If verisimilitude were the benchmark for dramatic success, then writer and producer Aaron Sorkin, creator of the popular and iconoclastic television series The West Wing, would score one hundred percent. So real has his presidential character, Josiah Bartlet, become to the viewing audience, that almost one third of viewers wanted to vote for him for president in the 2000 election--more than opted for either of the two actual front-running candidates, Al Gore or George W. Bush, in an unofficial CNN poll. At the time of the 2000 election, Donna Shalala, then a member of President Bill Clinton's cabinet as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was also pro-Bartlet. "He's your dream candidate for president of the United States," she told Beth Nissen for CNN.com. "He's a moral man, an intellectual. He thinks through issues, he struggles. He shows the complexity of decision-making in the...