Of Setting The Bar So Low, I Can Hardly Look At It
"When we gave this to CJ, I never dreamed I'd be using it instead."
Leo turned around blankly and stared for a second. "Oh," he finally registered. "Yeah." He trailed a hand along the top, coming to look at the two peaceful faces.
"I mean, I knew we were going to be fathers," Josh said with a reverent awe and sadness. "I knew we were going to be using them, just not instead." He bowed his head over the twins before looking over at Leo. "We're not ready for this."
"You're never ready," Leo remarked. "You just hope they come out in one piece and that you've got enough people around you to-what are you making a face at?"
"I was talking about reelection."
A pause.
"Josh, I pity anyone trying to have a conversation with you."
"Yeah." He found himself smiling a little. "Sorry about that. But I meant Ritchie. I'm not sure we're ready for this kind of election."
"What do you mean?" Leo gestured for them to step back from the crib and led the way to the next room. "He's a Florida Republican with one-liners, Josh. What do you want from me?"
"He's appealing to the lowest instead of the highest. He's the opposite of the real thing, the opposite of the President. I'm not even sure they can be in the same room together without the end of the world coming." Josh halted, horrified at his own words. "No, I misspoke, because we already had our own personal end of the world, and came out of it."
"Yeah." Leo gazed at Josh from the depths of an armchair. "So, Josh, what do you want from me?"
"We've got to cream him so thoroughly that the public will never again consider voting for someone that stupid."
"Josh, so help me, if you say that in the Oval Office..."
"I'll ask Donna to polish it up for me." Josh's pause was eloquent and he could feel himself turning scarlet. "I mean, that is, I'll, you know, just not say anything..."
"We let you work for the President?"
"Sorry."
"You know, Josh," Leo said, leaning forward a little, "I said something to the President during the first campaign about being tired of the bar being set so low for the highest office in the nation."
"Can I say that?" Josh asked.
"No."
"Then why did you-"
"I agree with you." Leo leaned back again and lifted a hand to his chin. "CJ said we were going to have to meet expectations."
"But they're so low that-"
"She didn't say whose, Josh, she said we'd have to meet them. And she said that sometimes politics, like school, is about raising your hand and asking the question instead of sitting quietly in your seat, being afraid to learn or be laughed at or whatever it is with that particular person."
"You want us to apply the broader theme to the election?" Josh's brow wrinkled up in amazed confusion. "Leo, that's for, I don't know, education reform, appealing to everyone without being stupid-" he stopped. "Oh. Yeah."
"Thank you," his boss responded dryly. "I'm going home. You're staying up here tonight?"
"Yeah, I drew the short straw," Josh revealed, trying not to smirk.
"You look too happy for it to have been a short straw."
"Yeah, yeah, it's my turn," Josh grinned openly.
"Good night. Try not to break anything."
After Leo left, Josh went back to the crib and stood there, gazing down at the two infants, thinking.
As dawn glimmered its way into the room, Josh looked up and smiled.
"Setting the bar so low," he murmured. "Expectations. Thanks, you two." He bent and kissed them gently.
"I've been told," Toby said gravely, "that you want to say something about land mines."
The Poet Laureate looked over at him, her hair flying a little about her face in the wind. "Yeah, I want to talk about land mines. They're horrible things, Toby. Children step on them and-"
"I know what land mines can do," Toby stopped her with a raised hand. "I know what they can do," he repeated.
"Okay." She glanced aside in a gesture reminding Toby of Andi. "Yet you came here with the intention of telling me I can't speak my mind."
"Tabitha, if you talk about this now, it will be the story."
"I want it to be the story!"
"And then it won't go anywhere."
"How do you know?"
"This is what I do, that's why. You write poetry, I'm a political operative."
"Hey, it's good poetry," she objected.
"And actually, that's not why I came here," he continued. "I came here to tell you that there are definitely chances for you to speak your mind, although perhaps more subtly than you want, on this subject."
"Just not now." It was both question and disappointment.
"Right." He dug around in a pocket briefly before coming up with a piece of paper. "Here's some information on organizations you could support and places you could speak out on this. And I agree with you. We need to not have land mines. But there's a lot of things we need to not have." He pressed it into her hand and stood. "Thank you. I'll see you later."
"Excuse me," she protested, rising indignantly. "That's it? You're so rushed that I get, what was that, four minutes?"
"About five minutes, and yes, I'm a little busy right now. We're running for reelection and I'm doing seventy-five percent more than my normal job at the White House, which was originally about one hundred percent more than most sane people consider to be a job."
"Okay." She frowned. "I get five minutes because one of your colleagues died?"
"You get five minutes because this is the big leagues and this is an election year, and yes, because someone died, and she wasn't a colleague, she was a friend. I have to get back." He turned away again.
