The devil can cite The West Wing for his purpose

Liberal evangelist St Sam Seaborn, now the patron saint of conservative bloggers and pundits for whom the greatest sin is hurting the feelings of very rich people.

Republican bloggers and pundits are having fun passing around this quote from an episode of The West Wing. They think Aaron Sorkin speaking in 2001 through President Bartlett’s speechwriter, Sam Seaborn, was presciently criticizing what they regard as President Obama's You Didn't Build That blasphemy.

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, "It's time for the rich to pay their fair share," I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I'm happy to 'cause that's the only way it's gonna work, and it's in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don't get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn't come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn't come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let's not call them names while they're doing it, is all I'm saying.

Josh Barro, writing more in the mode of Paddy Chayefsky than Aaron Sorkin and echoing Ned Beatty's wrathful sinners in the hands of an angry corporatist god speech in Network---“You have meddled…Mr Beale!”---white knuckles the lectern and gasps from his pulpit at Bloomberg, "When Barack Obama has made an argument for progressive taxation that even Aaron Sorkin finds distasteful, he has erred."

Three things wrong with this.

First is, that's not what the President meant and Barro and the members of his choir and the elders in the front pews know it. So unless you actually built the bridges and the roads that carry your customers to and from your business' front door, stop whining and shut up.

Second, nobody cares that some rich people got their feelings hurt.

Third, thanks to The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's reputation is not at its highest these days. In fact, he's regarded as something of a pompous, self-infatuated windbag who although he can write some snappy dialog knows next to nothing about politics, economics, baseball, social networking, journalism, or comedy, but particularly politics and economics.  Everything he's done since West Wing has made even fans wonder if we were wrong about West Wing.

Other than that...

Barro and others seem to think we’re damned out of our own mouths and we ought to feel ashamed of the President as if he’s our pastor caught preaching a heresy.  Seriously?  They expect us to feel chastened, to tsk tsk at the President, because a fictional character was inordinately pleased with himself because of all the money he made as a lawyer?  Oh well. Serves us right. It was liberals who evangelized that The West Wing, a usually cleverly written, always incredibly well-acted fantasy about how wonderful it would be if the country was run by a handful of smartypantsed white yuppies, was liberal gospel. Every now and then I'll come across a liberal blogger who seems to think Aaron Sorkin wrote a how-to manual for effective and moral liberal governance and then, like Sam Seaborn, I want to hide under the couch and change my name.

But here's the thing. Most of the time Sorkin didn't care what his characters were saying. He cared about how clever what they were saying sounded and how it played off what some other character had just said and then how clever what the next character to speak would sound playing off of that. The West Wing was often a comic symphony for voices speaking gibberish.

Seaborn's speech is a good example. It's not thought. It's sound. Which is fine. It's pleasant sound. As thought it's mostly BS. If you're rich the fire department does get to your house faster. The police not only arrive sooner, they ask permission first and then they wipe their feet when they show up and apologize for taking so long and being out of breath.

If the water coming out of your tap isn't hot enough, the mayor will drive over with his tool kit and replace your hot water heater himself and fix the drip from the kitchen faucet while he's at it.

It's a good life, being rich. Things are so much easier and pleasant. Also safer.  It's not always a picnic, but when it is there are way fewer ants. That's why we all want to be rich. It's why we Democrats like to spread the wealth, so more people can live lives that are easier and more pleasant and safer and with fewer ants. It's why it's a bad thing that the One Percent have stopped spreading it and set themselves to hogging more of it.

It's also the case that Sorkin wrote that speech when Bill Clinton had just left office with stratospherically high approval ratings after having balanced the budget and built a surplus partly by raising taxes.

Besides the fact that it's out of date, and was out of date when it was written, what's wrong about the speech (or right if you think of Sam's character as somewhat callow and naive) is that Sam assumes everyone making upwards of 400 grand is like him, happy to pay their fair share so all of us can have good schools and safe streets.

Conservatives don't read our scripture any more closely than they read their own. Sam isn't arguing against taxes. He's not necessarily arguing against raising them. He's certainly not arguing for cutting taxes on the rich as Mitt Romney is promising to do. He's objecting to the rhetoric Henry’s boss---whoever Henry is---uses when he agitates for raising taxes and I guess cons who got that are assuming Henry's boss sounds like they think President Obama sounds, needlessly disrespectful of his betters. Their noses get out of joint if everything you say isn’t a hymn to the greater glory of our Galtian Overlords or doesn’t include a Wayne and Garth-level of apology for how unworthy we rabble are to live in the light of their gloriosity.  But they miss or expect us to miss that Sam thinks taxes on the well to do are necessary to pay for infrastructure for the common good.  This is an idea the Republican Party has lately rejected.

