As a caveat, the furthest I ever went with politics was high level work in the campaign for a friend of mine running for the U.S. Senate. I defer to people who may have worked with the White House directly, but I'm sure it's a small percentage of people so you may not run across one here.

Here are a couple insights about CSI and The West Wing. In CSI, time is massively abbreviated. Those tests they stand around and wait for, or conveniently have ready for someone to look at, take hours or days to complete. The technicians have dozens of cases to work on, and a lot of the day is very boring. They also don't usually find crucial evidence within the first three minutes of arriving at a scene. So CSI runs at probably 20x "normal" speed, for the sake of comparison, investigations go on for weeks, not minutes or hours.

Judging by the political activities I've been involved in, the West Wing runs at probably 1/2 normal speed. A lot happens much of the time on the show, and they shuffle people, meetings and such around quite a bit. What gives away the things they leave out are the few details they leave in, like handing over the morning briefing as the president and aides are walking somewhere. Read-talk-walk and the idea of zero down time gives some sense to what an active executive political official actually behaves like. This would get extremely confusing for an audience, and so they actually tone things down and spend time on individual issues (also to unravel subtext which would be apparent to anyone actually in the room, but not to a third party).

If time is in question, everything else is likewise. I think your parallel is a good one, I'm sure the spirit of CSI is to show forensics, but it just doesn't happen that way in terms of speed or database searches, or always getting a "hit" on something. The facts, and their frequency, are edited to make entertaining television. Even if the core of the show is scientific, it is only so much so to appeal to people interested in "realistic" programming. Notice how they never use words like electrophoresis (how you get DNA gels to compare), because big scary science words would turn off a large viewing audience.

In the same way, a lot of the meat is missing from The West Wing. It's good television, good drama, writing and acting of a high caliber. But it is highly glamorized. Remember, as important as it is, one of the president's major goals is developing/proposing a budget. You know what budget meetings are like at your company? Now add 25 more departments, and 700 pages to the "summary" report. The issues underlying the budget might be very interesting, critical and of great importance. But ascribing them a dollar value is not nearly so exciting. I seriously doubt the senior staff does much of this, even at the representative level senior staff was concerned about drafting policy. They explained that policy to more junior staff, who did much of the actual writing and research, and then the senior staff looked at the output of the junior staff, made revisions and comments, and it went round again. That would be really boring to watch.

So the senior staff on the show as represented is talking a lot more about issues and ideals, because that's the meaty stuff that we care about and want to see. They may do this sometimes, and perhaps very vocally and eloquently. But what you don't see is the other 90% of their time spent reading drafts, commenting, fielding calls and incorporating minor or major changes in data and circumstances into their models and predictions for the world they are writing policy for.
Source(s):
Personal experience with reasonably high level bids for US politics. Media studies and teaching media literacy.

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