Santos and Obama
Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ:
Aficionados of The West Wing have been noticing for some time a few similarities between the arc last season of the show that saw Matthew Santos become US President and the meteoric rise and skillful campaign of Barack Obama. Politico outlines some of these similarities in the introduction to an interview with Jimmy Smits, the actor who portrayed Matthew Santos:
It’s an urban legend that actor Blair Underwood based his “L.A. Law”
role of a hotshot black attorney on Barack Obama during the late 1980s.
Underwood had been playing the part for years before he even met Obama,
who was president of the Harvard Law Review at the time. But it is true
that Jimmy Smits’ charismatic candidate character Matt Santos on “The
West Wing” was inspired directly by the politician. Indeed,
writer-producer Eli Attie even spoke to Obama adviser David Axlerod to
pick up backstory and other details for use in his scripts.
The many parallels between “The West Wing’s” final season and the
current presidential race have been widely noted. Like Obama, Santos
was a former community organizer with a wife and two kids who enjoys
grassroots support, excels in soaring rhetoric about “hope,” yet lacks
real Congressional experience. His far older Republican rival, Arnie
Vinick (Alan Alda), had a chilly relationship with conservatives in his
own party and often engaged the press with “straight talk.” Indeed,
“The West Wing” also predicted an October surprise of sorts, only it
was a nuclear reactor meltdown instead of one on Wall Street that
altered the race.
Though the “West Wing” finale was more than two years ago and Smits
moved on to a role as an assistant D.A. on the quirky cable drama
“Dexter,” thoughts of Santos and his eerily prescient presidential
quest still weigh on…