Life Mimicking Art

Question: Who made this speech?

Soon we will be inundated by the polls and the punditry and the prognostications and all the nonsense that goes with our national political campaigns.

But none of that matters. This is the place that matters. Because everyday children walk into this schoolhouse to glimpse their futures, to ask for hope -- they may not know they need it yet, but they do.

And I am here to tell you that hope is real. In a life of trials, in a world of challenges, hope is real. In a country where families go without healthcare, where some go without food -- some don't even have a home to speak of -- hope is real. In a time of global chaos and instability, where our faiths collide as often as our weapons, hope is real.

Hope is what gives us the courage to take on our greatest challenges, to move forward together. We live in cynical times, I know that, but hope is not up for debate. There is such a thing as false science, there is such a thing as false promises -- I am sure I will have my share of false starts in this campaign -- but there is no such thing as false hope. There is only hope.

Was it:

A. Franklin Roosevelt
B. Abraham Lincoln
C. Barack Obama
D. Matthew Santos

Give up?

Answer: D. Matthew Santos, the young Texas congressman on "The West Wing" who goes on to beat the odds to become America's first Latino president.

You wanted to say C. Barack Obama, didn't you.

Question: Is President Obama nothing more than an obsessed "West Wing" fan who took things a step too far by actually running for president, instead of like the rest of us who, throughout the show's seven-season run, merely wished in vain to swap reality for fiction?

A. Yes
B. No
B. Yes, and Aaron Sorkin planned the whole thing (the real reason he left after season four)
D. No, it was actually the Santos character who was based off Obama, not the other way around