9.4/10. We’ve done Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. We’ve done Let Santos Be Santos. I suppose it was time for the old guy on the other side of the aisle to get a turn at holding steady, trusting his instincts, and doing the right thing in the face of every opportunity to compromise, give in, or make the convenient but unethical choice. I guess it was time we let Vinick be Vinick.
And, to be honest, I loved it. It’s usually the sort of the thing that bugs me on this show, the way The West Wing’s universe lets fortune smile upon those noble creature who won’t dare sully themselves in the muck of that dirty little thing you call "politics." But whether it’s the way the character’s written, the charm of Alan Alda, or my own political leanings which probably hew closer to Vinick’s policies than Santos’s, that same old spell worked on me in “Two Weeks Out,” and the moral choices the episode presents.
The lesser moral choice in the episode is how to get Vinick’s campaign out of the rut it’s been in for the last two weeks. We open with old man Arnie’s hand getting crushed from excessive handshaking (a kind of cute but nicely symbolic bit), and it’s another sign that this election is wearing on him. Vinick didn’t necessarily expect this election to be a cakewalk, but he expected to come in as the frontrunner, someone who was shooting for a 50-state electoral map rather than the guy having to scrape by to get 51%.
But that was before San Andreo, and that was before Kazakhstan. So instead, Santos is trying to figure out how to chart a new strategy between now and election day to pull out the victory. He’s come out against gay marriage, something that, behind closed doors, he’s clearly uncomfortable with. He doesn’t like having to offer sops to the “values voters” that new campaign-manager Jane wants him to court. He doesn’t like the impression that he’s chasing Santos’s tail as they hit the same swing states. He doesn’t want to have to focus his campaign on the Southern states, voters which, as Jane admits, never especially liked him anyway. He’s tired of being tarred with the nuclear accident. He’s tired of having to do things that go against who he really is.
It’s tough, because all he’s hearing from everyone is that he needs to go in directions he doesn’t like or want. Jane wants him to double down on his pitch to the GOP base. Bruno doesn’t like it, but admits he doesn’t necessarily have a better plan. And Bob pretty much bends whichever way the wind is blowing. Meanwhile, Josh is getting secret campaign advice from Toby(!) and is positioning Santos to take California right out from under Vinick in the wake of the near-meltdown in his backyard.
Vinick can’t take it. He doesn’t want to cop to Jane’s southern strategy. He doesn’t want to throw in the towel on himself as a moderate. He wants to win, but on his own terms. So he doubles-down on his straight-talking ways, the frank honesty and forthrightness the voters know him by, deciding to give a make-it-or-break-it marathon speech about nuclear power in front of the plant where the accident occurred. His advisors warn him against it, with Jane coming close to quitting, but he wants to get this story, or at least his part of it, out of the news cycle, and he believes that addressing it head-on is the best way to exercise this particular demon.
And by god, it works. He goes out there, speaks openly and truthfully, and says that despite the accident, he still believes in nuclear power. He talks about the risks we take every day for things that better our lives. He places the blame for the accident on federal regulations, and when asked if he regrets pushing for a more abbreviated process that skipped over those regulations, he dodges for a bit but then admits he does. He says if he could do it all again, he would do a lot of things differently, that politicians should change their minds with new information, be smarter in their positions and opinions than they were when they started. In the process, he comes off as earnest and human, winning back Bruno and, in a great nigh-wordless performance, earning the begrudging admiration of fierce ideologue Toby. He wears out the press, gets his mojo back by being himself, and saves his chances in California, and with them, his shot at the presidency.
But there’s a bigger moral choice to be made. When Vinick is in the depths of his frustrations at the way the campaign’s gone, Bruno offers him a golden ticket. Innocently enough, Bruno found a briefcase Santos left at a spot where both teams campaigned. Less innocently, he rifled through it, finding Santos’s journal and a mysterious checkbook made out to a young woman who worked for Santos when he was mayor, a woman with a young daughter who might be Santos’s.
He presents this information to Vinick, and with it, a choice: should Vinick use this stuff, and quite possibly guarantee himself a victory in the Presidential election, or should he give it back graciously and use nothing, and win or lose on his own merits?
