Newzmaven

I’m living in a time warp. About a year ago now, at the height of the presidential campaign, my son and I rediscovered The West Wing on Bravo. I’m building my own consulting business far from my usual newsmaker haunts. Jon is working in retail but has far too much exposure to life on the Washington sound stage from his two “newsie” parents not to appreciate every nuance in the exceptional yet rapid-fire Aaron Sorokin scripts. Neither of us has ever planned our day around television.

Until lately. We didn’t catch on until the 2005 season when Jimmy Smits takes on the persona of Matthew Santos, (D-TX), running for president to succeed Jed Bartlett. Even without the prompt on Wikipedia, we’d long known – or at least suspected – that the Barlett White House Chief of Staff character Josh Lyman, masterfully played by Bradley Whitford, was patterned after Rahm Emanuel. (I mean, just check out the hairlines. Add this together with Lyman’s self-conscious yet ambivalent Judaism, the “take no prisoners” attitude that forced a Democratic defection to the Republican party, and the likeness is unmistakeable.) The fact that Sen. Arlen Specter just made the switch in reverse just fans the flames of this debate.

Of course the parallels became more pronounced as we watched Santos announce for the presidency from the statehouse steps. The speech – which occurred in the 2005 season, mind you – was a dead-ringer for Obama’s announcement paean to “hope” and “change.” In The West Wing, Santos is elected after defeating one of the Republican party’s elder statesmen, who hailed from a state west of the Rockies and prided himself as being a straight-talker. (Alan Alda plays the Republican candidate, Arnie Vinick, who refuses to “take the ethanol pledge” before the Iowa Corn Growers in his stump through Iowa.

This much you might be able to chalk up to the contrived intent to have art imitate life and so heighten the believability of a parallel universe where it was a Bartlett, not a Bush who reigned over the majority of the last decade. After all, DeeDee Myers was a consultant to the show. The Guardian Newspaper even made one of the show’s writers admit that Santos was patterned after Barack Obama

But there are other parallels that seemingly defy coincidence:

• Bartlett’s most controversial appointment to the Supreme Court is a Latino named Roberto Mendoza with a chip on his shoulder about racial profiling.

• Bartlett’s trip to China, late in his presidency, is interrupted by a North Korean nuclear test.

• A European passenger jet goes “off radar” while flying near Iran. (In the fictional world, it’s a British plane and the mishap is due to the Iranian Air Force’s mistaking it for a U.S. spy plane, not a French plane and faulty instrumentation, but you get the drift. This episode aired FRIDAY.)

This may only be fodder for collegiate drinking games, who knows? But how much of what happened in this alternate reality can be attributable to the policy roadmap that lies deep in the heart of the show’s Democratic advisors? We’ll know for sure when:

• Obama gets Israelis and the Palestinians to agree on a settlement that puts 20,000 U.S. peacekeepers on the ground in Jerusalem.

• The “college credit” becomes law.

• Both a conservative man and a “liberal lion” woman are appointed to the Supreme Court simultaneously. (The woman becomes Chief Justice.)

* Health care reform passes with $5 million caps on medical liability.

• Or… What can I say? You’ll just have to watch for yourselves.

(Note to speechwriters: Instead of having Obama speak to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner next year, stage a stand-up between Emanual and Whitman. This, I’d pay to watch.)