The West Wing

This month Australians will wave goodbye to a long-serving politician they have grown to respect and admire – and despite current international tensions, he happens to be American.

Barring surprise changes to its schedule, the ABC’s current Saturday night double-episode airing of The West Wing will see the seventh and final season come to an end on April 21st.

Jed Bartlett’s departure from the White House is tipped to be a highly watched affair for antipodean viewers. The close of another state election and the fast approach of a federal one are reasons enough to consider why Australians will miss a fictional president’s brand of politics.

I have observed elsewhere that Martin Sheen’s on-screen alter ego provided a model of leadership that many have hungered to see in our own political circumstances. The original tag-line when the series aired for the first time on Australian television was ‘Right place, right time, right man’, alluding to Bartlett’s to commitment to policy decisions that were driven by his moral convictions.

We have witnessed Sheen’s character standing out against even his own party for reforms to education and wages he knows to be right. It is fiction, certainly, but it is also the sort of idealism that as Christians we should develop an increasing hunger for.

In the seven years that script writer Aaron Sorkin’s character held sway over an illusory political process, we have seen more depressing motivations at work in the real Australia and America. There is something quite sad about countries that have been taught by their politicians to accept that phrases like ‘economic growth’ and ‘national security’ are unquestionable explanations for policies that might otherwise be morally reprehensible.

I am as indebted as the next Sydney resident, and yet sometimes I think that I would gladly trade an interest point for a policy that offered wage security to our lowest paid, or bourn the risk of illegal immigrants melting into our community for the sake of keeping parents and children together.

Bartlett’s character reminds us that there is something wrong with a nation whose greatest goal rises only as high as the comfort of its citizens. As it stands, we seem to have traded part of national identity and our international respect for something as ephemeral as ‘secure borders’.

In this final series The West Wing turns its attention to another area that is particularly poignant for Australian voters: the place of religion in politics. Alan Alda plays Senator Arnold Vinick, the Republican front-runner for the presidency, who has come under fire for his refusal to discuss whether he attends church or not. Writer Aaron Sorkin wrestles with the thorny issue of the separation of church and state without any definitive answers.

But away from their minders, Bartlett reminds Vinick that a formal separation doesn’t mean the topic is irrelevant to citizens. “It’s not up to us to decide what the voters get to use to evaluate us.”

I feel a great deal of sympathy for politicians who have their private lives needlessly dragged into the glare of public scrutiny. But I agree with Bartlett; I can’t quite agree that the politician can expect to exclude our attention entirely.

Federal MPs have raged in recent times that dragging a person’s religious convictions on to the floor of parliament is a disgraceful tactic, and I heartily agree when the sole purpose is simply to find another club to beat an opponent down with. But, fundamentally I don’t believe in the separation of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres of life because they are invariably connected by the politician’s character.

In The West Wing political strategists realised that what Bartlett did in his private life affected the public’s perception of his policies. Likewise, I want to know how a politician behaves with his family, I want to know if their religion influences their actions, and I will vote accordingly, because I believe that the character that shapes their private moments is the same that will form their public decisions.

The president of The West Wing is respected even by his enemies because he is known not simply for his democratic policies but his moral proclivities. I’d like to see some of that ‘fiction’ in our governments today. I would like to see our politicians’ claims to religious conviction – be it Catholic or Protestant – actually shape the way they speak about each other on the floor of parliament and in the public arena.

I would like them to stop treating their opponent’s religious convictions as proof positive of their capture by special interest groups, and instead engage with the ideas themselves. Maybe then we will begin to see the emergence of more heavenly motivations than a nation’s bottom line.

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