The Great West Wing Rewatch: 6.15 "Freedonia"

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Joel: Can I just say, that chicken themed ad that Josh was trying to run, that was a terrible ad. It was clearly supposed to be funny because all of the characters on screen were laughing at it, but it wasn’t a funny ad. It was clearly supposed to be hard hitting and biting because we just spend the whole episode talking about how it had to be such a shocking ad for it to work, but the ad that we saw seemed like a fairly run of the mill negative attack ad. I’ve seen more shocking political ads every presidential election in real life. I get that doing the ad live was always going to be the shocking thing that worked in the end, but Josh needed to come up with something really crazy to get Santos mad enough to do what he does at the end of the episode, and what Josh came up with felt very middle of the road. Instead of Santos coming across angry about what poor taste the ad is, it comes across that he’s upset at how insignificant the ad seems compared to what it could have been.
Plus, for a campaign that’s so strapped for cash that they can only afford a single minute of air time, it’s a wonder that they actually paid the money to rent a space and get podiums for a debate that Josh was sure wasn’t going to actually end up happening.

Chris: It's interesting how no one in the Santos campaign is consistently right from episode to episode. Originally Santos is wanting to buck the system and that came back to hurt them a little and now in this episode, there's no chance The Santos campaign would've gotten noticed at all if Santos listened to Josh and his commercial idea. Also, the chicken suit idea wasn't great either. Ultimately, Santos took a play from Leo's book and let Santos be Santos in the live commercial in the end. This episode further points out just how far behind the curve the Santos campaign is compared to the frontrunners. However, every campaign has it's growing pains such as Donna getting caught on camera yelling at one of the Santos chickens. What the Santos campaign is starting to realize that their best asset is Santos himself, much like the Bartlet campaign.

A good president has a voice.

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