- In "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet" Leo says that "everything you do says 'For God's sake, Leo, I don't want to be a one-term President'" and yet we learn in "Two Cathedrals" that the President had an agreement with his wife that he would only serve one term. So which is it?
- Anybody notice how during Bartlet's first year in office, even the President himself assumed he would be running for a second term?
In the first season's "The Short List" retiring Supreme Court Justice Crouch
is giving the President a hard time about having run a great campaign but
moving to the middle of the road once assuming office. As the President is
trying to placate him by saying he will nominate a more liberal justice the
next time, and he has a re-election to consider in three years, Justice
Crouch tells him bluntly that the Republicans will win the next election
because they have guts and the American public appreciates that.
Of course we now know that there was supposed to be a pact between the
President and the First Lady that he would not be running for a second term.
Many people wrote us about this but it took us so long to get a page done that we have misplaced those emails.
- Bartlet calls on one "Secretary of Health and Education" in "Twenty-Five". That is a position which doesn't exist outside the West Wing's world.
So, what are the cabinet positions in the outside (real?) world?
- Immediately after the show ended, we heard from Craig T. Fifer, who wrote: "there is no 'Secretary of Health and Education' in our world, as
the cabinet roll call indicated. Our cabinet is listed at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cabinet.html. The President also did not seem to call the roll in any particular order (not alphabetical, not in order of succession or reverse order of succession, and not even in the order they were sitting around the table)."
Here is a list of the cabinet positions:
- Secretary of State
- Secretary of Treasury
- Secretary of Defense
- Attorney General
- Secretary of Interior
- Secretary of Agriculture
- Secretary of Commerce
- Secretary of Labor
- Secretary of Health & Human Services
- Secretary of Housing & Urban Development
- Secretary of Transportation
- Secretary of Energy
- Secretary of Education
- Secretary of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Homeland Security
Then there are the cabinet rank positions:
Cabinet Rank Members
- The Vice President
- President's Chief of Staff
- Environmental Protection Agency
- United States Trade Representative
- Office of Management and Budget Director
- Office of National Drug Control Policy
- We also heard from Peter E. Perkowski who emailed: "when President Bartlet was calling the roll of cabinet members, he called on the 'Secretary of Health & Education.' There is no such Cabinet position. Current cabinet positions... include the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In fact, there never was a Department of Health and Education. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare was created in 1953, and it was redesignated the Department of Health and Human Services in 1979 at the same time the Department of Education was created. See http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/preface.htm
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One Term or Two?
