The Great West Wing Rewatch: 7.9 "The Wedding"

Joel: While a large part of this episode is about Ellie’s wedding (The episode is even titled “The Wedding”), what really struck me is Josh’s story here about the campaign running out of money. I know that we had storylines where they were running thin on funds before, but that was when the Santos for President campaign was on its own. Now they have the backing of the entire Democratic Party, and it feels like their funds would be limitless. Of course I know that in real life that’s not the case. Tons of money is spent by people who run for president. A mind boggling amount almost. It took until 2013 Hillary Clinton finally pay off the debt for the first time she ran for president in 2008.  And the federal government doesn’t consider a campaign officially over until the campaign's debt has been repaid. Which means that as of this past summer, Newt Gingrich is technically still running for President in 2012.
Even at the highest levels of campaigning difficult choices have to be made when it comes to money. Only now it’s even more stressful because the choices have to be made on a national level with a dollar level that’s almost impossible to fully wrap your mind around. Not only that, but the world it watching and everybody else in your party has a strong opinion on where you went wrong and what you should have done differently. I can get why Josh is non stop stressing about these decisions and can’t let go of his map.

Chris: If Leo is the end-all be-all of running democratic campaigns then one can assume Josh has had plenty of input from Leo this entire time so all of this questioning of Josh's ability to run the campaign is also an insult to Leo's ability as well. Of course, Leo possibly could be hands-off and letting Josh call the shots but still, Josh is the sort of person that has to have some sort of confirmation from someone he respects before he makes any decision. Ultimately being 6 weeks out from the election, it's presumed that there's not really a whole lot else to be done and I'm not so sure if that's true. In the grand scheme of things, 6 weeks out make feel like you've got the ball down on the 1 yard line but you can still have a Seattle Seahawks miscall to throw instead of handing it to the best power runner in the game. Not a whole lot of truth in that thinking but Leo does enough to call everyone off and let Josh continue to do the best he can which is better than most.

A good president forces his daughter's wedding to start whenever he wants it to start.