Barack Obama will win: it's all in The West Wing
By Daniel Hannon
Alright, I'm calling the US election. Barack Obama will win, but not by nearly as much as people are predicting.
How can I be so sure? Because, as in some South American magical-realist novel, the whole campaign is following the plot of The West Wing.
It's downright eerie. To see how much Barack Obama resembles Matt Santos, the fictional Democratic contender, watch this clip.
Many critics have understandably accused Obama of plagiarising a make-believe character. But, weirdly, it turns out to be the other way around. Earlier this year, a West Wing writer called Eli Attie, who worked as Al Gore's chief speechwriter on 2000, admitted that the Santos character had been modelled on Obama, then a new senator.
What no one has explained, though, is how The West Wing managed to prophesy the Republican primaries, too. Aficionados of the programme will remember the way the GOP nomination seemed to be sown up for a conservative. Instead, Republicans plumped for an old dude, a maverick Southwestern senator whose liberal positions enraged the party base. But the old senator was enough of a politician to pick a God, guts'n'guns conservative as his running-mate, and went into the campaign with a lead in the polls over his inexperienced rival.
Then something happened which no one could have predicted. In the West Wing it was a nuclear meltdown in California. In real life it was the financial cataclysm. The effect was the same in both cases: to discredit the old Republican and give the young Democrat a massive lead. By polling day, everyone was expecting a walkover. Only the two campaign chiefs, Josh and Bruno, sensed that something was amiss. It turned out that the polls had been wrong. Lots of people had been reluctant to admit that they wouldn't vote for the pro-change Democrat, his party's first non-white candidate. It's what pollsters - real-life pollsters, I mean - call "the Bradley Effect" (though the phenomenon may be overstated). So, if life continues to imitate art, we can expect the campaign to go to the wire, and Santos - sorry Obama - to win by a single state.
As for my own preference, I'm mulling over your advice, and I'll declare on Thursday. Not that my opinions will have the slightest impact, of course. The thing was fated when Aaron Sorkin took up his pen. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.
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