The Great West Wing Rewatch: 4.4 "The Red Mass"

Joel: Ah the dreaded third candidate. We could go on and on about the problems of a two party system, but one of the problems comes, at least for the candidates, when someone decided to run as a third party and gets just enough traction to muck up the either or feeling of the election. It usually happens, like it did in this episode, when someone knows they have no hope of winning still wants an issue to be addressed in the election cycle. As long as their loud enough about said issue, the other candidates will have to address it and the real goal is met. And this isn’t something that could only happen in the convoluted reality of a TV show. I remember an article that came out during the year 2000 election that interviewed several Florida voters who has all voted for Ralph Nader to make a point. Pretty much universally they said that they wished they had voted for one of the two big candidates now knowing how big of a deal their state would be in the election. Looking at the numbers that Nader got in Florida in the year 2000, it’s possible that a third party candidate did affect the outcome of that election.

The real world implications are even more interesting now with all of the talk about the possibilities of current candidates running as a third party this year. As far as how it impacts the world of The West Wing, I’m mostly glad we got to see Senator Stackhouse again.

Chris: If there was one thing that Aaron Sorkin is passionate about, it’s political debates and how he’s unhappy with the format. In this particular case, his voice is being funneled through the president as he calls the current standard format as “a joint press conference.” His call for debate reform doesn’t end here as it will be a continual thing until the debate actually occurs and even then he isn’t done as it comes right back to the forefront in the final season (although Sorkin is no longer the show runner at that point). And then finally I would argue that the majority of the second season of Sorkin’s The Newsroom is spent on the cast trying to introduce a new debate format that would be more beneficial and informative to the American public. Aside from that, the secret assassination of Shareef proves to grow as an international disaster as the plane of Israeli Foreign Minister Ben Yosef and friend to the administration goes missing, either as a retaliation as Qumar has assumed Israel’s involvement in Shareef’s disappearance OR it could possibly be a direct retaliation to the US by making their friend disappear in the same manner and the Israel accusation was just trying to call the US’ bluff. Either way, sometimes when you do something bad in secret, you’ll be the one to face the consequences but a lot of times, those close to you meets the wrath long before you do.

A good president is great at sarcastically coaching football.