sort of effectiveness and we find out that Barlet’s feelings about his father is still a raw nerve. But that’s the importance of having people like Toby around because he knows what the president is capable of and hows Bartlet to that standard and calls him out on it if Bartlet begins to slip. It’s not pretty and it may be a bit out of line but it keeps the president from becoming a vanilla candidate that’s repeating a string of words that sound nice but are hollow.

A good president keeps Mr. Fluffy suppressed.