It was no secret that life imitated art this past election, as, throughout the campaign season, fans of NBC’s The West Wing couldn’t help but draw parallels between the junior senator from Illionois who would become President of the United States and the freshman congressman from Texas who did the same thing in the fictional world of Jed Bartlet and Josh Lyman. (Indeed, these parallels were augmented by reports that Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama actually were the inspiration for Josh Lyman and Matt Santos.)
For the most part, events in the show coincided with how they actually played out in real life, with one glaring, often overlooked, exception: pardons. After wrestling with the issue of whether or not to commute the sentence of former advisor Toby Ziegler, who had been the source of a leak of top-secret information regarding the space program, President Bartlet, just hours before the end of his term, signs Ziegler’s pardon.
Scooter Libby found himself in an eerily similar position, but with a less forgiving president at the helm; his pardon was never signed. Even the geniuses behind The West Wing can’t get it right every time.