“The West Wing” at the White House
And: How to hack Congress.
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, September 25, 2024. Election Day is 41 days away. The vice presidential debate is 6 days away.
We’ve had two pretty in-depth newsletters this week — read me on the Republican Party’s struggles to nominate electable candidates here and on America’s trend towards 50-50 elections here — so I thought I’d balance it out with something a little more fun this morning.
Here are two dispatches from a pair of interesting events I covered last week in Washington…
“The West Wing” comes to life
It probably won’t surprise any readers of this newsletter to learn that I’m a fan of “The West Wing,” the early-aughts NBC political drama about a fictional White House.
The show (and its broader political mindset) has come in for a lot of criticism in the past few years — some of it deserved, in my opinion, some of it not. (One New York Times opinion writer even blamed what they called “Terminal ‘West Wing’ Brain” for Joe Biden’s poor debate performance in June. That one, I’ll admit, I didn’t really understand.)
It’s true that “The West Wing” can be schmaltzy at times — and I’m not saying anyone should base their political philosophy off of a TV show — but, in addition to just being well-written television, I do think there’s something admirable about the message of the show.
Here’s how creator Aaron Sorkin put it in a recent interview with the Times:
In popular culture, our elected leaders are portrayed either as Machiavellian [think “House of Cards”] or dolts [think “Veep”]. I thought, “What if there were a show about our leaders where these people are as competent and committed as the doctors and nurses on a hospital show, the police officers on a cop show, the lawyers on a David Kelley show?”
The fundamental idea of “The West Wing” is that the federal government does employ some good people, who are motivated by public service and trying to improve the lives of their constituents. The show delves into the nitty-gritty of government, explaining in-the-weeds topics from the census to government shutdowns to the 25th Amendment. And it puts a high premium on bipartisanship and the notion that compromise is necessary to get most things done in Washington. (Even if, admittedly, many of its bipartisan ideas are either fantasy — a Democratic president naming a Republican to the Supreme Court — or unexplained — how exactly did Jed Bartlet fix Social Security? But, again, it’s a TV show.)
If you’ve read my Friday roundups on bipartisanship and government function, you might have noticed that a lot of these are themes that are central to my own writing as well.
Sorkin’s wider work, even outside the strictly political realm — I especially recommend the canceled-after-a-season “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” but “Sports Night” and “The Newsroom” are good too — is suffused with similar ideas, about loyalty,1 honor,2 respect for institutions,3 and belief in the democratic virtue of people who disagree engaging in passionate debate.4
Many of these concepts are now regarded as old-fashioned, but there’s no reason they can’t still be aspirational — at least for 60-minute episodes.
Last Friday, the cast of “The West Wing” reunited at the actual West Wing for an event with First Lady Jill Biden marking the show’s 25th anniversary. I watched from the press section, as attendees milled around and sipped on cocktails called “The Jackal” (a reference to the show). Like a lot of journalists, I think my personality naturally includes healthy doses of both cynicism and idealism — and there were parts of the event that made the fan in me smile (OK, it was cool to hear the “West Wing” theme song played in the White House Rose Garden) and the reporter in me roll my eyes (Martin Sheen effectively giving a speech as President Bartlet was a bit much).
Like the show itself, the event was a blend of fiction and reality — sometimes sweet, sometimes a tad cringey.5
Apparently, though, there was one person sufficiently inspired by the event. Sorkin told Variety that he had never seriously considered a reboot of the show — until last week’s visit to the real-life White House.
“I didn’t think about it seriously, frankly, until today,” he said, adding: “I just got a couple of ideas for episodes just walking around the White House. Like, ‘why didn’t we ever do this? Why didn’t we ever do that?’”
And, as a fan, that’s something I’ll applaud without qualification.
Congress tries to hack itself
As mentioned, one theme of “The West Wing” is that the government isn’t only full of corrupt or stupid people — there are also people there in it for the right reasons. (One cast member recently called the show a “love letter to public service.”)
Just yesterday, someone on Twitter posted something mocking people in Washington, sparking this response from the journalist Matt Yglesias: “I think the extent to which DC is populated by incredibly earnest people motivated by sincere desire to advance the best interests of the country is badly underrated.”
I agree.
Last week, I saw evidence of that firsthand — although on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue from the the one portrayed in “West Wing.”6
The Congressional Hackathon is one of the more unusual events to take place in the U.S. Capitol each year — a bipartisan symposium that brings together congressional staffers, federal workers, good-government groups, technologists, and private citizens in order to brainstorm ways to make the legislative branch work more effectively.
