Whether Republican or Democrat, independent or anarchist, most people can find something to hate about the world of politics.  As widely revered as it is for its ideals, American democracy is just as widely loathed in its practice.  This is of course, our founding fathers would tell us, part of the point:  We have, as a country, established a system by which the beliefs and values of all individuals are respected; those ideas on which majorities agree have been assimilated into law; while policy is designed, ideally, to best suit the greatest number, differences of opinion will always exist, but, well, we’ll try to work it out.

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What the Jeffersons and Franklins little accounted for was the TV Age and the rise of the ongoing, 24-hour drama in which our politicians-turned-characters are the stars.  Cable news networks like CNN and Fox News give us the highlights, from comical speech blunders (recall Howard Dean’s candidacy-killing scream) to juicy sex scandals (you can probably think of a couple); and the real die-hards tune in to the CSPAN networks to see the drama unfold in real time on the floors of Congress.  But as entertaining as it is, the knowledge remains with us constantly that these characters we follow so closely–and come to love/hate as goofs, heroes, idiots, suck-ups, villains, and mudslingers–remain real men and women who, for better or worse, are running our country.  Here arises the almost universal American distaste for politics.

Since its inception, at the tail-end of the Clinton administration, NBC’s prime-time political drama The West Wing has made a living by posing the question:  Wouldn’t we enjoy politics so much more if the consequences weren’t so real?  The TV-viewing public’s answer so far has been a resounding “Yes.”  Now in its seventh season, The West Wing has built an impressive portfolio of real-enough-seeming political intrigue:  A president has defrauded an entire nation by hiding a chronic illness; a chief-of-staff and a vice president have both been exposed as recovering alcoholics; a member of the First Family has been kidnapped and held hostage; the American government has assassinated a foreign leader; and a president himself has nearly been killed in an assassination attempt carried out by a hate group because his daughter, a white woman, was dating his personal assistant, a black man.  Meanwhile, heroes and villains abound, Congress is inhabited by the nasty and the noble, and relations between Democrats and Republicans escalate to verbal fisticuffs, with the two parties going toe-to-toe like, well, Republicans and Democrats.  And the beauty of it is it won’t affect your taxes.

The other networks have been slow to catch on, but ABC recently joined the political drama game with Commander in Chief.  Though it relies more on gimmick than The West Wing–the show’s main character is the first woman to become the president–the chief selling-point is the same:  Intrigue and melodrama run rampant in the government, but at the end of the hour, it doesn’t really have anything to do with you.

Should we be frightened that these make-believe governments are so satisfying?  Is it ultimately a distraction from the fact that real corruption does arise in our own political system, that our nation’s needs–and the world’s–too often go unmet?  Surely someone will do a study to research the relationship of West Wing-viewing to real life political involvement.  Who knows?  It could turn out that fake politics get people interested in real politics.  Whatever its long-term impact, The West Wing is a fascinating cultural artifact, to be cherished as much for the questions it makes us ask as for its entertainment value.  And as long as America faces turmoil and strife, tragedy and scandal, as long as Americans sometimes wish they could simply change the channel, it’s a pretty good bet that these daydream politics will live on in prime time.

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