Today is Dennis Perrin’s birthday, and he’s feeling wistful:
While watching “The West Wing” the other night, I caught the episodes where the Ann Coulterish blonde reactionary is invited to join the White House legal team, and her struggles to be taken seriously by the liberals who staff it, when not weathering their unveiled contempt. Of all of Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasies, this one actually rang true for me, though, as usual, it’s the über-good liberals of the “Wing” who ultimately embrace their ideological opposite, showing us once again just how unflinchingly loyal they are to their inclusive values. Sorkin can’t pass up angelic displays like that. And when the faux-Coulter informs her rightwing friends that her new liberal co-workers are “patriots”? Oohh. The chill, the spinal chill . . . what better or purer endorsement?
All that heavenly imagery and rhetoric aside, I did connect to this storyline, simply because I experienced something like it, though at a more mundane level.
In the Summer of ’92, I was hired as the Managing Editor for New York Perspectives…
The rest of the story, involving the political and personal evolution of a once-hardcore Reaganite, and his early death, is here.