From The New Yorker, one small item to add to the long list of comparisons of Obama and Matt Santos, the President-Elect’s fictionalized counterpart on The West Wing.

Recall that Obama first said he would meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions in a primary debate in 2007. His team’s response:

“We know this is going to be the issue of the day,” Dan Pfeiffer, recalling a conference call the following morning, said. “We have the sense they’re going to come after us on it. And we’re all on the bus trying to figure out how to get out of it, how not to talk about it.” […] Obama said something to the effect of “This is ridiculous. We met with Stalin. We met with Mao. The idea that we can’t meet with Ahmadinejad is ridiculous. This is a bunch of Washington-insider conventional wisdom that makes no sense. We should not run from this debate. We should have it.”

The most compelling Santos moments, in my mind, are just this sort, in which the relatively inexperienced, reluctant candidate displays a sharper sense of political dynamics than his team, who’ve over-researched every possible angle and only make the safe moves.

To take just a single example, in “Undecideds,” Santos and his team struggle with his upcoming address at a church in a mostly-black neighborhood where a 12-year-old boy has just been shot and killed by a Latino policeman. Santos’s team know (and advocate for) what’s expected: high-minded rhetoric pretending towards a healing function.

Santos, though, knows better. He knows he’s not a part of the community to which he’ll speak, and knows that such a speech would be transparent (customary’s ugly cousin, in political campaigns). He dismisses his team’s ideas, saying he knows just the Psalm for the occasion.

Lou, played by Janeane Garofalo, questions this approach, “You can’t just go in there and offer them a prayer” (or something along those lines). Santos replies only by saying, “You want to show me what you’ve come up with?” The team hang their heads, knowing they can’t force the remarkable candidate into the unremarkable package.

It’s a delight, imagining such moments on the Obama bus.