"Whoa." He turned about again, glowering now. "A friend?"
He came back and stood right in front of her. "Yes. And if you can write a poem in the next three hours that I feel does justice to her, then you can speak on land mines now. Otherwise, please stop bothering me. It's a worthy cause and I understand, but you can't talk about it right now." With that, he turned around with finality and walked away, leaving her staring after him.
Nine hours later, she gave up on the poem. Toby was right, and so she reached for the paper he had given her and started looking at it with real interest.
In early April, Carol Fitzpatrick stood icily at the podium as she was asked if she was outraged over the girls who had died in a fire in Saudi Arabia.
"I'm barely surprised," she remarked at the end of what was, for her, a scathing diatribe, and Danny, who had reluctantly returned to the press room, noted that for all the fire in her voice, her eyes had been sad, not sardonic or angry, as he knew they could be. This was another reflection of violence, and so Danny wrote it, ignoring the protests of his editor.
He was affirmed in his decision when Donna got up later in the day and made similar remarks, all but coming out and saying the hate mail had already begun pouring into both their inboxes.
They could have used the hate mail, but they didn't. Curious, Danny wandered back to Carol's office the next day and asked her about it.
"Been getting hate mail?"
"Close the notebook."
"It's closed."
"Really?" She turned around and studied him. "This is off the record?"
"I'm just curious." He leaned against the doorway and she watched his eyes grow sorrowful as they traveled around and fixed on CJ's door. "I wonder how much she'd be getting now."
"A lot more," Carol answered firmly, turning back to her computer for a moment. "I was nice."
"You scorched their ears off," he said, almost laughing.
"Yeah, I'm getting it."
"Why aren't you doing anything with it?"
"I'm giving it to the Secret Service, and they don't discuss procedures."
"I mean, you could use it against them."
"Danny." She sighed and gave him her full focus. "One. That'd be giving them more attention, which is the last thing they need. Two. I'd be letting them know it actually got here and possibly bothered me, which is the last thing they need. And three. It's not what CJ would have done, and it's not what we want."
"Yeah, okay," he sighed after a minute. "Are any of them serious?"
"Why do we let you back here?" she asked, getting up out of her chair as though to shoo him away.
"You like me."
"Maybe I don't."
"Let me be here," he begged, suddenly sobering and touching her shoulder.
She looked up at him. "If that's what it takes. But you have to see the twins first."
"Aww, c'mon..."
"Danny, they're almost three months old and very cute. And you can't spend much time back here."
"How does Donna feel?"
"About the mail? The same way," she answered his nod.
"But she's got Josh."
"Danny, I think if she could she'd forgive you."
"Yeah, but she can't, and I've got a guilty conscience, so here I am."
"Reporters can have guilty consciences?"
"Yes."
She wanted to roll her eyes, but couldn't in the face of Danny's obvious guilt. "You don't get to hear what Josh thinks of the mail. Come on up to the Residence and see them." She pulled his arm gently.
"So when are they getting married?" he inquired innocently. She laughed.
"You get to find out when the rest of us do. Come on."
"I hear things about the President's youngest daughter and a certain--"
"Ah-ah," she cut him off. "We're off the record. And we don't talk about the personal lives of our staff."
"I'm not here as a reporter; I want to be a friend."
Carol pulled up short at a doorway and turned around. "You can't be," she told him.
"I want to."
"Danny," she shook her head. "You're forgetting some things. This is going to throw away your job and possibly other jobs, and while we all like you too, we'd rather have you as a reporter who's a friend to this administration, not a friend to us personally."
He drew back and looked down. "Yeah. I know. I was just-you know..."
"I know." She turned back. "Come on. They might be awake now."
"Who pulled daddy duty?"
Carol chuckled softly. "Toby's got them for a while today. We've got to work something out eventually; they're not quite old enough yet that we want to bring them into the West Wing."
"Yeah. They're cute?"
"Very."
"What is this?" Sam asked a couple of weeks later, turning the package over in his hands.
"I don't know," Ginger replied, raising pale eyebrows as if to ask him when he thought she had time to go get X-ray vision.
"A tape," he mused, pulling it out. "Okay. I'm pretty tired, but I'm just going to-" he started backing toward his office "-go watch this."
"Watch out for the moose."
He jumped and turned, looked, then turned back. Ginger just smirked at him and continued working. "Thanks," he griped at her. "I already had a permanent fear of moose."
"Glad to help out." Sam muttered something under his breath and went into his office.
Five minutes later, he came out, looking upset. "I need Bruno."
As if via relay, Bruno and then the regular senior staff trickled through Communications and then downstairs.
"Jed Bartlet. What's he hiding from us now?" the voice on the ad demanded.
