THE LEADERSHIP BREAKFAST

Toby wants to use a bipartisan breakfast to discuss real issues instead of making it a staged event; Sam floats the idea of moving the press room across the street; Leo wants Josh to apologize to a columnist on his behalf; Leo and Toby realize they need to start thinking about reelection. (c/o IMDb)

Holy crap – suddenly The West Wing is about politics.

If “Galileo” was about the illusion of civility, then “The Leadership Breakfast” is about a tattered veil in front of a cage of snarling dogs. The gamesmanship involved in seating people for the titular breakfast takes up the entire cold open. Just introducing a potential debate about a minor clause to an extant bill takes an all-day meeting and hard negotiation. Everyone in this episode has an agenda and everyone is scheming to achieve it.

The head schemer, of course, is Ann Stark, Chief of Staff to the Senate Majority Leader, played by Sorkin veteran Felicity Huffman. She portrays a younger and more bubbly leader than she did on Sports Night – not to say that she’s empty-headed, but she’s more playful than the harried Dana Whitaker. Of course, as the post-breakfast press conference proves, she’s also far more vicious.

Ann begins laying the groundwork for her “hit” at breakfast with Toby, when she bestows on him with a can of New Hampshire maple syrup. “Where’s my present?” she pouts. At first we take it as a jest, only to later realize that this is how Ann operates. Everything must be tit-for-tat. She wouldn’t be giving Toby a can of New Hampshire maple syrup unless it put him in her debt, albeit symbolically.

It’s also a very artful way of implying something that the episode makes obvious without ever putting into words: that Toby and Ann have a romantic history. Toby tries to persuade Leo into letting him sit down with Ann – the executive officer for the President’s chief rival – and has to reluctantly admit that he “know[s] her a little.” Ann teases Toby about how he “used to be fun” and asks him what she should wear to breakfast the next morning. Everything about their relationship is obvious, but it goes unsaid.

We see this in more humorous ways, too, like when Sam is press ganged into going to dinner with Karen Cahill, a New York Times columnist whom he’s terribly nervous about impressing. He pats himself on the back afterward for having spoken so cleverly, until he becomes convinced that he confused Kyrgyzstan for Kazahkstan. To smooth over the malapropism, he sends Donna to chat with her. Donna thinks she impressed her, until realizing that an extra pair of underwear fell out of her pant leg in front of Cahill. For those keeping score at home, that’s two episodes of Sports Night that Sorkin self-plagiarized from (S2E2 “When Something Wicked This Way Comes” and S2E4 “Louise Revisited”). When you consider that he imported Felicity Huffman, I think we score this as a trifecta.

Either way, the implication, and the theme, is the same: there’s no such thing as a harmless meal. Breaking bread in D.C. is not a moment of communion. In fact, that’s when you redouble the pressure, because the other side might have his guard down. There’s the meal, of course, but there are also things that can and can’t be said. Like raising the minimum wage, or how could you do this to me after all those years?, and the like.

One last note: I objected, very early on, about the beatific glow that surrounds President Bartlet. He’s a man without faults, only quirks. “The Leadership Breakfast” changed that, and it waited until the very end to do it. Toby and Leo, considering the impact of the day’s events, decide to kickstart the President’s re-election effort. The problem: they can’t tell Bartlet about it. Bartlet, the moody philosopher, wouldn’t have the stomach to start his re-election campaign that early. For once, Bartlet’s intellectualism, his academic remove from the concerns of petty politics, is treated as a flaw.

It’s an unexpected direction. It’s a refreshing change. And it also means there’s a war coming.