Forum:Barack Obama/Arthur Coleman Winters problems

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To bring something over from Talk:Ghosts of the Northern Line:

Ghosts of the Northern Line currently says:


 * Barack Obama is said to be President of the United States. This would appear to conflict with TV continuity (both in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures) which established other individuals as having been in office as of 2008-2009. Arthur Winters was President Elect. If Obama was his running mate, then he would have become President when Winters was murdered.

How can Barack Obama's presidency possibly conflict with televised episodes when The End of Time debuted on television at the time this comic strip was almost the most current one available from DWM? You could literally have been reading this comic as a "new comic strip" at the same time you watched TEOT as a "new episode". Surely this comic strip supports, rather than conflicts, televised evidence. Whether you believe TEOT to have taken place around Christmas 2010 or 2011, Barack Obama could plausibly have been President of the US and won the election of 2008 in his own right.

He's not Winters running mate; The Sound of Drums does not take place anywhere close to wintertime, so Winters has not just been elected, no matter what he says in one line in the script. Every other piece of evidence in that script suggests he is fully the president: the fact that his plane is called Air Force One, the chirons on the news reports, the fact he says "Send this out under my seal of office". None of these things would happen unless he was actually the President. The "President-Elect" thing is best viewed as a mistake on the character's part. Like Bush, when he goes to make a high-pressure speech, he flubs the line.

Last time I checked, it was site policy not to treat obvious gaffes as "gospel". I propose replacing above with something like:


 * Barack Obama is said to be President of the United States. Within weeks of the publication of the final installment of this story, the the character of Obama, and a clip of the real-life president's voice, debuted in televised Doctor Who in The End of Time.

Apparently this same kool-aid is being drunk at the articles for Barack Obama, Arthur Coleman Winters, Last of the Time Lords. There's this notion that Winters' line where he describes himself as "President-Elect" is indeed absolute gospel and it sets off a whole cascade of problems that fail to allow Obama to be president in End of Time without strange things being done to the DW timeline. As I see it, though, nothing in any episode of DW requires Obama to have done anything other than what he did in real life: get elected in his own right in November 2008.


 * The Sound of Drums is obviously in the wrong season for a US presidential election. The leaves on the trees are far too verdant for anything but a spring/summer setting, as can most clearly be seen when Martha teleports from the Valiant to Earth.
 * The entirety of series 3 through The Sound of Drums is only 96 hours long, from the perspective of Francine Jones. Thus the settings of Smith and Jones and The Lazarus Experiment are germaine to The Sound of Drums.
 * Everything except that one line where Winters says he's President-Elect directly attests to the fact that he's, in fact, president. A President-Elect has no seal of office, does not travel on Air Force One, and would not be repeatedly referred to as "President Winters" by news organizations. It's also highly unlikely that a president-elect would speak to a sitting Prime minister as Winters did to Saxon; he has no force of law to back up his opinions about the suitability of another sovereign state's electoral choices.

We should, therefore, not be calling him anything other than "President Winters", should vigorously slap down any attempts to use his line as superior information to what else is in The Sound of Drums, and should not be entertaining odd notions of US presidential succession with respect to Obama's running mate or party affiliations.

Winters misspoke, that's all.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 03:40, January 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree. Your statements about the time are correct. It seems not unlikely to me that the writing staff simply wasn't that familiar with the American political system. I always took his line "President-Elect" in the tone of "I'm the President and I was elected to be the President". -- Noneofyourbusiness 20:06, January 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * Any other thoughts on this issue?  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 14:30, April 20, 2010 (UTC)