Hartsfield's Landing: Revisited

If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.  

Isaac Jaffee, SPORTS NIGHT

I think it's this idea that provoked me to tears a couple of different times while watching the staged reading of the classic THE WEST WING episode, "Hartsfield's Landing". I miss having someone who values wisdom and intelligence leading our country. 

I know THE WEST WING is a TV show... and at many levels, a fantasy of a center left administration that didn't have the skirt-chasing/#MeToo issues of the Clinton presidency. I harbor no illusions that a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor will be up for election any time soon... or that everyone who works for the President will spout quips and monologues as if Aaron Sorkin is whispering in their ear.

But I want a President who's "top priority items for a second term" is more than this:

Well, one of the things that will be really great… You know, the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that, but the word experience is a very important word. It’s a very important meeting. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our First Lady and I say, “This is great.”

But I didn’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan from New York. Now I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes. An idiot like Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bums on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.

taken from town hall with Sean Hannity on June 25, 2020

Or more recently: 

By the way, nice trucks. You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away. I’d love to just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this. I had such a good life. My life was great. And then I said, “Let’s do this, darling, this will be a lot of fun.” 

quote from rally in Allentown, PA on October 26, 2020

If you'd like to see an excellent reading by almost all of the original cast (with the exception of John Spencer who passed away during the final season of the show),  HBOMax has made it available for free until the end of 2020. (For those of you who were fans of the show - like me - it's a wonderful trip down memory lane and a reminder that I'm getting older.)

I'm guessing that some of you reading this blog post are sure by now that I am stealth campaigning for the Democratic candidate... I am not. You need to make your own decisions about who to vote for and why. If you'd like to hear more about my reasoning (which pre-dates COVID, George Floyd, tear-gassing protesters to hold a Bible upside, and all the other insanity of the majority of 2020), please read Choosing Not To Die - which I wrote in February of this year.