Plot
Sam appears on political talk show Capital Beat with a "blonde leggy Republican" named Ainsley Hayes. She clearly wins the debate (to the amusement of Toby, who asks his assistant Ginger to "get the popcorn," and a back-on-the-job Josh) and impresses President Bartlet sufficiently for him to tell Leo to hire her. As per the President's instructions, Leo makes the offer, appealing to Ainsley's sense of duty. Ainsley is stunned by the irony that her second opportunity to work at the White House would be for a Democratic administration with which she agrees on very few issues.
Meanwhile, CJ spends several days fretting after confirms to a new reporter that there is a on-going grand jury investigation regarding a sanctions violation. After Ainsley returns to the White House with the intention of turning down Leo's offer, the reporter happens to mention CJ's admission to her. Ainsley subsequently points out to CJ that her admission didn't break any laws, and that consulting with the counsel's office would have been more fruitful than "hoping no one would notice."
As she waits to meet with Leo, Ainsley has a heated discussion with Sam about their different political viewpoints. Their debate is interrupted when an international incident occurs. Ainsley witnesses the President and his staff responding to a coup in the fictional Equatorial Kundu while its president is at the White House for a summit with pharmaceutical companies about the AIDS crisis in Africa. Josh and Toby had crafted a strategy that would enable the Kundunese President to get desperately needed AIDS medications to his people, but the plan is torpedoed when the coup occurs and the President's family is either murdered or forced to flee the country. President Bartlet evacuates the American embassy in Kundu and offers his Kundunese counterpart asylum in the U.S., but the offer is refused and he returns to face a horrible fate.
Ainsley, impressed by the administration's handling of the Kundu situation, changes her mind and accepts the job. When her Republican friends call the Democratic staffers "worthless," Hayes responds with a passionate rebuke, saying that while she may disagree with their Democratic policies, the staffers are "righteous" and "patriots."
Read more about this topic: In This White House
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)