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"100,000 Airplanes" is the 55th episode of The West Wing. While the White House staff works...

"100,000 Airplanes" is the 55th episode of The West Wing. While the White House staff works intensely on President Bartlet's crucial State of the Union speech, Bartlet suddenly demands that a passage ambitiously promising a crusade to cure cancer within 10 years be included. Sam is the point person for this speech, which is billed as the most important one of the President's career and one whose failure will end his hopes for re-election. As Sam is very reluctantly interviewed for a Vanity Fair profile by Lisa Sherborne (Traylor Howard), who was once his fiancée, he lays out the process by which a State of the Union address comes about. Sam knows that the pledge to cure cancer is noble and the kind of over-reaching government should do, but also that for political reasons it can't be included in the final speech. He takes the excising of the section with great pain, and even the rousing success of the speech amongst poll members doesn't cheer him up much. Sam takes out most of his frustrations on Lisa Sherborne, who finally tells Sam she's taking herself off the story, and then lets him know that it was he and not her who ended their engagement. Sam recognizes she's right and then