absolutely. As I've said before, think "West Wing": Pollack and the vast majority of good professionals are like Fitz (the John Amos Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff character) or Nancy (the Anna Deveare Smith NSA character) or the secret service or FBI guys you occasionally see. They don't always agree with each other, but their disagreements usually center around things like cost, feasibility, competing priorities, and so forth.
The vast majority of the WH staff, in contrast--the people who actually fill the roles played by Josh, Toby, Sam, CJ, Leo, etc.--are all like Bruno, Ron Silver's Dick Morris/Karl Rove character. They don't care that much about policy one way or another, only elections, polls, and so forth.
In the (second) Bush administration as opposed to the Clinton administration, however, there's also a third category of inside players--the strongly ideological political appointees, people like, oh, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith over at DOD, John Bolton at State, Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, etc. These folks don't really correspond to anybody on the West Wing because they no longer play a prominent role in the executive branch wing of the Democratic party and thus are not represented on the show, but you can imagine them by looking at Sam or Toby in their "idealistic" moments and multiplying by 2-3.
tb@everyone'satvcritic.com |
