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As if to keep his best and brightest on their toes, Bartlet even invites a Republican attorney, one Ainsley Hayes (played by Emily Proctor), to work in his White House. Sharp and attractive, she brings standard GOP stances to bear on policy debates with charming flair, no doubt keeping a fair share of Republican viewers from tuning the show out in disgust.

But perhaps more than anything it is Bartlet's quiet, authentic Catholic Christianity that distinguishes him from his more self-consciously secular inner circle. Bartlet, a graduate of Notre Dame, had at one time been preparing for the priesthood, we learn, and Sheen is at his best in portraying Bartlet's religiously sensitive spirit. When Chinese evangelicals (whom the deputy chief of staff amusingly tags "Christian evangelicals"—as if there were "Hindu evangelicals") seek asylum in the United States, for instance, Bartlet displays his biblical prowess by testing theirs with the famous shibboleth passage from the Book of Judges. When they pass his test he movingly conveys brotherly embrace in one powerful visual exchange.

Bartlet is a believer. The GOP, we're made to see, is not God's Own Party after all. Score one—heck, two, or three—for the Democrats.

Sorkin's Democrats, though, do not seem to be particularly aware of this ontological incongruity, a species of blindness that we, alas, have come to expect from self-appointed children of light. Sorkin's smug rendering of the holier-than-thou Democrats is surely the show's most serious, bedeviling flaw.

Among other things, it makes for bad art: the specially blessed, whether on TV or at church, always have trouble laughing at themselves (think of Jimmy Swaggart—or Hillary Clinton, for that matter), and The West Wing is filled with dedicated folk who are a little too earnest, people whose smarmy wittiness is just one expression of deeply seated messianic sensibilities. This posture fails to lead to the sort of deep and searching self-judgment that can free a soul, or a TV show, from the sort of shallow self-seriousness that in the end makes anyone seem less believably human, and so less worthy of admiration.

When Bartlet calls God a "feckless thug," we see a man who is understandably and believably angry, reeling at both the (seemingly) senseless death of a longtime friend and a personal crisis that threatens his presidency.

As Bartlet rages at God, though, it becomes disappointingly clear that he sees himself as something like a heavenly power broker: he had, he reminds God, created jobs, fed the hungry, and even managed to get a good liberal on the bench.

"I was your servant here on Earth," he spiels—in Latin, to boot. "And I spread your Word and I did your work. To hell with your punishments. To hell with you."

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October 1 2001, Vol. 45, No. 12