The Great West Wing Rewatch: 7.13 "The Cold"

Joel: For the second time in the campaign storyline, Santos gets and incredibly lucky break when things seem to be at their worst. The first time was in the primaries when Hoynes got in trouble again for an extramarital relationship, and then this time a nuclear disaster happens to take place just a few weeks after Vinick talked about how important nuclear power was to the country. On top of that, the plant was in Vinick’s home state and it was a plant that Vinick pushed to get twenty-five years ago. This couldn’t have worked out any better for the Santos campaign if they had planned it. And that’s a bit disappointing to me.

I know that lucky political breaks happen like this in real life, but remember, we’re supposed to be searching for Bartlet’s successor here, someone who has the skill and talent to carry forward with all the work we’ve seen people do over the past seven years, not somebody who gets lucky every now and then. And we know that Santos is smart. We know that he’s good at this. The live political ad is the perfect example of Santos doing something proactive that gets him noticed and gets him ahead. That’s what I want to see more of. I want to see more examples of why Santos would be the best person for the job, and him pulling ahead in the polls because of things that Santos or the Santos campaign did. Not because the right thing went wrong at the right time.

Oh, and Donna and Josh kissed. I guess that’s important since we’ve been waiting since the first episode for that to happen.

Chris: So a girl that you've like since forever leaves a key for you to her hotel room and yes, a friend mistakenly sees the key and interprets that as the girl must've forgotten her key. Still, if you're Josh and you're waiting on a signal, that's about as big of a green light he's ever gonna get and yet you still don't go to her room? Shame.

Oh right, politics and matters of national security. There's been one understated theme this season and that's been the Santos' campaign being unable to fully capitalize on any momentum going their way and it's mostly not due to any fault of their own. Like this episode, there's a monumental shift in polling data in their favor for the first time and when they should be in a full campaign blitz, they had to leave the trail to Santos and Leo could be briefed on the Kazakhstan situation either Vinick or Santos will inherit. Also, Vinick's campaign continues to struggle leading to the RNC suggesting that he fire Sheila. It sucks but the public need to see that the campaign appears to be correcting it's course even if the reason they're in this mess is because of Vinick himself saying that wrong thing at the wrong time about the nuclear plant. Sadly, you can't fire your candidate (a fact that we wish was untrue here in 2016) so you have to go with the second most visible person and that's the one who is running the entire thing.
And finally, the is the last episode where we actually see John Spencer. I'm glad we get at least one Bartlet/Leo scene in there.

A good president tries really hard not to show campaign favoritism unless you best friend is one of the VP candidates.