"Burn it," Donna suggested immediately.
"We don't have it, we've never seen it," Bruno said. "Put it in a drawer and forget about it, Sam."
Sam had been staring angrily at them; he jumped up now and said, "No. I want to meet with Kevin Kahn and give it back."
"You're out of your mind," Toby said, voice approaching a shout.
"Carol," Bruno directed, "could you tell Sam why it would be bad to give it back?"
"Bait," she answered, not even looking up.
Sam looked around again and suddenly deflated. "Okay. Burning or a drawer?" he asked.
"A big, full drawer," Josh directed.
As they broke up and started to go upstairs, Josh went over to Sam. "What was with you?"
"Huh?"
"I thought we were going to have to spend another half hour arguing you down from giving it back. What's with you?"
Sam looked at him, blue eyes disturbed. "You're not going to believe it."
"You were remembering Mallory and then her dad would yell at you and be right?"
"No."
"Well?"
"You're not going to believe it," Sam repeated, staring toward a corner of the room. Josh slowly rotated his head to look that way, then looked back.
"Earth to Sam."
He blinked and rubbed his eyes, then turned around and picked up his suit jacket. "I thought I saw CJ over there," he whispered. Josh's eyes grew huge.
"You're right. Yet for some reason, I don't think you're crazy," he confessed as they went up the stairs.
Thus did the Ritchie campaign lose another chance to gain ground.
"I just told Charlie to start looking for a new Executive Secretary," the President told Leo a couple of weeks later, apparently at random.
"Hmm?" Leo looked up with an absentminded expression.
"A new Executive Secretary," his leader prodded.
"Oh. That's excellent, sir."
"I suppose sometime," he continued slowly, "I'll have to name a new Press Secretary too."
"When you're ready, Mr. President, but we've been managing all right," Leo told him after a minute of eloquent silence.
"I don't want whoever it is to use the office."
"Absolutely, sir."
"Charlie went out with Zoey last night," he groused, apropo of absolutely nothing. Leo smirked broadly, as he had years before. The President shook his head at him. "Mallory and Sam?" he asked, smirking a little himself.
"Mr. President," Leo grumbled.
"Josh and Donna are adorable."
"Sir."
"You don't want to talk about weddings and romance, Leo?"
"No, sir. I came in here for something else."
The President considered his friend's expression and mulled over what had been occurring recently and put it together with upcoming events. "They cancelled?"
"Yes, sir."
"Any idea why?"
"It's possible they're pissed about the base," Leo confessed, leaning on the desk a little.
"Possible?" Jed tossed off.
"Okay, they're pissed about the base."
"Are they pissed at me, or at the country?" the President asked, voice lowered.
"Mostly at you, but this is Qumar we're discussing, so really-"
"Yeah." He stewed for a minute. "Don't they have anything better to do with their time than get pissed at us?"
"They're setting the bar pretty low, sir, I have to admit." Leo straightened. "Anyway, I thought you should know, and also we've revised your campaign stop schedule accordingly."
"Okay. Thank you, Leo."
"Thank you, Mr. President."
Slowly the President's gaze turned to a ten-page memo that had been sitting on his desk for almost four months. The edges were turned up, as though he had flipped through it again and again, not reading it.
He'd read it once a week, actually. Slowly, he reached for it again and flipped two pages until he reached a certain section, and read it, lips moving as he murmured the words.
"The Ritchie campaign said WHAT?"
"They said that you and Donna have been having an affair since the first campaign," Sam supplied reluctantly.
"They can shove it up their--Leo, can I go tell them to shove it up their asses?"
"No," Leo replied definitively. "Absolutely not. We strike back on this visibly and we lose."
"If they feel free to make those kinds of attacks, then we'll lose anyway! Leo, come on!" Josh bounced a little as he begged to be let off the proverbial leash.
"If we respond to them, we give them more to use against us. Right now, we have better press with the young people of this country than any President in recent memory. We have the twins. We have the two of you, we have Sam and Mallory, and we have Zoey and Charlie," Toby shut him down. "We're going to very casually do some photo ops emphasizing how nauseatingly cute all of you are, and we are not going to respond directly in any way, shape, or form."
"Yeah, we're going to do what Toby just said, except for the part about Sam and Mallory," Leo said, smirking a little at the younger man.
Sam held his hands up. "She's cuter than I am?"
Carol gave him a wry glance. "Um, yeah. I'm going to need something a little more than cute pictures for the press briefings, unfortunately."
"Remind them that this is an attraction which postdates Josh hiring Donna."
"Also that this is a happier White House with the two of them dating."
"Perhaps that this is the modern age and it's really none of their business if there's sex involved?" Stares. "No, then?"
"Um, yeah, that's a no."
