WH staffers said it was extremely realistic
yes, but take anything the current occupants say with a shakerful of salt. For example, they all claim that it's a disguised portrait of the Clinton administration, and they love it because they think it's very flattering. What they don't understand is that, first, it's a portrait of the early 90s team, not the current crop, and second, that it's the Bizarro Clinton administration--that is, the one we wanted rather than the one we got.
For example, the people you see portrayed on the show are not the substantive policy experts each party has who staff the upper levels of the bureaucracies, nor the technocrats of the permanent government, but rather the President's own personal WH staff. In the real world over the last several years, many of these are precisely the ones who have been the most shameless spinners, the most partisan hacks, the most blindly loyal to a deeply flawed capo rather than any larger cause or interest. Think Sidney Blumenthal and Harold Ickes, for example.
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