What makes this episode a cut above is that it takes a seemingly obvious question (using this type of privacy invasion, however guilelessly it came about, is unquestionably shady), and actually makes a decently compelling argument on both sides. Beyond the sheer ethical issues of how Vinick’s campaign came across this material, Vinick immediately disclaims any interest in wanting to use and raises the point that even if their suspicions were true, it wouldn’t change his mind if he were a Santos voter. Bruno responds, not entirely unreasonably, that it’s not for him to decide what matters to voters, that they deserve to get all the info and make an informed judgment based on what they care about, not what Vinick thinks they should care about.
Bruno also offers a pragmatic argument, that Santos didn’t get a full vetting because he was a surprise winner in the primary, that the press will find this stuff sooner or later, and that if Santos wins, it could come out when he’s in the middle of “World War III” in Kazakhstan. It’s hard to know how much Bruno is a true believer and how much he just wants to win, but he at least lays out a plausible moral case for why Vinick should use this dirt.
Vinick, however, sticks to his principles once again. He returns the briefcase to Santos; he tells his opponent they won’t use any of what they uncovered, and rather than spilling the beans to the press, encourages Santos himself to come clean. Of course, Santos being the mythologically pure individual that he is, was simply paying child support in the stead of his deadbeat brother, and had no personal failings on that scale. But the point stands. Vinick had a chance to, at least from his perspective, win the election through underhanded means, and despite the fact that he was at the end of his rope, that he felt his last chances slipping away from him, stayed true to his beliefs and his integrity.
There’s an odd mix of enmity and mutual admiration between Vinick and Santos, a sense that in other circumstances, they would be on the same side. They share many of the same principles even if their positions differ markedly. Much of that is a product of what The West Wing is, a show about people who stay true in the face of overwhelming opposition and pressure to take the easy way out. Sometimes that’s cloying; sometimes it’s unbelievable, but sometimes, by god, it just works, even on crusty cynics like me.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-10-19T01:45:04Z
9.4/10. We’ve done Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. We’ve done Let Santos Be Santos. I suppose it was time for the old guy on the other side of the aisle to get a turn at holding steady, trusting his instincts, and doing the right thing in the face of every opportunity to compromise, give in, or make the convenient but unethical choice. I guess it was time we let Vinick be Vinick.
And, to be honest, I loved it. It’s usually the sort of the thing that bugs me on this show, the way The West Wing’s universe lets fortune smile upon those noble creature who won’t dare sully themselves in the muck of that dirty little thing you call "politics." But whether it’s the way the character’s written, the charm of Alan Alda, or my own political leanings which probably hew closer to Vinick’s policies than Santos’s, that same old spell worked on me in “Two Weeks Out,” and the moral choices the episode presents.
The lesser moral choice in the episode is how to get Vinick’s campaign out of the rut it’s been in for the last two weeks. We open with old man Arnie’s hand getting crushed from excessive handshaking (a kind of cute but nicely symbolic bit), and it’s another sign that this election is wearing on him. Vinick didn’t necessarily expect this election to be a cakewalk, but he expected to come in as the frontrunner, someone who was shooting for a 50-state electoral map rather than the guy having to scrape by to get 51%.
But that was before San Andreo, and that was before Kazakhstan. So instead, Santos is trying to figure out how to chart a new strategy between now and election day to pull out the victory. He’s come out against gay marriage, something that, behind closed doors, he’s clearly uncomfortable with. He doesn’t like having to offer sops to the “values voters” that new campaign-manager Jane wants him to court. He doesn’t like the impression that he’s chasing Santos’s tail as they hit the same swing states. He doesn’t want to have to focus his campaign on the Southern states, voters which, as Jane admits, never especially liked him anyway. He’s tired of being tarred with the nuclear accident. He’s tired of having to do things that go against who he really is.
