“The West Wing” was also a full-throated argument (perhaps too full-throated) for the essential goodness of government and a celebration of the talented people who fill its ranks. (Surely this, and not just the fictional Administration’s politics, explains why it was unpopular among conservatives.) It’s in this way that Sorkin’s vision of government reëmerged in another spot recently: at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, in Charlotte, where, for the first time since the 2010 midterm elections, the Democrats seemed to be riding high on a sense of their own mojo.

On the final night of the convention, President Obama scored one of his most memorable lines, in a speech otherwise judged as low on soaring rhetoric, by saying, “You know, I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention. Times have changed, and so have I. I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President.” The crowd responded with what seemed like its most raucous cheers of the evening, as if reminded of their sound past judgment and current good fortune. In its cadence and resoluteness, the phrase evoked a singular moment of political cinematic camp, when, in the Sorkin-scripted “The American President,” from 1995, Michael Douglas, playing the embattled President Andrew Shepherd, calls a press conference to address attacks issued by his political challenger, Bob Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss. After soaring to Sorkian heights, he climbs just a bit higher:

If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up. My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I am the President.

Obama didn’t match Michael Douglas’s bluster, but he did put forward the same message: our challenges are serious, and I am only serious person on the ballot. (Hence his line, “The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place,” another Sorkinesque bit of high-wattage homily.) After two years spent running away from health-care reform and other contentious achievements, the Obama campaign decided in Charlotte to acknowledge what the Administration had done. That, along with the seizing of national defense for the first time since 9/11, and speech after speech touting the party’s support for abortion choice and gay rights added up to the kind of proud, defiant liberalism that served as animating spirit for “The West Wing.” And the triumphant return of Bill Clinton, the ultimate “Explainer-in-Chief,” capped it all off, proving, as Sorkin did before him, that percentages, policy papers, and political parables can make for good television.