I'm in one meeting the whole day. All they did was feed me tea made with Tienchi Ginseng and deer horn glue. You see, it's the thing for the nerve damage. But that meant I had to piss every twelve minutes, which is more of an ordeal than it was when I could stand without assistance. The new kid, Curtis, and I are becoming very close.
S6Impact Winter
Cabinet meeting?
...an informal conversation with senior members of the administration.
President doesn't need the Cabinet swooping in on their shining steeds.
Wanna step into your office or something?
The president is still running the show, on two continents. Russell can stop with the less than subtle insinuations to the contrary. There will be no cabinet meeting.
It's been announced. You don't think it will be more awkward if it doesn't happen.
You know what? Watch yourself. You and the candidate.
You done?
No. Free advice for the campaign trail - stop with the ceaseless mentions of his tennis game. Doesn't make him look young and vigorous, it makes him look like a dilettante who can't settle down with a thick book.
Wheels down in Beijing in a minute or so.
[Will leaves]
A cabinet meeting.
You really think all the talk about tennis makes him look flaky?
No, I think it makes him look young and vigorous.
I just looked at the tape.
Vinick's announcement? Makes you want to cry like a little girl, doesn't it?
It's a tough primary for him. I wouldn't tear my shirt yet.
Russell offered me campaign manager.
Really?
Turned him down. Hoynes asked too.
Popular. You change your cologne or something?
Think Hoynes could win?
With Baker out? Russell's got a huge financial advantage. Sitting VP, he's going to raise a lot more money and he's in a position to offer a lot more favors.
Hoynes is a guy without a job.
That said, Hoynes is much more experienced in the job that Bob Russell holds, he was elected senator of a huge, complicated, and usually Republican state and Russell got elected representative of a district the size of my thumb.
Hoynes is smarter than Russell. He'll kick his ass in the debates.
And he's got more foreign policy experience. It could happen. But you gotta want to work for him and you gotta want him to win. You want that?
I want to get Jed Bartlet a third term.
Yeah. What happened to the good old days when a couple of hacks with cigars chose the nominee in a smoke-filled back room?
They didn't do so bad, did they? Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower.
We need a back room.
Well, we just about outlawed smoking and at this point I'm not allowed to look at a cigar. But we're it. You and me. This is the back room.
S6Faith Based Initiative
If I'd wanted to exercise, I'd have never become an economist.
Is upholding the sanctity of marriage our job? I raised my right hand and swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.
SWSen. Wilkinson
Where was your left hand, Mr. President?
[to Josh, about leaving to run Santos' campaign] You can't leave. We're not done here.... You're going to walk into the Oval Office and tell the President you just found a better horse?
What are you going to do when this is done?
Whatever I can to stave off the chaos, mayhem and self-interest that lies just beneath our civil disguise.
So, not the private sector?
The money would have to be unbelievable.
I wanted to start this journey in the place where it all started for me. Soon, we will be inundated by the polls, the punditry, and prognostications, all the nonsense that goes with our national political campaigns. Well, none of that matters. This is the place that matters. Because everyday, children walk in to this schoolhouse to glimpse their futures, to ask for hope. They may not know they need it yet, but they do. And I'm here to tell you that hope is real. In a life of trials, in the world of challenges, hope is real. In a country where families go without health care, where some go without food, some don't even have a home to speak of, hope is real. In a time of global chaos and instability where our faiths collide, as often as our weapons, hope is real. Hope is what gives us the courage to take on our greatest challenges, to move forward together. We live in cynical times, I know that. But hope is not up for debate. There is such a thing as false science, there is such a thing as false promises, I am sure I will have my share of false starts. But there is no such thing as false hope. There is only hope.
S6Opposition Research
[after Santos admits he only became a candidate to get a couple of months of media exposure for his education plan] I gave up everything for this! You aren't even in it to win?
Maybe we have a different definition of winning, Josh.
You're not making it easy.
Well, you know if we're going to do this, I'm not going to make it easy.... I'm going to push every limit. And that's the campaign you get to run.
What if I can't make that work?
Well, then no one can.
One idea is a big fund raising drive in the Latino community.
I don't feel comfortable with that right now.
Its a huge donor base you alone can tap.
Josh, I don't wanna just be the brown candidate, I want to be the American candidate.
How do you want to go broke? As the brown candidate or the American candidate?
I want this to be a campaign of ideas... and these campaigns always wind up being about a candidate's high school transcripts.... You know, if we just took the money the campaign spent on personality contests and partisan side shows, we could solve this country's problems and shut down talk radio, all at the same time.
New Hampshire is about retail politics. People here won't vote for you until you've had coffee in their house five times.
S6365 Days
We've been here seven trips around the sun. Done some things we're proud of, things we're less pleased about... It may be time for us to take our own temperature; an internal inventory... What's done. What's undone. What's done that we'd like to undo or do over.
Overwhelming response to the State of the Union. Thirty-six interruptions for applause.
I don't know what's more embarrassing: that we count them or that I care.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's The West Wing pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.