I am, as regular readers may have noticed, a bit of a fan of the West Wing. The dialogue, the characters and a lot of the plot lines make for most excellent televisual viewing.

However, that doesn’t mean that I agree with the depiction of the White House. I’m sure that it wasn’t a million miles away from the real life workings of the actual West Wing, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right.

Looking at it, the two big issues I have are:

• Over centralisation – every little message is coordinated from the centre, with every department of government being micromanaged and their PR being dealt with entirely by spin.
• Lack of any real idea of the limitation of power, or the separation of powers. The White House bullies pretty much everyone, trying with Congress, the Courts, the States and even individual counties within those States.

It would appear that, in some ways at least, the Obama White House has some of the same flaws as the Bush one and the Clinton one had before.

Well, there’s a hopeful change, isn’t it…