By james art Stars of the 2000s political drama The West Wing Bradley WhitfordMartin Sheen, Richard Schiff and Mary McCormack were warmly greeted by an energetic crowd at the Barrymore Theater after campaigning with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin on Sunday.
Whitford took the stage first, leading the crowd in chants of “we will win!”
It wasn’t the first time Wisconsin Democrats partnered with a political TV show. Last month, their “Veep” reunion. raised $735,000. This election season, Wisconsin Democrats haven’t been shy about jumping into the pop cultureand Sunday morning was no different.
A native of Madison, Whitford spoke about his father’s previous role as president of Planned Parenthood, a role he said was “not controversial” at the time. Whitford lamented the political partisanship of abortion rights, comparing today’s landscape of women’s health care to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I’m working on a documentary now called The Handmaid’s Tale,” Whitford said wryly of her role in Hulu’s TV adaptation of the book. “Here we are at this moment when Amber Thurman in Georgia died needlessly because she didn’t get the health care she needed because she wasn’t, she wasn’t nearly dead enough for the doctors to feel safe [performing abortion].”
The rest of the cast came out announcing that they would like to “reclaim” a song as they burst into singing the national anthem.
Whitford mocked Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde for not knowing the national anthem and suggested the candidate doesn’t live in Wisconsin or know about the farm bill. a large-scale legislative package which provides food aid and agricultural subsidies. He said there was a lack of “rational Republicans” and called former President Donald Trump a “broken soul.”
Richard Schiff, who played White House communications director Tobey Ziegler on “The West Wing,” became emotional as he addressed the crowd.
Schiff shared his experiences growing up after World War II and the story of his family fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe. He recalled asking his family, “How could all these people, many of whom I assume were people who just wanted to go to work and raise his family, be so easily complicit?”
“The man in 1933 was elected. He was elected to office, similar to what happened here in 2016,” Schiff said. “And now I understand how it’s possible when you don’t stand up for what people think, if you don’t stand up for the fight against this kind of hate and idiocy. . . that’s what can happen as a result.”
Schiff spoke about her stepfather, Clarence B. Jones, and his continued advocacy as a close advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., who co-authored the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Mary McCormick, who played deputy national security adviser Kate Harper, said she was “encouraged” by how angry women were and said she hoped that anger would lead to real change.
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“We shouldn’t even talk about it [Trump] wants to ruin the environment, eliminate the Board of Education, his ridiculous non-existent economic policies, that he wants to ruin health care, take away Medicare,” she said. “The list is endless, but it should have ended when he bragged about sexual assault.”
She also talked about raising her 13-year-old daughter without a phone in the era of mass and school shootings.
“How am I going to tell you I love you if there’s a shooter?” McCormick said her daughter once told her, which brought the actress to tears. She concluded by encouraging the crowd to find the apolitical women in their lives and “talk about how much they love their grandsons, their granddaughters. [Ask] what a world they want to leave them.”
Finally, Martin Sheen gave an impassioned speech to the crowd, channeling the energy into fictional President Jed Bartlett.
Sheen shared with the crowd an Irish story about a man who arrived at the gates of heaven and where St. Peter asked to see his scars. When the man told Peter he had no scars, he replied, “How unfortunate. Wasn’t there something worth fighting for?” Sheen used this story to rally the crowd around the Harris-Walz ticket, talking about the righteousness of fighting for something that’s right.
“We are all rightly called to find something in our lives worth fighting for, something deeply personal and uncompromising, something that unites the widow of the spirit, the work of the flesh,” Sheen said.
Sheen ended the rally with a rendition of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Let my country wake up”, changing the ending to “Dear Father, let our country wake up”.
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Brina Goeking is the arts editor for The Daily Cardinal. She also reports on campus news. Follow her on Twitter @BrynaGoeking.
Sreejita Patra is a senior staff writer and former summer advertising sales manager for The Daily Cardinal. She has written about breaking news, campus news and the arts, and has done extensive reporting on the 2024 presidential race. She also covers the Oregon Rural Council for the Oregon Observer.