The Great West Wing Rewatch: 3.12 "The Two Bartlets"
Joel: We talk a lot about how the show does a good job of not painting all republicans as evil even though the main characters are all democrats. There are multiple times throughout the show where we get to see the thought process behind a traditionally conservative idea, and how it can still be a good idea or at least have good merits. What we don’t get to see nearly as often is a traditionally liberal idea being torn apart by our democratic main characters. CJ’s storyline in this episode hints to a larger storyline we will see later with her dad, but I like that it comes out that CJ has issues with a right that her party is frequently the champion of. The show is able to put intelligent arguments into the mouths of republican characters when it comes time to defend conservative values, and that’s impressive. But what really gets me here is that the show is able to show the issue of affirmative action not by having our characters argue against a special guest star about th...