Lou's Look at Love

I am not a romantic and I doubt anyone has ever mistaken me for one. I tend to watch the world with a cynical eye waiting for the inevitable break-up of relationships. That does not mean that I am oblivious to the interplay between people. More that I like to be a dispassionate observer of the foibles of my fellow humans and occasionally offer objective advice to a few friends who, inevitably, ignore me and continue to make the same mistakes again and again.

I like campaigning for the adrenaline. I love the buzz of a victory, however small, and thrive on little sleep and juggling the unexpected.

I joined the Santos campaign a little warily, as Josh and I had clashed on numerous occasions and I had my doubts. To be fair, it worked out better than I expected and Josh had matured a little and was able to take a broader view of things now that he was in charge.

I knew a little about Donna, but no details and was taken aback by the hostility between her and Josh, given that they had worked together for all those years. She was perfect for our purposes however and I was determined to hire her, so I stuck them together to sort it out.

They must have come to some sort of compromise as they started to work together without killing each other.

I found myself an amusement - nothing serious, just someone to help release all that adrenaline at the end of the day. Young and eager (in lots of ways) and energetic, he was the perfect stress relief. OK, so maybe he had problems seeing it that way, but that is hardly my fault. The trouble with these young idealistic guys is that they expect you to be idealistic too and I was born world-weary, cynical and jaded.

Anyway, Josh and Donna were working closer together and we all noticed a phenomenon which I understand was well known in the Bartlet administration - they spoke in their own shorthand and seemed bemused when anyone else had difficulty following the conversation. When all you heard was 'What about…' 'No not this time' and 'all of it? ', you could be forgiven for wondering whether you had missed something.

Then Donna started to influence Josh more and more. Oh, it was subtle, yet I noticed the respect with which he treated her opinion and the gradual way she started to use minute facial expressions to get her point across. Anyone else and Josh barely noticed full on weeping, but a hint of a frown from Donna and he might pause to at least consider what he said.

I am also an early riser and so I noticed the interplay over coffee, which took place some mornings. Josh would ask anyone around for coffee, but never Donna. Yet they would often exchange looks as if the word 'coffee' meant something else to them. Josh would bring Donna coffee and that seemed to be accepted; yet she never got him a cup. You may think I have an obsession with coffee to have noticed this, but at times it was so marked you could hardly miss. Donna would bring coffees for everyone in a group bar Josh, yet he never so much as commented - and, believe me, Josh Lyman can be like a little boy on things like that. The most he ever did was to raise an eyebrow at Donna, to which she shrugged with a small smile playing over her mouth. I am not imaginative and, as I have said before, I do not have a romantic bone in my body, but for those two Donna not bringing Josh coffee seemed almost a form of foreplay. I have said they are weird, haven't I?

When you work on a campaign like that you are with people for long hours and get to see a side to them you might not in a conventional work setting. Josh certainly showed us his natural high-handed bad-tempered self, although Donna was always an oasis of calm within the group. Brad had a theory that, having worked with Josh for so long in the pressure cooker of the White House, she saw the frantic pace and ever-changing demands of a Presidential campaign as a normal working environment. Interestingly, he did not comment on the fact that Josh never lost it with Donna. In fact, on one occasion when he was in full flood and Donna came into the room he seemed to swallow his words and moderate his tone to a mere bellow when he saw her. This will sound odd and I hesitate to even think it, but it was almost as if he was afraid of her - or maybe of her reaction.

There were some odd rumours floating around about the two of them on Election Day - something about Donna bringing Josh coffee when we gathered in his room early on and a mutter, which was never repeated, about something odd in Josh's room. I paid little attention at the time, having a few other things to think about, but it was hard to ignore being told that Donna had been located in Josh's room after being missing for quite some time. I have no problems with a campaign fling, having indulged more than once myself, but I doubted Josh and Donna getting together would be so short lived or unemotional as my liaisons.

The events later on put such things out of all our minds and there were no signs of anything further occurring, so I think everyone assumed it was either someone's overactive imagination or a brief aberration.

I was more than a little surprised to hear that Josh had suddenly decided to go on vacation, given that this was the guy who focused on the campaign to the exclusion of all else. I was even more surprised to come into work the next day and hear that Donna was also away. It took all of 10 seconds for people to draw the obvious conclusions from this and, for the most part, the attitude was amused.

Amy Gardner was a different matter. She came into the Transition offices as if she owned them and started throwing her weight around before she got through the door. I mean, I am a focused and dedicated professional with a pretty clear appreciation of my own worth, but that woman seemed to think she was better than the rest of us, when clearly she is not. She came in asking, no demanding, to see Josh without an appointment and did not like it when Ronna told her it was not possible. Ronna tried politely putting her off, but she started on about being an old friend and Josh's door always being open to her and that is when I intervened. I told her Josh was away and she was a surprised as we had been. Amy then demanded to be told where he was and when he would be back. I don't usually let people get to me and in politics there are enough demanding people, but that woman took the biscuit. I carefully informed her that Josh's whereabouts were none of her concern, but that he would be available the following week should she care to make an appointment. That would have been that had Amy not announced that, as a close friend of Josh's and former girlfriend she would just come over when he got back. She even implied that they might resume their relationship. Maybe I should have kept quiet, but you get fond of people on the campaign trail and Donna was an easy person to like. So I told her that when Josh and his girlfriend came home they would be busy preparing to work at the White House again and so would not have the leisure to entertain old friends who barged in without an appointment. She gasped a bit, but, to give her credit, Miss Gardner is quick and she soon added the clues together to come up with Donna's name. As a final flurry she made some disparaging comment about 'secretaries' not being that busy, but my hackles were well and truly up by then and I decided Donna deserved better. So, she left with the information that Donna would be extremely busy preparing for her role as the First Lady's Chief of Staff and what I have to confess was a rather nasty comment about her being better than certain previous holders of that title. Funnily enough, she left quite quickly and had her secretary ring Ronna later to arrange a meeting with Josh. Ronna will do well in future – she had the good sense to arrange the meeting on neutral ground and between two important engagements so that it would, of necessity, be brief. The romantics on staff may goo over Josh and Donna and annoy the rest of us, but we will all support them because they are true professionals and, yes, even I can see that they belong together.