Before he became an MSNBC host, Lawrence O’Donnell spent seven years as a writer and, eventually, executive producer on the West Wing. So it’s surprising that one of the key writers behind a show that’s liberal canon agrees that President Bartlet isn’t a progressive hero. As O’Donnell told ThinkProgress in a phone interview yesterday, “It used to drive me nuts when people would simply and offhandedly refer to him as a liberal president. … It would just be ‘oh he told off the religious right.’ Who gives a fuck? Tell me, what was the bill? What was the law?”

Indeed, O’Donnell was pessimistic about liberalism’s prospects throughout the conversation. He always “kinda assumed” the West Wing’s writers “knew this guy was not a liberal” because he said the show was committed to painting a realistic portrait of what is possible in American politics, and “there was no known equation in which a liberal becomes President of the United States.”

As evidence of this point, that only Democrats tainted by a streak of conservatism can become president, O’Donnell cited presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s decision to fly home to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a death row inmate who self-lobotomized himself in a failed suicide attempt that left him unable to even understand what it meant to be executed. When prison guards arrived to escort him to the death chamber, Rector told them that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.”

President Bartlet came from a very different state than President Clinton. As the former governor of New Hampshire, Bartlet would have presided over a state where the death penalty was technically legal, but has not actually been carried out since 1939. As such, the first time Bartlet had to decide whether to offer a last minute reprieve to a condemned man came in the Oval Office, and it ends with Bartlet confessing to his priest that he lacked the political courage to do so:

O’Donnell’s pessimism was at its apex when he discussed his process behind writing this scene. “When I proposed a death penalty episode…the backstory that I wrote in my head for this president is that he pandered on the death penalty, just like every Democrat who doesn’t believe in it, in order to get elected president. And he was from a state where he never had to use the death penalty anyway.”

If anything, however, O’Donnell describes a West Wing writers’ room that was even more pessimistic than the facts on the ground required. We asked why Bartlet did not at least fight to enact a prescription drug plan for seniors or major immigration reform, both of which were realistic enough goals that they were attempted (in the first case, successfully) by President Bush. O’Donnell questioned whether Bush’s rare flirtations with progressivism were really grounds for optimism — Bush’s Medicare expansion, O’Donnell emphasized, was poorly designed. This is certainly true, but if a conservative like President Bush was willing to fight for a Medicare expansion that was not paid for, surely it would not have pushed the bounds of realism for President Bartlet to at least try to enact a similar expansion and also pay for it.

Ultimately, O’Donnell agreed that the West Wing writers’ room was a little too pessimistic about our politics’ potential to reach above the moment and achieve something transformative. When asked if Barack Obama — who actually did fight (and occasionally, win) major battles on health care, immigration, economic policy and the environment — is a better president than Josiah Bartlet, O’Donnell was unequivocal. “Of course. Incomparable. Of course.” And then he went further: “The West Wing writers room would not have come up with the idea of running a presidential campaign in which an African-American gets elected. Because the realism view would have said that’s not possible. And I say that with no disrespect for the creative process, but rather with a greater respect and awe for the real world. … We are lucky enough to live in a country in which our politics in 2008 soared above the creative imagination of its fiction writers.”

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 16 episode of Homeland.

I’ve been incredibly impressed thus far with the way the show has handled Brody’s reintegration into his family, particularly the rivalry between Jessica and Dana for his affections. There’s a genuine discomfort to the fact that Nicholas will laugh with his daughter behind a closed door but won’t let his wife touch him while he’s masturbating to her, that Nicholas is able to be more patient with Dana than Jessica is. “She’s obviously got a secret life out there,” Jessica says, worried, only to have Nicholas laugh it off, saying “She’s sixteen…Didn’t you have a secret life when you were that age?” “Yeah, with you! That was different,” Jessica tells him, but it’s not, not really. Similarly, Dana takes Jessica’s relationship with Mike as a kind of visceral betrayal: her mother is cheating on not just Nicholas, but on her, exposing her to the evidence that she has an undomestic sexuality.

And it’s Nicholas who reins Dana in, implying to her that they can have their own secrets, that she is perhaps more relevant than her mother to his endurance. “You know when I went over to Afghanistan, you were in third grade…That’s what I took over with me. You were in a play that year, the Wackadoo Zoo. You were so good,” he tells her. “Honey, it’s practically all I thought about for eight years. It kept me alive. But now I’m back, and all those things that kept me going, they’re gone.” I’m trying to decide if there’s something genuinely queasy there, or if it’s just the dichotomy between a man who can get his teenage daughter to be good for Lawrence O’Donnell and the man who sees himself powerfully distant from his family in the mirror.

Speaking of Lawrence O’Donnell, I thought there was something pretty game about his agreement to be a pleasant dupe in this episode. “I was told Lawrence O’Donnell gives everyone a hard time except guys in uniform,” Nicholas tells his family, explaining why he’s not afraid of the interview. And true to this expectation, O’Donnell serves up softballs disguised as emotionally difficult questions. “What did they want?” he asks Brody about why he was tortured. “They want you to lose faith,” Brody tells him, swinging incredibly hard at the soft toss. “To lose faith in your country, which they say is the devil. In your brother marines who they say aren’t coming for you because you have no military value. In your wife, who they say has got your arms wrapped around someone else.”

Carrie’s also getting some tough love and tender treatment from the men in her life, namely Saul and Virgil, who is rapidly becoming my favorite character on the show. Carrie’s prickly about the fact that the CIA isn’t protecting Lynn, telling one of her colleagues who describes her as a hooker that “If by hooker, you mean someone who’s off risking her life while we’re sitting around a conference table.” But she’s not doing well in meetings, reacting badly to Saul who wants to know “You think that when I ask you the same exact question I’d ask anyone else, I’m giving you a hard time?” He’s angry at her for treating him like all the other people they work with, but also for sexualizing their relationship. I really want to know more about Carrie’s backstory in the department. And after she asks Lynn to take a risk, it turns up nothing. She snaps at Virgil, who, after suffering through the yogurt in her fridge, decides to make them both a real meal, saying “There’s some spaghetti in the closet. It’s only 10 years past its expiration date. I’m sure it won’t kill us.”

But they never get to dinner. Lynn’s death didn’t strike me as particularly surprising, and I would have liked to see her fleshed out a little bit more so her murder hit harder. But I do appreciate that it opened up another thread of the mystery, a case where we know slightly more than than Carrie and Saul but where we have absolutely no idea how they’re going to get there. It’s a perfect example of why spoilers don’t matter: the journey, rather than the destination, is what’s going to be tremendously exciting.