The Great West Wing Rewatch: 7.8 "Undecideds"

Joel: This episode, along with the previous one, mark the first time in the series that Santos really starts to feel presidential. Before now he seemed smart and ambitious. He had strong views that he was willing to back up, and he clearly knew how to play the game of politics. But there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the person who is trying to declare themselves the best possible choice to be leader of the free world. Bartlet had it right from the beginning, when he walked in the room at the end of the first episode. While his was different, Walken still had the air of a president for those few episodes, in the way he held himself and the way he took command of a room. With Santos we’ve gotten to see that develop over time, from the beginning of the campaign till now. And there are several small examples throughout the debate in the previous episode that Santos has that presidential feel about him. But you get a strong example to point to at the end here, when Santos has to address the church. It show a good deal of confidence in both the writing and in the delivery by Jimmy Smits, that they showed the entire speech in its entirety for the viewing audience to decide if they liked it or if it felt effective. Even early episodes of The West Wing would shy away from that. There would be scenes of Toby and Sam talking about if a speech was good or not, and then the final line of the speech along with applause so that we knew it was a well received speech, but we aren’t often given the entirety of a statement the way we were here.
I’m not saying it’s bad that the show skipped the speech at points. Sometimes you need to do that for pacing, or ease of storytelling, or a whole number of reasons, but in this instance the needed to show the full statement from Santos to see him acting president in a difficult time, in a difficult situation. I’m glad they were willing to take that risk here, and I think it paid off really well in how you look at this character from this point going forward.

Chris: Parts of me feel really icky when candidates visit the homes of recently deceased citizens to pay respects, especially if said candidates wouldn't have been there were they not running for office and even then, Santos only bothered with this because just happened to have already scheduled an event in the community prior to the death. The thing about campaign is that everything is now an ugly political stunt but the trick is trying to hide as much of the dirty feeling as you can, this time Santos was saved by the speech in the church and good for Santos for not falling into the trap of doing a bad impression of a black southern pastor because it's happened way more in real life with candidates that do similar church stunts than I'm comfortable recognizing. I suppose my real criticism here is that this is presumably the only time the Santos campaign has been remotely concerned with getting the black vote and really only did it when they were faced with the violence issue. Also, where was Vinick in all of this? The shooting happened in Vinick's home state. Don't you think he would want to come back to California if this had happened? Especially if your opponent was already there?

A good president doesn't actually think over whether or not he should go help a friend out.