On March 18, 2008, Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, addressed a crowd of supporters at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia’s boxy shrine to democracy and the Founding Fathers. The speech was a sprawling, profoundly personal examination of race relations in America, prompted by increased media scrutiny of the senator’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose outré politics had precipitated the first real crisis for the Obama campaign. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that the viability of Obama’s candidacy rested on the speech. Certainly it felt that way at the time, especially for the young volunteers who had flocked to the campaign, among them Sam Graham-Felsen, who was just three years out of Harvard, fresh from a stint writing for The Nation, and now working as Obama’s chief blogger. He caught the address in a campaign office back in Chicago. It was a moment of high drama, with the communications team huddled around a monitor as Obama intoned, in churchy cadences, “For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ‘Not this time.’ ” Graham-Felsen still remembers the scene vividly: “One of the staffers was a young African-American guy, and he was crying.” This was a heady moment, history unfolding in the present tense, right now, but Graham-Felsen had just the right framework to put around it. “It felt sort of like The West Wing,” he says. “Not to cheapen the moment.”

President Obama is often credited with inspiring political idealism in young people (at least until the campaign ended and actual governing began). But before Obama there was Aaron Sorkin and President Josiah Bartlet. It’s been nearly 6 years since the series finale of The West Wing, and more than 12 since the one-hour drama, which Sorkin created and largely wrote, first walked and talked its way through NBC’s Wednesday-night lineup; and yet you might think the series never ended, given the currency it still seems to enjoy in Washington, the frequency with which it comes up in D.C. conversations and is quoted or referenced on political blogs. In part this is because the smart, nerdy—they might prefer “precocious”—kids who grew up in the early part of the last decade worshipping the cool, technocratic charm of Sorkin’s characters have today matured into the young policy prodigies and press operatives who advise, brief, and excuse the behavior of the most powerful people in the country.

In the same way that the noble, sleeves-rolled sleuthing of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men prompted legions of baby-boomers to dream of careers in journalism, The West Wing, which made policy discussions seem thrilling and governing heroic, has become a totem—its romanticization of a stuffy, insular industry infusing a historically uncool career with cultural cachet. Rather than treat the political process as risible at best (Dick, say, or Primary Colors), a horror show at worst (The Ides of March), The West Wing was pluckily idealistic. A hyper-real drama about waiting for a callback from some freshman congressman (D—Nowheresville) would have sent aspiring White House interns and aides running back to law school. Instead, The West Wing “took something that was for the most part considered dry and nerdy—especially to people in high school and college—and sexed it up,” says Eric Lesser, who worked in the Obama White House as a special assistant to former senior adviser David Axelrod and is now a student at Harvard Law School.

Which isn’t to say all high-school and college students were equally susceptible to the show’s siren call. But for those who were primed to be seduced, The West Wing was something of a first (intellectual) crush—immediate, unconditional, and, naturally, one-sided. “I remember when they were first promoting The West Wing, and I was like, ‘Oh, man, I can’t wait to see that,’ ” Lesser says, recalling a pop-cultural urgency that others in his cohort might have reserved for a new Jessica Simpson video.