“Jack & Bobby” Season 1 (2004-05, WB), episodes 1-7 – “Jack & Bobby’s” mother (Christine Lahti) is a living, breathing stereotype of a liberal college professor who feels out of sorts in Small Town, Missouri. In the show’s second episode, she invites students to smoke marijuana and open their minds in her living room, which is littered with Kerry-Edwards placards. Bobby (Logan Lerman), the show’s future-president-as-a-young-man, wears about 30 Kerry-Edwards pins on his T-shirt.
At first glance, this would appear to be an example of executive producers Greg Berlanti and Thomas Schlamme indulging in shameless stumping in the guise of a TV show. However, the liberal righteousness displayed by Professor McCallister is characterization, not campaigning. In the same episode, an abashed school president responds to one of the prof’s diatribes with, “Hey, I’m a Republican, not a Communist.”
“Jack & Bobby” endeavors to make the present into the past and the future into the present by interspersing standard WB tales of growing up with comments from Bobby’s colleagues, political rivals and journalists in 2048, after he completes a presidency that earns him the tag “The Great Believer.”
But as we learn in these interviews, Bobby, a left-leaning Republican, leaves his party in the midst of his campaign to run – and win – as in independent. In contrast to Professor McCallister, “Jack & Bobby’s” writing team seems like Democrats who are disenfranchised with their party, but not its ideals. B
– John Hansen, “On Tuesday, vote Pryor and McCallister,” Brainerd Dispatch, Oct. 28, 2004