"I just want to add that this is really low," Sam noted.
"Yeah."
"Below the belt, even."
"Shut up."
"Guys... I agree, but we're going to have more of the same before November, so we're going to have to get used to it." Leo sighed and looked at all of them, then frowned.
"We're here to raise the level, not lower it," Toby contributed.
"We are, Toby, and if you can find a way to raise the level on this, then do it, but I don't want it coming back to me in any way, shape or form."
"Okay." Leo waved them away as Toby nodded at him and sat back down.
The clamor of rumor increased as the convention approached, and the number of shouting matches in offices had increased along with it. Leo had rounded a corner one day to find Carol, who never yelled, shouting at an intern.
"Go fix it," she finished abruptly upon seeing him, blushing.
"What was that about?"
She shook her head. "You know, I'm not even sure."
Leo stood in front of her desk. "If you want to move, all you have to do is say so." She looked over at him, then back at the door.
"I find it kind of comforting, actually," she admitted after a minute. "When I've just come out of a tough briefing or I don't know what to do, I lean on the door for a while."
"Okay. What's going on?"
She sighed deeply. "We have too many couples and not enough marriages."
"Don't mention that to the couples in question."
"Yeah, but the press likes a good wedding or even an engagement."
"We'll get them when they get them, and considering that two of the three couples involve daughters of, you know, powerful men, that could be a long time in coming." To his surprise, she responded with a small smirk.
"I can play up the Zoey and Charlie relationship, if it might help," she offered. "Because of the shooting, there's a lot more sympathetic interest there."
"Quietly, will you?"
"I don't think the President will notice."
"He's pretty busy, but don't underestimate his powers of deductive reasoning," he warned her dryly.
Donna found Josh backstage at the Democratic convention, leaning against a wall, forehead all wrinkled. She warily shifted Abigail against one hip and approached. "Josh?"
"Donna," he smiled, stepping away from the wall to give her a kiss and touch the baby's nose with one finger. "Which one is this?"
"Abigail."
"Can I hold her?"
"Not now. They need you back."
"And you came to tell me that with a baby on your arm?"
"Yes."
"Okay." He followed her back to a warren of offices, where she deposited Abigail back with her sister and they joined the insanity that Toby, Sam, and Carol were coordinating.
"Where do you need us?" Josh called after a minute.
"We don't," Sam said, looking up. "It's a lock; we've got--I don't know, about twenty thousand votes or something."
"Then why did you have Donna bring me back here?"
"We weren't sure when we sent her, and Abigail likes to be walked when she's being burped," Toby answered. "Sam, what are the basic marks of punctuation?"
"It's a rough draft."
Carol snatched some paper from in front of Toby as Josh and Donna turned away.
"They don't need us," he murmured.
"Mmm," she replied.
"I need you."
"I need you, too," she came back. There was nothing flirty about the exchange; they might have been speaking as boss and assistant for all the passion present.
Josh sighed and took her hand gently, rubbing his fingers across hers. "I really need you," he repeated, using his other hand to cup her chin gently as he put his cheek on hers. Donna responded by wrapping her free arm around him, and accepted the way he leaned on her, just a little bit. They stood that way for a few minutes, until Josh sighed and slipped out of Donna's hold... in the downward direction.
"Josh?" she asked worriedly.
He still had one hand around one of hers, and now looked up with an expression she'd never seen before, a sort of wonder and realization. "I've been walking around with this for too long," he confessed. "But it's impossible for me to walk around without you for too long." He stopped to kiss her hand gently, and she felt warm metal against her palm just before he spoke again. "Please?"
"Say it," she managed, torn between smile and tears.
"Donnatella Moss, I love you, and will you do me the honor of marrying me?"
She nodded, giving in to both, as the circlet went around her finger. Josh stood and kissed her, then lifted her up in the air a little. "Victory is mine," he said gleefully. "Donna..."
"Victory is ours," she corrected. "But there's other stuff first... the wedding, honeymoon, anniversaries, kids..."
His eyes grew huge. "Whoa. You think ahead."
"That's why you love me."
"I love you because you're Donna."
"Aww." She stood smiling at him, until they finally attracted the attention of the other staffers.
"Get a room," Toby called first. Carol stood up and approached with suspicious joy.
"Guys, is there something you want to share with us?"
Donna held up her hand. Carol jumped and grinned, and Sam let his eyes sparkle, and even Toby forgot what he was doing for a minute, until they heard the TV.
"My name is Josiah Bartlet, and I accept your nomination for the President of the United States!"
"We still have the remarks up here!"
"Oh, God..."
"Talk about setting the bar low... oh, no..."
"I think he's got it, you guys," Josh murmured. "That's the end, and they're cheering."
"I quit," Toby moaned, and they laughed.