Obama is a Sorkin president
I just got back from Boston and have been catching up on all the news I missed while I was away. Part of that was watching Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for president via YouTube. Another part was going through my movie news sites like Deadline Hollywood Daily. On that particular site, Nikke criticized NBC news anchors for describing Obama’s speech as Sorkin-esque.
Always the cynic, aren’t you Nikke.
It’s funny because the exact thing she criticizes in Sorkin’s creations is it what is drawing people to Barack Obama in the first place. I remember watching Obama give his speech in 2004 and thinking, “My God, did they pull this guy out of a The West Wing script?.” By that time, The West Wing was on its sixth season and Sorkin’s The American President was airing on TNT something like twice a day, every day.
As naive as the politics may seem in any given Sorkin script, his idealized commanders-in-chief, both Jed Bartlett and Andrew Shepard, always seemed like the men you would want in the job. Smart, principled, and hesitant to engage in gutter politics. When it came to fighting back, these rabble rousers didn’t pull punches, but instead they maintained their righteous dignity. It wasn’t about them. It was about the job.
Barack Obama gave that same type of speech last night.
What makes Obama and his fictional Sorkin counterparts great is that they have the sincerest trust in the American people. That’s something most citizens aren’t used to, especially for people like me and have only lived to see Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. Obama trusts that we’ll do our jobs as citizens. In return, we trust that he’ll do his as president.
Obama’s idealism will no doubt clash with reality. But those clashes will make Obama a stronger president–and us a stronger people for believing in his vision in the first place.
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