Today would have been John Spencer’s 59^th birthday. The actor, best known for his role as Leo McGarry, the former White House chief of staff now running for the vice-presidency on West Wing, died Friday morning of a heart attack. There was a time, back when Aaron Sorkin was still writing its scripts almost single-handedly, when West Wing was the finest show on television. And John Spencer was its intellectual, dramatic & moral center, playing a recovering alcoholic one-time labor secretary who convinces the governor of New Hampshire to make a quixotic bid for the presidency only to win. Even tho the series has become something of a shadow of its former self, I still watch most episodes. Indeed, just last Sunday, as the floundering Matt Santos campaign looks to VP candidate McGarry to take over the reins of the campaign from the manifestly incompetent Josh Lyman, Spencer muttered the line “They’re trying to kill me,” since his character had been forced from his White House post two years before after a major heart attack. It will be hard to see that line in the reruns that have become a staple on Bravo.

What was perhaps most impressive about West Wing, at its best & to some degree even now, was the degree to which it gets the actual feel & flow of electoral politics right. I worked as a lobbyist in Sacramento in the early 1970s, the legislative advocate for a group called the Coalition of 2600, consisting of almost all the prison movement and prison reform organizations in California. For four years, I kept the state of California from building any new prisons and co-led a successful effort to rewrite the entire penal code, replacing the thoroughly politicized indeterminate sentence with fixed terms. At one point, I stopped Governor Jerry Brown’s first choice as head of the parole board, ex-prison boss Ray Procunier, from being approved by the state senate…and managed to do so without having my fingerprints all over the controversy, since I still needed to work with Brown. Indeed, after I left that position, I was appointed to the state task force on health conditions in local detention facilities, a board that reported up through Brown’s secretary of health, Jerome Lackner.

While some of West Wing’s characters, such as Brad Whitford’s Josh Lyman & Richard Schiff’s Toby Ziegler, come across as so inept you know they would be eaten alive even in the relatively small universe of any state capitol, Spencer’s McGarry had the feel of the real deal in everything he did. Part of the show’s success, of course, has been its ability to use an ensemble to construct multiple plot lines that combine political issues with both comedy & drama, such as when the six-foot tall Allison Janey, whose character C.J. Cregg is code-named Flamingo by the Secret Service & whose height is accentuated by the fact that so many male actors are short – Spencer himself was only 5’6” – was helping first lady Stockard Channing film an episode of Sesame Street at the White House and had one scene where she simply sat down on a bench for a second’s respite, joined wordlessly there by Big Bird. But such rigmarole has little to do with what goes on day-to-day in any real political office. Leo McGarry’s no-nonsense push-ahead political style, accomplished largely by Spencer’s underacting in a world in which most television performers do just the opposite, has everything to do with it.

West Wing’s future has increasingly been tenuous ever since Sorkin left the show, and it remains to be seen if it can survive without Spencer. Whether it continues or not, the first three seasons or thereabouts of West Wing will remain as good as any television drama has ever been.