Steve Benen notes that Barack Obama's selection of Joe Biden as a running mate only adds to the eerie similarities between real life and The West Wing (and real life again):
Everyone remembers the seventh season of "The West Wing," right? A young, charismatic, relatively inexperienced member of Congress, who happens to be part of a minority group, endures through a lengthy and contentious Democratic primary season, and defies the odds against a better known and better tested party favorite to win the nomination. Waiting for him is an older Republican senator from out west, who's occasionally rankled various constituencies in his own party.
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan posts a comment from one of his readers that includes:
The problem for Obama is that, given his age, biography and the seemingly relative ease with which he has ascended, his success just gets to people. He is a vessel for all their pent up angst against what they see as the alleged favorable treatment that being black affords due to "liberal bias" and its accursed affirmative action policies.
Sullivan's reader argues that resentment toward Obama's "easy
success" is inextricably bound with racism, and that's probably so in
this case, but the genius who achieves success early in life is a
common figure in literature and drama -- and he's rarely someone the
audience roots for. Amadeus, Citizen Kane, and Capote
are about audacious young men who outshine their elders, seemingly with
little effort, and are satisfyingly punished with short lives or slow,
painful declines. (On TV, Mad Men may yet fall in this
category; advertising whiz Don Draper is certainly on that path.) In
contrast, unambiguously heroic films, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Rocky,
or any Judy Garland biopic, are about people who get to the top by
insanely hard work and a generous dose of luck (which is much more
respectable than intellectual brilliance.) That's why presidential
contenders so often try to pass themselves off as Harry Truman, the
accidental president known more for tenacity than for brainpower.
Almost all of us have been passed, at some point in our careers, by
someone younger who hasn't "paid his dues" and seems to succeed with
little effort. At these times, it's easy to channel the fictional
version of Antonio Salieri ... or the real-life Geraldine Ferraro.