It’s tough, because all he’s hearing from everyone is that he needs to go in directions he doesn’t like or want. Jane wants him to double down on his pitch to the GOP base. Bruno doesn’t like it, but admits he doesn’t necessarily have a better plan. And Bob pretty much bends whichever way the wind is blowing. Meanwhile, Josh is getting secret campaign advice from Toby(!) and is positioning Santos to take California right out from under Vinick in the wake of the near-meltdown in his backyard.
Vinick can’t take it. He doesn’t want to cop to Jane’s southern strategy. He doesn’t want to throw in the towel on himself as a moderate. He wants to win, but on his own terms. So he doubles-down on his straight-talking ways, the frank honesty and forthrightness the voters know him by, deciding to give a make-it-or-break-it marathon speech about nuclear power in front of the plant where the accident occurred. His advisors warn him against it, with Jane coming close to quitting, but he wants to get this story, or at least his part of it, out of the news cycle, and he believes that addressing it head-on is the best way to exercise this particular demon.
And by god, it works. He goes out there, speaks openly and truthfully, and says that despite the accident, he still believes in nuclear power. He talks about the risks we take every day for things that better our lives. He places the blame for the accident on federal regulations, and when asked if he regrets pushing for a more abbreviated process that skipped over those regulations, he dodges for a bit but then admits he does. He says if he could do it all again, he would do a lot of things differently, that politicians should change their minds with new information, be smarter in their positions and opinions than they were when they started. In the process, he comes off as earnest and human, winning back Bruno and, in a great nigh-wordless performance, earning the begrudging admiration of fierce ideologue Toby. He wears out the press, gets his mojo back by being himself, and saves his chances in California, and with them, his shot at the presidency.
But there’s a bigger moral choice to be made. When Vinick is in the depths of his frustrations at the way the campaign’s gone, Bruno offers him a golden ticket. Innocently enough, Bruno found a briefcase Santos left at a spot where both teams campaigned. Less innocently, he rifled through it, finding Santos’s journal and a mysterious checkbook made out to a young woman who worked for Santos when he was mayor, a woman with a young daughter who might be Santos’s.
He presents this information to Vinick, and with it, a choice: should Vinick use this stuff, and quite possibly guarantee himself a victory in the Presidential election, or should he give it back graciously and use nothing, and win or lose on his own merits?
What makes this episode a cut above is that it takes a seemingly obvious question (using this type of privacy invasion, however guilelessly it came about, is unquestionably shady), and actually makes a decently compelling argument on both sides. Beyond the sheer ethical issues of how Vinick’s campaign came across this material, Vinick immediately disclaims any interest in wanting to use and raises the point that even if their suspicions were true, it wouldn’t change his mind if he were a Santos voter. Bruno responds, not entirely unreasonably, that it’s not for him to decide what matters to voters, that they deserve to get all the info and make an informed judgment based on what they care about, not what Vinick thinks they should care about.
Bruno also offers a pragmatic argument, that Santos didn’t get a full vetting because he was a surprise winner in the primary, that the press will find this stuff sooner or later, and that if Santos wins, it could come out when he’s in the middle of “World War III” in Kazakhstan. It’s hard to know how much Bruno is a true believer and how much he just wants to win, but he at least lays out a plausible moral case for why Vinick should use this dirt.
Vinick, however, sticks to his principles once again. He returns the briefcase to Santos; he tells his opponent they won’t use any of what they uncovered, and rather than spilling the beans to the press, encourages Santos himself to come clean. Of course, Santos being the mythologically pure individual that he is, was simply paying child support in the stead of his deadbeat brother, and had no personal failings on that scale. But the point stands. Vinick had a chance to, at least from his perspective, win the election through underhanded means, and despite the fact that he was at the end of his rope, that he felt his last chances slipping away from him, stayed true to his beliefs and his integrity.
There’s an odd mix of enmity and mutual admiration between Vinick and Santos, a sense that in other circumstances, they would be on the same side. They share many of the same principles even if their positions differ markedly. Much of that is a product of what The West Wing is, a show about people who stay true in the face of overwhelming opposition and pressure to take the easy way out. Sometimes that’s cloying; sometimes it’s unbelievable, but sometimes, by god, it just works, even on crusty cynics like me.