Bartlett and Obama

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: September 23, 2008

Were you one of the millions of dedicated fans of the NBC drama “The West Wing?“

I was.

Wait; I am.

The show was appointment viewing for me from its inception in 1999 until its final episode in 2006, and I’m the proud owner of DVDs of a couple of seasons of the show.

“The West Wing” was an extension of the witty, sharp and downright terrific writing viewers loved in the smash 1995 movie, “The American President,“ which did $65 million in box-office sales and $30 million in rentals.

Of course, Aaron Sorkin is the mastermind who gave voice to the characters of both projects. Sorkin is as gifted a writer as Hollywood has ever known, in the mind of this humble entertainment consumer.

So when the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd offered a column this week that featured Sorkin’s rendering of an imaginary conversation between West Wing’s fantasy Democratic president Jed Bartlett and real-life Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, I couldn’t get my hands on it fast enough.

Yes, Sorkin is a huge liberal, and so is Dowd. But try to ignore that and the gratuitous political swipes sprinkled throughout the “conversation.“

Don’t let politics deny you the pleasure of reading Sorkin’s work.

Finally, in an observation worthy of note, Huffington Post’s Rachel Sklar writes that Dowd “is very good at outsourcing her column.“

With lines like that, Sklar might give Sorkin a call if things at Huff don’t work out.