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It?s an urban legend that actor Blair Underwood based his ?L.A. Law? role of a hotshot black attorney on Barack Obama during the late 1980s. Underwood had been playing the part for years before he even met Obama, who was president of the Harvard Law Review at the time. But it is true that Jimmy Smits? charismatic candidate character Matt Santos on ?The West Wing? was inspired directly by the politician. Indeed, writer-producer Eli Attie even spoke to Obama adviser David Axlerod to pick up backstory and other details for use in his scripts.

The many parallels between ?The West Wing?s? final season and the current presidential race have been widely noted. Like Obama, Santos was a former community organizer with a wife and two kids who enjoys grassroots support, excels in soaring rhetoric about ?hope,? yet lacks real Congressional experience. His far older Republican rival, Arnie Vinick (Alan Alda), had a chilly relationship with conservatives in his own party and often engaged the press with ?straight talk.? Indeed, ?The West Wing? also predicted an October surprise of sorts, only it was a nuclear reactor meltdown instead of one on Wall Street that altered the race.

Though the ?West Wing? finale was more than two years ago and Smits moved on to a role as an assistant D.A. on the quirky cable drama ?Dexter,? thoughts of Santos and his eerily prescient presidential quest still weigh on his mind. Less than a hundred hours before the election, Politico spoke with the actor, who had just returned from introducing Obama at a Ft. Lauderdale, Florida rally that capped off the candidate?s groundbreaking half-hour infomercial. ?I?m not a policy wonk ? I?m somewhere between being undecided and a surrogate,? he says with a laugh when asked about his role in the real-life campaign.

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