The Portland Trip - TWW S2E7

Original airdate: November 15, 2000

Teleplay by: Aaron Sorkin (28)
Story by: Paul Redford (4)

Directed by: Paris Barclay (1)

Synopsis

• As the President takes a late-night cross-country flight on Air Force 1, he finds himself having to make decisions on an oil tanker evading sanctions in the Persian Gulf and whether or not to sign a bill restricting same-sex marriage rights. Sam struggles with crafting an education policy speech. Donna has a date cut short by Josh's work demands, and CJ has to pay the price for disrepecting Notre Dame on the eve of their game against Michigan.

"A long flight across the night? You know why late flights are good? Because we cease to be earthbound and burdened with practicality. Ask the impertinent question. Talk about the idea nobody has thought about yet. Put it a different way."

"Be poets."

If you're asking me, this isn't the strongest episode of The West Wing. Particularly when you're comparing it to the overall excellent first season (as well as what's coming ahead in the tremendous Season 2), it's fine. It's okay. I did like some of the policy debates, the back and forth about the Marriage Recognition Act and the bold education move voiced by Charlie, as well as the dilemma over the oil tanker and sanctions - but in general, it just seems like this episode ... fills time. Donna's date, Sam's writing struggles, CJ's hassles with the press and the drafts, Ainsley doing ... what exactly is Ainsley doing in this episode, besides describing a part of the Constitution that Josh should know perfectly well himself (heck, even Donna brings up "full faith and credit" like it's no big thing)? It all just feels like busy work to give everybody a couple of scenes and make Allison Janney look goofy in a Fighting Irish cap.

Perhaps it suffers by being part of such a great overall series, I don't know. This isn't really one that's going to stick with you, I don't think.

For the second episode in a row, the administration is finding itself trying to play catch-up with events. An oil tanker suspected of evading sanctions has been intercepted in the Persian Gulf, giving the President an opportunity to gripe over the fact that the fine against the oil company hardly makes a dent in the profits they'll realize from sale of the oil. Congress has sent the Marriage Recognition Act, a bill Bartlet clearly despises, to the White House for his signature. He and his staff struggle over what to do - should he veto the bill, only to have Congress override? With the Senate out of session and 10 days elapsing since passage of the bill, should he take no action (a "pocket veto") and force Congress to re-pass the bill in January? Or should he sign it, since it's clear it's going to become law in any event? And Sam is struggling with writing a speech on education, failing to find a soaring voice for a policy that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Let's start with Sam, because to be honest, this plotline seems to be quite the rebuke to Season 1's Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, where the President and the entire senior staff pledged to forge ahead with bold initiatives and do what was right for the country, optics and polls be damned. Sam is so unhappy with the speech he's penned for the President to deliver in Portland that he asks CJ to recover the drafts issued to the press corps. He's looking for something inspiring, something bold, and thinks maybe even the right turn of phrase could bring about a change in policy:

Sam: "Can't great oratory inspire an idea that can be implemented?"

But when he looks to Toby for support, he finds cold comfort there:

Sam: "Toby, you're the one for the last six months who's been saying we need a radical approach -"

Toby: "Yes, yes I have, and I got shouted down in every meeting! I'd love to write a speech about a radical new approach to education, but we don't have one!"

Sam's inspiration eventually comes from a chance doodle that Charlie writes on a notepad, "Send them to college," and the idea of funding college tuition for 100,000 students in exchange for three years of teaching in the public schools comes into focus:

Charlie: "The government will send you to college or law school or medical school if you spend three years in the armed forces. Why not -"

Sam: "College tuition to anyone who wants to go to college, in exchange for they teach in a public school where we send them for three years."

Toby's still not on board ("Where are getting the money?") and the speech eventually is written without a bold change in policy - but Toby does finally talk to the President about perhaps putting together a pilot program with 100 teachers to start, rather than the full 100,000. So, a baby step in a "bold initiative" - not exactly what we thought we'd be getting after Let Bartlet Be Bartlet.

