KEY POINTS:
Reality will follow fiction.. Barack Obama is going to become President of the United States on Tuesday. It was foretold. - in The West Wing, the hit television drama about the Presidency.
For all of this year the writers of the series - it ended in 2006 -
have been watching in amazement as the path of Barack Obama mirrors that of the Matthew Santos, the young, chiseled Hispanic Democrat Presidential contender played four years ago by actor Jimmy Smits.
The parallels between The West Wing and what has unfolded in this US Presidential campaign are striking. Both the fictional and real White House races revolved around an unlikely, though charismatic, candidate from an ethnic background daring to take on America's political establishment and bridge the country's racial divide.
Matthew Santos, Smits character, was a forty something father of two. He was a coalition builder and a new comer to national politics, deeply frustrated by Washington' entrenched networks. "I am here to tell you that hope is real," he says when announcing his candidacy. Sound like anyone else?
And when Santos's aids try to get him to launch a fundraising drive within his Latino community, the candidate responds: "I don't want to be just the brown candidate. I want to be the American candidate." The line could be Obama's manta.
Just like Santos, Obama also listens to Bob Dylan. And in the series he was up against an older, silver haired Republican candidate , played by Alan Alda - the leading character in the Korean war drama, MASH. Alda just happens to be John McCain's 72 years and, just like McCain, Alder's character endured criticism from his own party that he was not conservative enough , His age was an issue . He was antitax and prided himself on 'straight talk' to the press. Yep, McCain, all over.
In another unerving coincidence with the 2008 campaign, The West Wing's televised leaders' debate between Smits and Alder (they actually did it live, too) centred on rocketing fuel prices and America's dependence on foreign oil.
Perhaps we should not be too surprised that fiction has foreshadowed reality. When Eli Attie, a writer for The West Wing, was thinking about the storyline of a young, ethnic Democrat's bold Presidential campaign, he called David Axelrod, a former Chicago newspaperman. The year was 2004 and Axelrod was working for Barack Obama who had just come to national prominence after making an electrifying speech to that year's Democratic National Convention. Now Obama's chief strategist, Axelrod laid out some of Obama's background and principles for the show's writers.
He could not have foreseen the parallels with the show that would later unfold for Obama - even down to the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team making the World Series finals in during The West Wing's Presidential race. The Phillies reappeared on Wednesday night to win the real thing.
And the outcome of Matthew Santos's shot at the Presidency?
He won - but only just.
