32
Popular Culture Review
When the Secret Service is asking Becca about the diary’s contents, she
hesitates and looks down. Allen—again, despite the fact that she’s been
blindsided by Templeton as she’s selecting a vice presidential nominee—sits
down beside her daughter, places an arm around her, and soothingly says:
ALLEN: Sweetie, I want you to tell the Secret Service
everything you remember about that diary. I want
you to be completely honest and {looking at Joan
Greer, Becca’s assigned agent) not a word of it gets
back to me. Okay?
GREER: Yes ma’am.
Although Allen misses an occasional family meal, she breaks away from a
staff meeting late at night to tuck Amy in as she’s drifting off to sleep and she
makes sure to say goodnight to her son, Horace. She’s even a good “mother” to
Tommy, the son of the late President Teddy Bridges, who’s temporarily staying
on as a guest in the White House with his mother.
In a later episode, “First Dance,” as Allen is in the middle of determining a
course of action to deal with the murders of several U.S. drug agents, she takes a
break and storms into the White House press room to confront the reporters
there after she sees a tape of Becca being peppered with questions from
reporters as she walks from the limousine into her school.
ALLEN: Look, I get the appeal of covering the children of the
president. It’s fun, it’s endearing, it’s marketable. The
one thing it’s not is news.
REPORTER: Ma’am, don’t you think the press should
determine what is and isn’t news?
ALLEN: Yes, I do. Still, some of you are parents, and I
assume you have the same rule number one that I do.
And by the way, this is not Mac the president talking.
This is Mac the mother. Don 7 mess with my kids.
Even in the midst of a potential international crisis as she’s trying to coordinate
the ouster of a dictator of another nation, Allen fiercely protects her children.
This is a sharp contrast to the Bartlet White House, where the president’s
family is almost nonexistent. His wife, Abbey Bartlet, makes an occasional
appearance during the first season, as does his youngest daughter. But the action
stays focused on the political workings of the White House, and even though
Bartlet tells the story about his granddaughter in his first scene, it is to illustrate
a political point and to show him as a man of passion and power. When he does
have discussions with Abbey Bartlet, a physician who has walked away from
her career to help him pursue his ambitions, they typically are about political
issues with Abbey being cast in the role of the feminist conscience (Garrett 183).
Despite their gender differences, the Bartlet and Allen characters are
remarkably similar in some ways. Both have strong academic backgrounds, both