A similar struggle comes with the Marriage Recognition Act. This bill federally defines marriage as between a man and a woman, restricting the rights of same-sex couples and cutting their access to federal government programs, survivor benefits, Medicare, and the like. Even though states would be free to allow same-sex marriage, without federal recognition these unions would not be seen as valid outside that state (Ainsley covers some of that Constitutional issue in a discussion with Josh and Donna in this episode). The bill passed Congress with large, veto-proof majorities in both the House and the Senate, and is awaiting the President's signature to become law. He's not happy about the prospect:

President: "We shouldn't be defining love, and we certainly shouldn't be ill-defining it."

His instinct is to bring out the veto stamp and send it back to Congress. Josh and Leo talk him down from that, saying such a move would energize conservative opposition to the Bartlet administration and perhaps hurt them in other areas, such as an employment non-discrimination act they are working towards. They decide to go with the pocket veto option, knowing the bill will be coming back to the White House in January.

This is another example of Bartlet being pushed into a corner by a Republican Congress (not the first nor the last time we're going to see that), and at least this time his instinct is to fight back, rather than try to mollify his opponents for political gain. It takes Josh to remind him the outcome of this bill is going to be the same no matter what he does, so perhaps using the extra time (and lessened antagonism) of the pocket veto gives them time to work towards civil rights in other areas.

This plotline also includes a long conversation between Josh and Rep. Matt Skinner, a fellow we've seen before but now discover he's a Republican, he strongly supports this bill ... and he's gay. Josh is basically baffled at how a gay man can be so passionately on the side of restricting the rights of same-sex couples, and how he can vote along with those in his party who compare homosexuality to kleptomania or sex addiction, but Skinner describes his personal support of Republican/conservative issues in general:

Skinner: "My life doesn't have to be about being a homosexual. It doesn't have to be entirely about that."

He shoots down the notion of single-issue partisanship, even though one would think this to be a quite significant single-issue for him. We do get to see him sternly shrug off a back pat from a fellow Republican legislator congratulating him for "winning" the debate with Josh.

The oil tanker storyline is another area where Bartlet wants to go in a radical direction, but he's held back here by Leo (shades of A Proportional Response!). Even though the American military is finally successful in boarding the tanker and testing the oil for its origin, even if it's discovered to be illegally obtained any fine for the oil company would be a literal drop in the bucket of their profits. The President makes a push towards bold action:

President: "I think we should confiscate the ship, seize the cargo, sell the oil and use the money to beef up anti-smuggling operations."

Which is immediately drenched in cold water by Leo:

Leo:  "You don't mean tonight. You mean in the future ..."

So education, same-sex marriage rights, sanctions with real pain attached - the President and the administration want to move in a radical direction with all three subjects, but end up doing very little with any of them. Small advances, perhaps - and maybe that's what Aaron Sorkin is trying to show us, that even progressive, liberal, intelligent politicians with great power sometimes have to move slowly and take what they can get at first.

I want to mention Donna, cause she's awesome, and she's got on a heck of a dress.

Even as awesome as that dress is, though, both Josh and Leo have the typical manly cluelessness to ask if she'd been wearing that all day:

Leo: "You weren't wearing that dress earlier today, were you?"

Donna: "You guys are sharp as tacks, you know that?"

She's got a date on this Friday night, but unfortunately (and as usual), Josh is there to destroy her plans:

Donna: "I have an excellent sense about these things."

Josh: "Actually, you have no sense about these things. You have no vibe, you have terrible taste in men, and your desire to be coupled up will always and forever drown out any small sense of self or self-worth that you may have." 

Josh "graciously" allows her to go on her date, but demands she be back at the office shortly to help handle things after his meeting with Rep. Skinner. This turns into an even more callous move, because that meeting lasts long past the time Donna returns to the White House. Does Josh really need Donna to help him take care of whatever work he might have on his plate later that night? Or is he trying to sabotage her personal life? Why not both? Some of Josh's machinations (coupled with Donna's disastrous date with an insurance industry lobbyist) get into Donna's head and even move her to chat with Ainsley, in an attempt to convince herself that they don't look alike:

Donna: "Have you ever thought about dyeing your hair red?"

