This year's US presidential election has proved uncannily similar to the plot line of the final few seasons of American political drama The West Wing. The show's character of Matt Santos - a young, inexperienced Democrat politician with a message of hope and change, who becomes the first memeber of an ethnic minority to run for President - was explicitly based on Barack Obama, several years before he actually ran for President. The show's writers even got in touch with David Axelrod, Obama's political advisor, to ask for background details.
Freaky, huh, so what happened next...
Having defeated one of his party's best known figures in the primaries, Santos goes up against an cantankerous old, white, moderate Republican from a western state (Alan Alda's Arnold Vinick), who has a reputation as a maverick, but placates his party's base by picking a vice-presidential candidate he doesn't particularly like from the religious right - just as later happened in the real race. In contrast, Santos picks an experienced party stalwart with lots of foreign policy experience as his vice-president, just as Obama did. The race eventually turns in Santos' favour after a meltdown (nuclear, rather than financial) brings the Republican's past policies into question.
But there's more...
The similarities got really weird when John McCain's team accidentally included a photograph of the location where Santos announced his run for President as the backdrop for McCain's Republican convention speech. And to top it off, actor Jimmy Smits, who played Santos, has recently been introducing Obama at campaign rallies.
And that's not all...
If the plot line of the West Wing holds true, it's bad news for Obama's vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden - he's scheduled to die of a heart attack some time in the next 24 hours.
Matt Santos announces his candidacy by talking about hope - sound familiar?
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