Democrats in fantasy land

Well, Mr. Bookworm and I are watching yet another season of The West Wing. For those of you who do not watch this show, this season is the election year episode, with the Democrats backing Jimmy Smits, and the Republicans backing Alan Alda. Last season, as both Smits and Alda were doing their pretend party primaries, Alda's character was presented as the most moderate Republican in the world. Indeed, he was a Hollywood Democrat's dream of what an Republican should be: one who espoused all Democratic principles, except that he periodically opined in the abstract that Government should cost less. This season, the gloves are off. The shows creators are trying to go back and do Kerry's campaign as they wish it would have been done. The Alan Alda character is nasty and ineffectual. The show's creators have taken a cute information leak plot from last season and labeled it a "security" issue this season. This way, they can show that, contrary to all conventional wisdom, their candidate (Smits) is a hawk, who actually served in the first Gulf War, while the evil Republican (Alda) is merely an arm chair warrior who has never seen actual service. In other words, Bush v. Kerry, except this time without all the nasty little problems that bedeviled Kerry, such as the fact that his own men hated him and the fact that he kept getting caught in lies about his service, big and little. The show also tries to explain what went wrong with Kerry's campaign: he was desperately trying to stay on issue, while the Republican dirty tricksters went off issue and ambushed him with embarrassing irrelevancies. Poor Demos. The only elections they seem to win lately are the imaginary ones. Let's just hope that the combination of this election primer and the new Commander in Chief Show (or, as I like to think of it, "Hillary's Advance Guard") doesn't actually confuse the voters into thinking, along with the Hollywood mavens, that there is something to be said for reliving the Clinton years.