Ainsley: "No."

Donna: "You should."

Ainsley: "Why?"

Donna: "It'd look good."

[...]

Donna: "I think it's because of the alabaster skin and the farm girl looks that ..."

Ainsley: "You're wigging out, Donna." 

The ongoing subtext of what's-going-on-with-these-two gets played up a little here. First, when Donna comes back from her date and finds Josh in the mess to tell him, Josh's attention is entirely on her, not on Skinner, as he watches her through the windows walking back to the office. Later, as they're preparing to leave for the night, they exchange looks:

"You look really great in that dress tonight, Donna."

 

I mean, it's clear these two have kind of an unspoken thing for each other (just see their faces when Donna reads the note Josh wrote in her gift in In Excelsis Deo), but 1) it's a supervisor-employee work relationship, which makes this kind of creepy, and 2) Josh is really not that nice to Donna most of the time. So it's kind of an emotionally abusive relationship in some ways. Don't get me wrong, the acting of Bradley Whitford and Janel Moloney is terrific in this area over the entire series, and it gets better eventually, but hoo boy, there are some issues here.

I suppose the fact that the themes of this episode are so similar to that of the previous one, and the underlying frustrations of the President and his staff making mind-numbingly slow headway on the issues they're dealing with, might have something to do with my lack of enthusiasm for this chapter. It's only a little speedbump in the generally exhilarating Season 2. So onward we go, flying through the night, looking for soaring oratory ...


Tales Of Interest!

- There's an interesting issue with how time works (again) in this episode. CJ tells the press on the bus that Air Force 1 will be "wheels up" at 9:05 pm, arriving in Portland just before midnight local time (that would be almost 3:00 am Eastern time). That works out to just under six hours in the air, which is what nonstop flights to Portland from Dulles or Washington National should take, so that's accurate. However, everybody (even the press) appears to stay awake all through the five-plus hour flight; also, when we're told that Air Force 1 is 82 miles from the Portland runway (so about 20 minutes or so from landing), we see a clock on the wall behind Josh and Donna indicating it's 10:10 in DC. That's barely an hour after Air Force 1 took off! So somehow, the events in Washington take place over an hour or so (which fits the narrative of Donna cutting short her date, and the other Congressmen waiting in the lobby for Rep. Skinner to finish talking with Josh), even while simultaneously Air Force 1 is in the air for almost six hours. It's weird. It's wacky. It violates the space-time continuum.

In fact, upon further review we discover the clocks in the West Wing must have stopped. This is what we see at the beginning of the episode, before Donna heads out on her date. The clock highlighted here is showing DC time, and indicates 10:10.

Then as I mentioned above, towards the end of the episode (Donna has returned, she's talked to Ainsley, Ainsley has come upstairs, Josh has finished his long discussion with Rep. Skinner, and Air Force 1 is about to land in Portland), we see that same clock still reads 10:10.

I brought up the continuity challenges of clocks in my post about The White House Pro-Am, and boy, oh boy, here's another example.

- We can figure out this episode takes place on a Friday night into Saturday morning, as we are told the Notre Dame/Michigan football game is the following day (and college football games are played on Saturdays). It turns out Notre Dame and Michigan didn't actually face each other in 2000; they had played in 1999 and would again in 2002. Another non-reality-based item is the fact that by November, Michigan would be into their Big Ten conference schedule, and therefore unable to play a non-conference opponent like Notre Dame. In real life, their games are typically early in the season, in September (perhaps in The West Wing universe Notre Dame is actually a member of the Big Ten?).