Contrary to its name, no actual hacking taking places at the hackathon. (“We won’t be coding at this?” one man sitting near me muttered to himself as the event was getting underway, shortly before making his way to the exit.) Instead, the hackathon is “a chance to build and create new tools so Congress can better meet the needs of the American people,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the event. (Johnson co-hosted the hackathon with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.)
“Even as Americans have increasingly technologically integrated, Congress has been a step or two behind that curve,” Johnson joked. “That’s what we do here.”
The hackathon is the institution’s attempt to remedy that — and, in the previous five iterations, several of its ideas have been implemented on the Hill.
The event started with a “lightening round” of pitches, featuring a mix of Hill staffers, Big Tech employees (including from Apple and Adobe), and college students who offered prepared ideas for improving Congress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly all of the proposals at this year’s hackathon involved AI — using AI to write bill summaries, using AI to help staffers with press clippings, using AI to modernize the constituent services process. Many of the ideas involved ways to reduce Hill staffers’ workloads, to ensure they are spending as little time as possible on busy work (collating clippings can take hours) and more time on legislation and helping constituents.
Other ideas were aimed at modernizing the legislative process itself. A pair of undergrads from Princeton and UPenn pitched “Dealmaker,” a bot that promised to identify parts of a bill certain lawmakers might take issue with (and potential solutions), in order to encourage compromise. A computer science student at Dartmouth created an AI program that would allow lawmakers to “have a conversation with a bill” — How would Section 2 impact my district? How would Section 4 conflict with my proposal? — letting them engage in dialogue with the text.
Later, the hackathon split into breakout sessions; I listened in on the conversation on modernizing committees. “Congress is a broadcast organization,” one man pointed out early in the conversation — lawmakers speak to constituents (through floor speeches, or hearings, or social media videos) but the communication is rarely a two-way street. “The last place I’d go to say anything about Congress is Congress,” he added, noting that Americans are much more likely to vent about legislation on social media than contact their lawmakers.
From there, much of the conversation revolved around ways to open up public engagement with Congress. An online platform where people could sign petitions, and if a petition gets enough signature, the bill is introduced and potentially given a vote? A portal where people could sign up to be witnesses for committee hearings on issues that impact them, so hearings involve people touched by a bill, not just academic experts? Somewhere lawmakers could crowd-source questions for hearings, with the promise that questions receiving enough up-votes would get asked?
A lot of ideas were thrown out. More than any one proposal, though, I ended up leaving heartened by the experience of attending the event itself — seeing so many congressional staffers take time out of their day to think about these ideas, out of an earnest desire to make Congress work better for the American people. I left feeling just a bit better about our legislative branch and its capacity to improve itself.
As I walked out, I could almost hear the swell of the “West Wing” theme song rising up. Except, this time, it was real.
“You've got friends, and this is what friends stand up for,” Dan tells Natalie at one point during “Sports Night.” And then there’s Leo McGarry’s story from “West Wing” about what a friend does when their friends falls down a hole: jumps down, and helps them get out.
Much of the latter half of Season 2 of “The Newsroom” is spent with the characters all trying to do “the honorable thing” and resign for the good of their colleagues after (spoiler alert) reporting a false story. “We gave you a bad story,” one producer says, telling their boss that if he resigns, the rest of the staff will too. “It’s our responsibility. There are principles of principle here.”
In “Newsroom” and “West Wing,” Will McAvoy and Toby Ziegler both go to jail rather than give up a source — they won’t lie to a prosecutor, which would threaten America’s justice system and rule of law, but neither will they break promises of confidentiality (even though, in both cases, the sources have already died). Also in “West Wing,” the president gives a job to someone who criticized him because, in her letter threatening his life, she referred to him as “President Bartlet.” He explains: “You referred to me and to the office with respect. You’re a class act.”
In “West Wing,” the characters are constantly trying to “raise the level of public debate in the country,” including by nominating a Democrat and a Republican to the Supreme Court because they’ll have a healthy back-and-forth. Also, see Matt and Harriett’s years-long running argument on religion in “Studio 60.”
One notable example of that blend came during Sorkin’s brief remarks. “The fact is, ‘West Wing’ moments do happen. And Dr. Biden, we saw proof of that on the morning of July 21,” he said, an interesting nod to her husband’s decision to end his campaign for the presidency.
If there’s one thing “The West Wing” got right, it’s the antipathy that often exists between the executive and legislative branches. “I’m so sick of Congress I could vomit,” fictional White House employee Josh Lyman says at one point in the show, a sympathy I’m sure many of his real-life counterparts could understand.
I thought, “What if there were a show about our leaders where these people are as competent and committed as the doctors and nurses on a hospital show, the police officers on a cop show, the lawyers on a David Kelley show?"
Well call me old fashioned - I loved that show.
Oh how I'd love a re-boot of The West Wing! And yeah, I really liked this column a lot.