The issue for my character, and the issue of the show is, how dirty do your feet have to get without suffocating yourself in the mud in order to get an inch of what you really want done?

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

My joke about Aaron Sorkin is that The West Wing was a great show about democracy, run by Kim Jong-Il!

I am an old, old friend of Aaron Sorkin's, who is the executive producer and writer. He had been talking about doing a political show for a long time and I had been interested in it for a long time. The moment I became available, he called me last year and asked me if I wanted to do it and then I just had to audition for the powers that be, and I got it.

Cal Ripken is steady, he focuses on his job, and he's a good guy.

We all go through life bristling at our external limitations, but the most difficult chains to break are inside us.

Aaron is a very passionate, maniacal writer so the scripts really come from him, but he is very open to... y'know, we'll plan ideas and we'll certainly tussle about stuff when the script comes out. So, to a certain extent, he's very interested. If there's some problem or something that doesn't ring true, he wants to know why and he wants to correct it or fight for it.