- We see many of the staffers wearing hexagonal red lapel pins. CJ has one on her coat boarding the aircraft, which she later wears on her jacket:

Toby has one:

Also Carol, Charlie, and a Secret Service agent:

The two guys talking with the President about subways and pavement, Steve and Mike, also are wearing pins, but they're not the same as the ones we see elsewhere:

It turns out these are most likely indicators to help the Secret Service know which individuals have been cleared to be close to the President on trips. Interestingly, it appears Sam doesn't wear one (at least I wasn't able to spot one on his jacket hanging on the chair while he's working on the speech).

- We know Toby has continued to wear his wedding ring, even after we discovered in Mandatory Minimums that he's been divorced for some time. This episode brings us the delivery of divorce papers to Leo (after his wife left him in Five Votes Down), but he's (perhaps not surprisingly) still wearing his wedding ring.

- Just an oddity to catch in the background and viewed in the context of being almost 20 years into the future, but it's nostalgic to see the full-screen graphic of CNN promoting itself as being "on the World Wide Web"!

- The air traffic navigation stuff, some of which I know a little about: The on-screen graphics describing a named "vector" and a "jet route" are at least partially based in fact.

The "vector" stuff with a name is nonsense, as far as I know (I've never heard of it), but jet routes are indeed like highways in the sky used for guidance between ground-based navigational aids. In the world of 2019, aircraft mostly fly by GPS and can travel more directly between their departure point and their destination, but in 2000 it would have been more common for pilots to tune in radio beacons on the ground and use them as waypoints on their filed route across the country. The specific jet routes named aren't completely accurate; while J151 does indeed pass right over Rapid City, South Dakota -

- the routes listed over Wheeling, West Virginia (J23) and Casper, Wyoming (J60) do not appear to exist in those places (I scanned the IFR High Altitude charts for the US and couldn't find J23 anywhere - it must exist somewhere, but I couldn't find it; J60 begins at the Sparta VOR in northern New Jersey, then crosses the nation, passing over Cleveland, ironically just south of South Bend and the University of Notre Dame, Omaha, and Denver before ending at Los Angeles). Also, while many airports have named STARs (Standard Terminal Arrival Procedures), at least currently there's no such thing as a Bonneville 3 arrival at Portland International Airport. Was there in 2000? Maybe. Things have changed over the past 20 years.

(Also, while Rapid City is located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they aren't really mountainous, which is certainly the impression we get from the visual. In fact, I doubt even the Rocky Mountains would look quite like this from 38,000 feet.)

- Another thing only a pilot or air traffic controller would notice - Col. Beecham announces from the flight deck that they've been cleared to climb to 42,000 feet. That's not actually an available assigned altitude, at least not in 2000. Aircraft above 41,000 feet (or Flight Level 410) at that time required 2000 feet of vertical separation, rather than the 1000 feet required at lower altitudes, so the next assignable altitude above FL410 would have been FL430, or 43,000 feet. Now, given that there's usually plenty of space around Air Force 1, and that there isn't a lot of traffic above FL400 anyway, and that it's the middle of the night, and there's "choppy winds" reported, might the pilot have requested and been given FL420? Maaaaaybe - but I doubt it.

- This is Paris Barclay's first time directing for The West Wing (he'll direct a couple more episodes in upcoming seasons), and I found some of his choices quite interesting. One scene aboard Air Force 1 with the President, Sam, Toby, and CJ kept energy and attention as the camera kept moving slightly as it cut from character to character, keeping that feeling of motion and flight. Josh's late phone call to the President had his end of the call filmed through the glass in his outer office, which I thought was pretty neat.

Quotes    

Leo: "What's with the fan?"

Ainsley: "I just went and got it from my apartment."

Leo: "It's 17 degrees outside."

Ainsley: "Then I should move my desk outside, because it's 103 in my office."

Leo: "The heat's not working?"

Ainsley: "No, the heat's working great, I can vouch for that personally." 

-----

Sam: "Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place. We should be talking about not being satisfied with past solutions, we should be talking about a permanent revolution."

-----

Toby: "Still, I think we'll stay away from quoting Communists."

Sam: "You think a Communist never wrote an elegant phrase?"

Toby: "Sam - "

Sam: "How do you think they got everyone to be Communists?" 

