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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

If you were a dedicated viewer of the West Wing’s final series, relax, you’re not going mad, the rise of Barack Obama really is spectacularly close to the WW’s storyline of how an outsider Democratic wannabe presidential nominee ultimately reaches the White House.

Some of the coincidences, detailed below, are downright uncanny.

But the story gets even weirder. Barack Obama, even before he became a senator, turns out to have been a major inspiration for the West Wing’s key final series storyline. Reality into fiction into reality :

Both the real and imagined (West Wing TV show) campaigns have centred on a young, charismatic candidate from an ethnic minority, daring to take on an establishment workhorse with a promise to transcend race and heal America’s partisan divide.

But there’s a twist.

For what those West Wing fans stunned by the similarity between the fictitious Matthew Santos and the real-life Barack Obama have not known is that the resemblance is no coincidence. When the West Wing scriptwriters first devised their fictitious presidential candidate in the late summer of 2004, they modelled him in part on a young Illinois politician - not yet even a US senator - by the name of Barack Obama.

The result is a bizarre case of art imitating life - only for life to imitate art back again.

In the TV show, Santos begins as the rank outsider up against a national figure famous for standing at the side of a popular Democratic president. There are doubts about Santos’s inexperience, having served just a few years in Congress, and about his ability to persuade voters to back an ethnic minority candidate - even as his own ethnic group harbour suspicions that he might not identify with them sufficiently.

But the soaring power of his rhetoric, his declaration that the old divisions belong in the past and his sheer magnetism, ensure that he comes from behind in a fiercely close primary campaign and draws level with his once all-commanding opponent. Every aspect of that storyline has come true for Barack Obama. Axelrod, now chief strategist for the Obama campaign, recently joked in an email to Attie: “We’re living your scripts!”

What’s more, the West Wing had the Republicans choose between a Christian preacher - a pre-echo of Mike Huckabee - and an older, maverick senator from the American west whose liberal positions on some issues had earned the distrust of the party’s conservative base: a dead ringer for John McCain.

In the West Wing, the McCain figure emerges comfortably as the party’s choice. Apparently the character was not based on the current Republican frontrunner, but was simply a function of the casting of Alan Alda.

“It was always an inside joke on the West Wing that the show had a prophetic quality…”

It’s also interesting to remember that when the final series of the West Wing was written, Hillary Clinton was deemed to not only be the rolled-gold choice for the Democratic nomination but all but a sure thing to win the 2008 presidential elections.

Even President Bush had a few chuckles about the whole “Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton” thing, referring to the fact that if Hillary Clinton were to win two terms in the West Wing, the most powerful political office in the world would have been ruled by members of two elite American families for three decades. Four decades if you accept that then vice-president George HW Bush was pulling most of Ronald Reagan’s strings during his final years in the White House.

Barack Obama? It was never supposed to be this way. Hillary had been promised the top job, and it was hers for the taking. Which is why the fight will get even nastier. Which is why the ‘Obama Is Gay’ rumours will begin, within a week or two.

Camp Hillary has got nothing left. Obama will be the Democratic presidential nomination. Unless, of course, he suddenly develops cancer, or has a brain anueryism, or the ‘gay thing’ really hits him hard.

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