Arnold Vinick

Arnold Vinick is a fictional character from the television series The West Wing played by Alan Alda. The role earned Alda a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2006.

Vinick is the senior Republican senator from California and a presidential nominee.

He is a social moderate and fiscal conservative with a maverick streak and direct manner, whose policies are loosely based on those of real-life Arizona senators John McCain and Barry Goldwater. Vinick is moderately pro-choice in the sense he is opposed to partial-birth abortion and in favor of parental consent laws. He is also in favor of immigration reform and against gay marriage but is reluctant to use it as a campaign issue. Vinick opposes the Religious Right's influence in the Republican Party and wants to return to more traditional, limited government conservatism. He has also been described as a deficit hawk, supporting "two-for-one" tax and spending cuts. Vinick favors free trade agreements, school vouchers, and tort reform while opposing ethanol subsidies in the Midwest as corporate welfare. He is conservative on law-and-order issues, such as gun rights, border security, and the death penalty. Vinick is mixed on foreign policy as he believes in a strong national defense and supports tough action against Iran, but was also described as an ally of Democrat Josiah Bartlet on foreign policy issues and a potential advocate for loosening the embargo on Cuba. During his 2006 campaign, it is stated Vinick has strong support from corporate conservatives, neoconservatives, Libertarians, Independents, and moderate Democrats, but his support is weak among social and religious conservatives.

In one episode, Vinick mentioned growing up in a "citrus-growing" community. In response to this, the town of Santa Paula, which is famous for citrus growing and is often referred to as the "Citrus Capital of the World," wrote to The West Wing's production company, asking that Santa Paula be made Vinick's hometown. The production company promised to keep Santa Paula in mind for any campaign filming. In the meantime, the city council decided to organize a campaign for Vinick, including opening an Arnold Vinick presidential campaign headquarters. The town was eventually mentioned as Vinick's hometown in the episode "Two Weeks Out," broadcast on March 19, 2006.

The son of Richard Vinick, a New York City public school teacher, and Patricia Vinick, a community activist, Vinick was born in New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. Four years later, his younger brother was born, and the family relocated to the southern California town of Santa Paula in order to farm orange groves. In Santa Paula, Vinick volunteered at the public library. Vinick was married to Catherine Vinick for around 30 years before she died. According to the NBC website, she died in 2004, and in "In God We Trust," it is stated Vinick stopped attending church with her "five or six years" before he won the Republican nomination because she was too sick to attend with him. He has one brother, four children, and nine grandchildren.

After graduating from Yale and Stanford Law School, Vinick opened a law practice in Santa Paula. He was eventually elected to the city council in the town's first write-in victory. He served one term on the board before being elected to the California State Assembly. He then moved on to the United States Senate, where he won the election with 6.9 million votes–the highest total for any Senate candidate at the time (Barbara Boxer in 2004 and Dianne Feinstein in 2012 are the only senators to have ever matched this number in the real world). Vinick has served in the Senate for 24 years as of the 2006 election (thereby eliminating the terms of Pete Wilson, John F. Seymour, and Dianne Feinstein in the real world), meaning he won the election in 1982.

According to the NBC website, Vinick serves as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and served as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, while serving on the Environment and Public Works Committee. However, when he is first introduced, it is also mentioned that as a freshman senator, he sat on the Judiciary Committee and befriended then-committee staffer Eric Baker, who would later become the Governor of Pennsylvania and a Democratic presidential/vice presidential contender. In the same episode, it is also stated Vinick is the chairman of a committee that has been continually investigating the Bartlet Administration (a role he does not like), implying he may be chairing the Judiciary Committee and possibly contradicting the website account, as senators generally only chair one committee.

Vinick was offered the post of Ambassador to the United Nations by President Josiah Bartlet's Deputy Chief of Staff, Josh Lyman, but declined as he intended to run for president. Lyman and former White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry were concerned that Vinick, as an articulate and appealing centrist who might carry California in the Electoral College, offered the Republicans a real chance to win back the White House after two terms of Bartlet, a Democrat. However, both questioned if he was conservative enough to win the Republican nomination.