Gerald!
I didn’t watch the West Wing until well after it was over on Netflix. I didn’t even realize it was a live episode until after I looked it up on Wikipedia, which I think makes it a really good live episode.
That’s one of the scenes I still watch regularly on YouTube because the acting and all the interplays between the characters are just so giggle-worthy.
I agree that that was just odd. CJ is a great character and a strong and intelligent woman, but have we seen anything to make us think that she would be better qualified for that job than, say, Josh? Wasn’t Josh the deputy chief of staff, and someone generally shown to be capable and intelligent and dedicated?
That whole idea just seemed like some kind of oddball fan service.
Yeah, I wondered that too. I didn’t watch the final seasons on NBC, so my memory is a little fuzzy. I know Josh went to work on the Santos campaign, but I thought that was after CJ got the CoS job, which by rights, should have been offered to Josh.
Josh did become CoS after Santos was elected, so there’s that.
I don’t remember seeing that episode, but the whole map issue seems like the kind of thing that Bartlett would have already well understood. Did it end with the president explaining to C.J. that cartographers have been trying to put a round globe on a flat sheet of paper for hundreds of years and there’s no way to do it that doesn’t shortchange somebody?
That was CJ as well. There were two “big block of cheese day” episodes. CJ got the Pluie wolves-only highway people in the first and the Mercator projection map in the second. The only other one I can remember is the sad-sack lawyer from Scrubs talking to Sam about UFOs in the first one.
There was also the one where a woman convinced Sam to look in on her grandfather, who turned out to be a spy. That was the second big block of cheese day episode.
“I don’t mean to frighten you, but I’m dad.”
I watched these on DVD well after the fact… I had just had my first kid and this scene still gets me. Precisely how I felt/feel.
To be sure, but it was one of Leo’s “big block of cheese” events, where the WH staffers are expected to meet the small interest groups that gets turned down or laughed out of the room the 364 other days. In this case, because even if most halfway educated people know that Mercator’s projection is a bit shit (both as a geographic representation, and a cultural item), it’s so ingrained in the collective mind of the entire world at this point that trying to replace it now is pretty quixotic. To say nothing of putting north at the bottom 
So many good scenes.
But I like this, episode:
“They come with hats now.”
Oh yeah, I understand (somewhat) the map issues, I was just wondering how that storyline played out. By the end of that scene C.J. seems convinced, or at least highly befuddled, by their cause. What happened next? Bartlett would often step in at the end with the one incontrovertible fact that made all the previous dithering irrelevant, is that what happened here?
I remembered another good episode, The Stackhouse Filibuster. It’s the one where a senator filibusters to add an autism amendment to a children’s health care bill that also included money for glaucoma and ED. (Seriously, WHY does Congress do that? Is it a children’s health care bill or is it not?)
Bartlet has a nice dinner with Leo and goes on a rant when they found the senator has an autistic grandchild.
Then everyone rallied together (Donna came up with the solution on how to give him a break without ending the filibuster) to help him.
Warm fuzzies all around.
I honestly don’t remember - I think, like all the other “big block” items, the President isn’t ultimately told about any of it because it’s all way below his radar. At best CJ made a joke about it during their next power walk or oval office session, maybe ?
But thanks to this thread I’m now rewatching the series, so I’ll keep you posted
It’s such a tender, moving scene, but it’s slightly ruined for me by the fact that Jed most certainly has daughters.
My favorite is the moment when Abby cuts off Jed’s tie with scissors right before the debate. I love it-- she cuts straight to the heart of what Jed got out of the good-luck tie-- not the tie itself, but the energy of getting on stage while putting out a fire. The look on her face when she snips it, and when Bartlett slaps her on the ass when he walks on stage. Love it.
As luck would have it, I just stumbled across that scene on youtube.
I loved it when Jeb told Charlie in reference to Charlie dating Zoey “Remember these two things: She’s nineteen years old and I’m the boss of the 82nd Airborne.”
The chronology was:
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Leo has a heart attack after his angry confrontation with Bartlett at Camp David over the Israel-Palestinian summit that culminates in a plan to deploy 18,000 American peacekeepers to police Jerusalem indefinitely. Bartlett semi-fires, semi-accepts Leo’s resignation during the confrontation (Leo said he can no longer effectively serve him, Bartlett says “So we have one disagreement and now you quit”, pauses and then goes “fine then, I’ll need a list of names for your replacement” and storms off.)