To the shock and dismay of even some Republicans, like retiring (in disgust) Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette.

Long an advocate of increased infrastructure spending, LaTourette said he was ”horribly disappointed” in the debate over the transportation funding bill, calling it an “embarrassment” to the institution that a bipartisan bill approved by the Senate was not handily approved in the House.

A long-term funding bill ultimately passed, but only after months of internal Republican strife.

“We’re talking about about building roads and bridges for Chrissakes,” he said, adding that he had come to believe his Congressional colleagues have become “more interested in fighting with each other than getting the no-brainers done and governing.”

Hat tip to ClaireHelene7.

__________________________

Second reading: As long as they’re quoting the Gospel According to Saint Sam Seaborn, chapter and verse, they should think about this one:

Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

You know who wouldn’t agree with this?  The guy the Republicans are about to nominate for President.  The guy who thinks we don’t need any more teachers.

Comments

[Dave]

Sorkin is a know-nothing blowhard. The most damning thing I can say about him is that you can take either of those speeches, give them to any character (well, any male character; the women are all morons) on Sports Night, The West Wing, Studio 60, or The Newsroom, and it would make no difference.

I agree his speeches are all sound and fury, but they reflect nothing but the interior of his tortured brain; tortured with being surrounded by those who don't see the plain and honest truth as clearly as he sees it. That's why all his characters sound the same; they're all as brilliant as he imagines smart people to be and that sounds suspiciously like his own voice.

Phooey to him from me.

[Claire Helene]

A-freaking-men, Lance. I'm glad you saw that tweet. Please don't get me started on the process that was getting this transportation bill passed, goodness knows I could go on about it. Did you see that piece Ezra Klein had a couple weeks ago that showed what little output this current Congress has had, in comparison to all others? It is shameful. I am sick of these do nothing, know nothings who just seem to sit around and moan about the other side. Anyway, good post.

[Nomoremister]

"If you're rich the fire department does get to your house faster. The police not only arrive sooner, they ask permission first and then they wipe their feet when they show up and apologize for taking so long and being out of breath."

911 is a joke.

[Ken Houghton]

If Sorkin were paying attention to his own show--pull the other one--someone would have told Sam Seaborn:

"Yes, and what did we get for that $400,000 a year, on which you paid less than $80K in Federal taxes? We got one of the biggest fracking oil spills of all time, which we have to clean up using Government funds because you arranged that the company that bought ships you knew were not up for the job for which they planned to use them wouldn't spend a penny on it.

"Don't bloody tell us you how you paid so much more than the other voters in taxes; your ledger is so far in deficit that if you and your children and your children's children worked for Gage Whitney and didn't take a bleeding deduction for at all, you would still owe those other 27 people money. They'll be paying for your screw-up for decades, Sam. Not one of those 27 people would have been willing to take such a stupid risk with the environment--to ruin one of those places where, if they scrimp and save all year, they can take their kids there for four or five days and feel as if this land really is partially theirs.

"They all know that you don't defecate where you eat, Sam. You didn't. That's why you got the big bucks. Because you would do things to them you would never allow to be done to yourself.

"You ruined their hopes and dreams, Sam, so don't go whining that you paid more taxes than Mitt Romney."

Fortunately, Sorkin and continuity don't have a good relationship.

[Jaquandor]

I once yielded to no one in my love of Sorkin, but he's so completely lost me that I, too, wonder if The West Wing was actually less good than I remember it. I watched most of Sorkin's episodes again a year or two back (when I was still smarting off the awfulness of Studio 60, unimpressed with Charlie Wilson's War, and wondering just what was in the Social Network kool-aid), and I was struck at how, for a show that's often seen as a liberal's fantasy world, how un-liberal the show was. Liberal arguments rarely carry the day on The West Wing. Whenever someone advances a Big Liberal Idea, you can count on the very next conversation being why it won't work or won't pass or just can't happen, and the person who advanced the Big Liberal Idea looks wistful for a moment before moving on to the next thing.

And that speech by Sam was ghastly. I couldn't believe Sorkin wrote it...but then, actually knowing what he's talking about is not Sorkin's strong suit. (Neither, frankly, is continuity -- where the hell did Mandy go after Season One? -- or logical premises for a joke -- why would Sam not know how old Leo's daughter is?) I watched the first scene of The Newsroom and was appalled at how it's just like any number of other moments in Sorkin projects, all the way back to The American President.