At the end of one episode of the US drama series The West Wing, which chronicled the fictional presidency of Josiah 'Jed' Bartlett (Martin Sheen, pictured), the key characters sit on a stoop sharing a beer. Their efforts to increase Democrat numbers in the Congress have failed but as the music swells and the screen fades they raise a toast: 'God Bless America'.
These public servants are cynical about many things, but never their country.
Australian liberals were drawn to the program's political vision, and the integrity of its hero, leader of the Democratic Administration President Josiah Bartlett. But The West Wing exposed stark national differences. To Australian viewers the patriotic idealism was unbearably corny. But wasn't there something magnificent there too?
We Australians don't do magnificence. The American vision excels at the grand scale, while our monuments, our fiction, and our food portions are of a humbler nature. The publisher Ivor Indyk has identified it as a kind of national 'shyness'. That shyness is nowhere clearer than in our political rhetoric.
In November last year Australians voted for a new government, hoping, it seemed, for the kind of change Jed Bartlett was committed to bringing to his country. But recall Rudd's acceptance speech and it's clear what different worlds Jed and Kevin belong to. The crowd greeting him at Brisbane's Suncorp Stadium was ecstatic but the new Prime Minister seemed determined to keep a lid on things.
He began with a sobering, 'Okay guys', and with the measured tones of a diligent scout master, plodded through a list of platitudes.
Not surprisingly, there is a greater resonance between Bartlett and presidential candidate, Barack Obama — the obvious intelligence, the liberal progressiveness and, above all, the sweeping oratory. The creator of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin, even wrote an op-ed for The New York Times imagining Bartlett visiting Obama to give advice.
But even in his wildest flights of lyrical idealism, Sorkin never came up with the kind of language Obama has been wooing the world with. Take this from the speech he delivered after Hilary Clinton's win at the New Hampshire Primary in January:
Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can.
It