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In the hospital Bartlett makes it known Leo isn’t fired, and can come back as soon as he’s healthy. Leo knows that Chief of Staff is too important a position for that, and that he is simply not physically able to do the job any longer. He tells Jed he isn’t coming back and he’ll have his replacement name. By the end of the episode he gives Jed a name (we don’t know what it is.) Then Jed walks out of the hospital room and tells CJ he needs her to do something for him, when she asks what, he says “Jump off a cliff.” We find out definitively in the beginning of the next episode that CJ is now the Chief of Staff.
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At this point Josh still works for CJ, and has an on-screen run in with Santos where he tries to confront him about leaving Congress after three terms, since the DCCC needs him down in Texas as an electable Democrat in a competitive district. In a later episode they clash over Santos’s maneuverings on a patient’s bill of rights, but in the end Santos wins and also gets way more concessions from the GOP than Josh thought possible. He comes away from it being in awe that Santos was able to get something done in this area of legislation and it plants the kernel that he should push Santos to run for President.
As for the reality of promoting CJ, in real life I don’t think we’d see it. Chief of Staff is usually just a much more credentialed and broadly experienced person. It varies from one White House to the next though. But in general the Press Secretary, while important, is actually much less involved in policy and basically a “more junior” position than CJ was portrayed as being in the show. If you look at the White House website today for example, there’s a page about Senior White House Leadership, it lists five people:
Denis McDonough - Chief of Staff
Anita Decker Breckenridge - Deputy Chief of Staff
Kristie Canegallo - Deputy Chief of Staff
Valerie Jarrett - Senior Advisor
Brian Deese - Senior Advisor
Josh would be the equivalent of one of those deputies.
In the “ranking” of Executive Office of the President ranks, the highest rank is Chief of Staff, then Deputy Chiefs of Staff, then the various department heads have their titles as head of their specific department (Director of x), but are ranked “Assistant to the President.” Below them are lower level officials who are ranked as “Deputy Assistant to the President” and then below them are “Special Assistant to the President.”
In comparing the West Wing to the real world, this means Toby as Director of the Office of Communications, would be an Assistant to the President–and clearly outranked by Josh who is higher rank than any executive office directors and in the EOP is only outranked by the Chief. CJ would be one step below that, and Toby is her boss (it’s never totally forgotten, but often goes many episodes without being mentioned that Toby is CJ’s boss.) As for what “rank” CJ would be, she could be an Assistant to the President (same as Toby, but her job makes her his subordinate)–this is the status of Josh Earnest, the current White House Press Secretary who is also an Assistant to the President.
The Special Advisors listed above are kind of just “highly connected people with nearly unlimited access who aren’t otherwise part of the org chart”, there’s usually several people like that. The show actually brings in a few people like that throughout the series, too. Leo post-heart attack would be one of those, as would Angela Blake (the woman brought in to take over Josh’s legislative portfolio after his brash behavior results in an Idaho Democratic Senator switching parties.)
But anyway, promoting a CJ or a Josh Earnest to Chief of Staff would be almost akin to naming a Brigadier General as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, it just realistically wouldn’t happen. It’s not quite as silly as that since ranks for high level EOP leaders isn’t so static and all those people are “will and pleasure” employees not subject to Senate confirmation so the President truly can move them around at will, but in reality such a jump just wouldn’t be likely to happen. Typically the Press Secretary is chosen for being congenial, doing good on camera, and understanding the press. These are valuable commodities but don’t give you a lot of the heft you’ll need to sit in the situation room with the President and advise him on whether to drop bombs or not.
Also the whole structure of the Executive Office of the President can change dramatically from one White House to the next. Some Chiefs of Staff have been considered on par with a “Prime Minister” or “Chancellor” someone who is pretty damn close to running the country at least for the “detailed” work. This was the model Ronald Reagan adopted, his Chief of Staff was very powerful. George W. Bush deliberately adopted another model, he emphasized the Vice President (the only person in his administration who could walk into his office at any time, and who had unlimited access, and also the person who typically had ‘final access’ to the President before he made a decision, which obviously is incredibly important) and also the cabinet–he leaned on his cabinet a lot as direct advisors. Bush’s longest running Chief at 5 years was Andrew Card, and he’s generally been seen as a weaker Chief who didn’t have a lot of policy influence. He was a true manager for the President, but not really a policy advisor like Leo was for Bartlett. Other Presidents are distant from their cabinet, Clinton was, for example–and I believe the West Wing was modeled on the Clinton approach, as cabinet members are irregularly shown and often disdained by the EOP staff on the show.
Josiah Edward “Jed” Bartlet
Jed with a “d”. A Jeb is a bush.