I Think It's Up To Writers To

Stupid People Surround Themselves With Smart People. Smart People Surround Themselves With Smart People Who Disagree With Them.

It's Certainly Easy For Me To Make A Fictional Character Mad About Something. I Can Get Them Angry About Something That I'm Relatively Indifferent About, Just Because I'm Not Educated On It, If I Go To Someone Who Is Educated About It And Is Passionate About It. I Find A Point Of Fiction And Then Give It To Them.

People Who Don't Know Anything Tend To Make Up Fake Rules, The Real Rules Being Considerably More Difficult To Learn.

Pretty Much Up Until The West Wing, Our Leaders Had Always Been Portrayed In Popular Culture As Either Machiavellian Or Dolts. But I Thought, "what If We Show A Group Of People Who Are Highly Competent, They're Going To Lose As Much As They Win, But We're Going To Understand That They Wake Up Every Morning Wanting To Do Good?" That Was Really The Spirit Behind The West Wing.

The Monica Lewinsky Scandal Was Happening At The Very Time I Was Writing The West Wing Pilot And It Was Hard, At Least For Americans, To Look At The White House And Think Of Anything But A Punch Line. Plus A Show About Politics, A Show That Took Place In Washington, Had Just Never Worked Before In American Television. So The Show Was Delayed For A Year.