Story threads, callbacks, and familiar faces (Hey, it's that guy!)

• Congressman Skinner (Charley Lang) was first seen fighting against changes to the census in Mr. Willis Of Ohio, and later congratulating Leo on passage of the banking bill in Enemies. We do find out for certain he's a Republican here - it really wasn't clear to me in his previous two appearances.

• Remember Congressman Bruno, who grilled Sam and Josh about Leo's drug use (and called them "teenagers") in Take Out The Trash Day? Leo mentions talking to "Bruno and Hess," although it's in the context of the oil tanker possibly evading sanctions in the Persian Gulf. I'm not sure why the chairman of the House subcommittee on appropriations for the White House budget would be involved in that call, but who knows.

• The Air Force officer in the Situation Room helping Leo deal with the oil tanker situation is played by David Graf, who you've probably seen in a lot of things but is best-known for his role as Tackleberry in the Police Academy movies.

• The President asks to have secretaries Hutchinson and Berryhill informed regarding the oil tanker situation. They were both mentioned in A Proportional Response (although Berryhill wasn't explicitly referred to as a "Secretary" in that episode), with it being implied that Hutchinson might be Secretary of Defense and Berryhill has some connection with the State Department.

• Sam's difficulty in finding his writing groove was seen earlier in Enemies.

DC location shots    

• The outdoor airport scenes featuring Air Force 1 in Season 1 were filmed at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, DC, using a Virgin Airlines Boeing 747 that was digitally turned into the Air Force 1 design scheme. I do not know if the opening scene of this episode was similarly filmed at Dulles. It certainly could have been, but I'm not positive.

They Do Exist! It's The Real Person, or Thing    

• We've heard the University of Notre Dame mentioned several times, as Martin Sheen insisted the character of Jed Bartlet had to be a Notre Dame graduate (and here we find out Danny went to school there as well). Other universities referred to here are Michigan, Harvard, Yale, and Williams. 

• At the airport, when the President insists CJ put on the Notre Dame cap, she says she's wearing Max Mara (the coat, I would imagine, although she keeps the cap on through most of the episode and her outfit is quite stylish) and the cap would "break up the line" of the fashion.

• Ernesto Perez Balladeres (a former president of Panama) is named by the President as a fellow Notre Dame alumnus. CJ responds with Joe Garagiola - while the famous Joe Garagiola Sr. (baseball player and broadcaster) never went to college, his son Joe Garagiola Jr. (baseball executive) did indeed graduate from Notre Dame. One wouldn't think CJ would know about the general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, but perhaps she conflated the two Joes in her mind.

• There's lots of news channel talking heads on background TV screens in this episode. Easily identifiable are CNN reporters Wolf Blitzer, Bernard Shaw, Judy Woodruff, and Bill Hemmer. There's also a prominent CNN logo seen several times. In addition we can see the PBS News Hour and anchor Jim Lehrer. 

• Speaking of people on background TV screens, this sure looks very much like footage of former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott on the TV in Leo's office (well, current Senator at the time).

• Sam, that old Communist, says Red Chinese leader Mao Zedong used the phrase "permanent revolution" in his "Little Red Book." In reality, that phrase appears to be most associated with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and its unclear if Mao ever used the term at all.

• Josh brings up Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe in his debate with Rep. Skinner over the Marriage Recognition Act. That fictional bill is based on the real-life Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (after passing Congress by veto-proof majorities) and struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.

• Product placement (and there's a lot of it in this episode) Josh and Ainsley are both clearly using Dell laptops, while Sam and Toby continue to use their Mac Powerbooks; Toby orders Jack Daniel's whiskey with his club sandwich on board Air Force 1; Ainsley is upset that the White House mess doesn't have Fresca; speaking of the mess, there's A.1 Steak Sauce, Tabasco, and Grey Poupon mustard on the tables; Josh gets Samuel Adams beer for himself and Heineken for Rep. Skinner. 

End credits freeze frame: Leo greeting the Presidential limo at the airport.