The West Wing (TV Series)

Slow News Day (2004)

Martin Sheen: President Josiah Bartlet

Quotes 

• Jed Bartlet : [about Social Security]  If it becomes public we've even discussed this, both sides will go crazy. It'll jeopardize our whole agenda on the Hill.

  Toby Ziegler : What if I do it? I'll do all the negotiating. You'll have total deniability. No one else in this building has to know.

  Jed Bartlet : And if it blows up, I'm supposed to pretend we've never met?

  Toby Ziegler : We'll always have Paris.

  [beat] 

  Toby Ziegler : Mr. President, life expectancy's rising. The biggest generation ever is retiring, and we don't have the money! Every year we wait means we have to cut deeper, take away more, 'til Social Security's not enough to live on, 'til retirement's a one-way ticket to a flop house. We have an opening. There's seventeen ways to fix it. Twenty years of blue ribbon commissions have told us how. This isn't a government program, it is a moral covenant. We don't want to be the administration that saves it from oblivion? We don't want that legacy?

  Jed Bartlet : Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.

  Toby Ziegler : That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.