Aaron Sorkin: How I would script this moment for Biden and the Democrats

NEW YORK – The Paley Centre for Media just opened an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of The West Wing, the NBC series I wrote from 1999 to 2003.

Some of the show’s story points have become outdated in the last quarter-century (the first five minutes of the first episode depended entirely on the audience being unfamiliar with the acronym Potus), while others turned out to be – well, not prescient, but sadly coincidental.

Gunmen tried to shoot a character after an event with President Bartlet at the end of Season 1. And at the end of the second season, in an episode called Two Cathedrals, a serious illness that Mr Bartlet had been concealing from the public had come to light, and the president, hobbled, faced the question of whether to run for re-election.

“Yeah,” he said in the third season opener. “And I’m going to win.”

Which is exactly what President Joe Biden has been signalling since the day after his bad night.

Because I needed the West Wing audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I did not really dramatise any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I did not dramatise any danger posed by Mr Bartlet’s opponent winning.

But what if the show had gone another way?

What if, as a result of Mr Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent? And what if that opponent, rather than being simply unexceptional, had been a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions? What if Mr Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists?

We would have had Mr Bartlet drop out of the race and endorse whoever had the best chance of beating the guy.

The problem in the real world is that there is not a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, does not really put a lump in our throats.

But there is something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but also with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here is my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention in August, the Democrats should nominate Mr Mitt Romney.

Nominating Mr Romney would be putting our money where our mouth is: a clear and powerful demonstration that this election is not about what our elections are usually about it, but about stopping a deranged man from taking power.

Surely Mr Romney, who does not have to be introduced to voters, would peel off enough Republican votes to win, probably by a lot. The double haters would be turned into single haters and the Ms Nikki Haley voters would have somewhere to go, Ms Haley having disqualified herself when she endorsed the leader of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government.

Does Mr Romney support abortion rights? No. Does he want to aggressively raise the minimum wage, bolster public education, strengthen unions, expand transgender rights and enact progressive tax reform? Probably not. But is he a cartoon thug who did nothing but watch television while the mob he assembled beat and used tasers on police officers? No.

The choice is between Donald Trump and not-Trump, and the not-Trump candidate needs only one qualification: to win enough votes from a cross-section of Americans to close off the former president’s Electoral College path back to power.

Part of the wish fulfillment of The West Wing was that oratory can be persuasive. So former president Barack Obama could come forth at the August Democratic convention in Chicago and remind us, once again, that we are not red states and blue states but the United States by full-throatedly endorsing his old rival. And Mr Romney could make the case that the Democrats are putting country before party in ways that the Maga movement will not, and announce his bipartisan Cabinet picks at the convention as well.

After the assassination attempt on Trump on July 13, rallygoers pointed at reporters and shouted “You’re next!”, and Republicans in Congress and on television were blaming Mr Biden and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) for the shooting, so it does not look as if that terrible moment will serve as the healing event we have all been waiting for.

But Democrats nominating a Republican could be. And when it loses the popular vote for the eighth time in nine presidential elections, the Republican Party can then rebuild itself back into a useful force for democracy.

The writing staff would tell me I was about to jump the shark, that this is a West Wing fantasy that would never, ever happen. But as actor Bradley Whitford used to say: “Isn’t the biggest fantasy on television a mafia boss in therapy?”

The Democrats need to break the glass and this is a break-glass plan, but it is more than that. It is a grand gesture. A sacrifice. It would put a lump in our throats.

But mostly, it would be the end of Trump in presidential politics. NYTIMES