Back on the trail

After dismal early poll numbers, a Democratic presidential hopeful retools his image, sharpens his message, changes his staff, and discovers his passion. With primary voters unmoved by his candidacy, another Democratic contender suddenly finds his issue, energizes his demoralized staff with an emotional speech, and changes his campaign slogan from "The Future is Now" to "For Real."

Candidate A is John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and current front runner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nod.

Candidate B is Jack Tanner, a former Michigan congressman who made it all the way to the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. Sort of.

Tanner, played by actor Michael Murphy, made his debut in 1988 as the lead character in a groundbreaking HBO miniseries about a presidential candidate, "Tanner '88." Written by Garry Trudeau of "Doonesbury" fame and directed by Robert Altman, the show was designed to give an unflinching insider's view of all the elements, from cynicism to courage, that define a modern presidential campaign.

More significantly, it has turned out to be a prophetic precursor of an era in which politics and entertainment blend indistinguishably, giving us everything from the Washington-based reality drama "K Street" to the spectacle of Arnold Schwarzenegger announcing his California gubernatorial candidacy on "The Tonight Show."

In an actual news report on the making of "Tanner '88," then-ABC correspondent Brit Hume declared that "no movie has ever blended fiction and reality so much." Murphy now recalls how hard he found it to distinguish the two. "By the second or third day [of shooting], I'm saying, `Hi, I'm Jack Tanner. I'm running for president," he says. "I thought to myself, `This is just like showbiz, I can do this. I get this whole thing.' "

Now, with another George Bush on the Republican side and a crowded field of Democrats, the 2004 campaign looks eerily similar to the 1988 contest. And the 11 episodes of "Tanner '88" are being rebroadcast on the Sundance Channel starting Tuesday at 9 p.m. Sixteen years and four election cycles later, its lessons are surprisingly fresh and relevant.

In the series, Tanner mixes with the real pols on the 1988 campaign trail, exchanging perfunctory pleasantries with Republican hopefuls Bob Dole and Pat Robertson while getting a heart-to-heart talk about authenticity from Democrat Bruce Babbitt. Kitty Dukakis, wife of the eventual Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, makes a convincing appearance in one episode seeking Tanner's support for her husband after a bruising primary season.

Murphy says that toward the end of the series, he walked onto the Atlanta convention floor and delegates actually "went beserk" and starting screaming "Tanner." More disturbingly, he remembers a social event in Washington at which he worked the crowd, explaining he was running for president. Everyone fell for it except the Rev. Robert Drinan, a former Massachusetts congressman who stopped Murphy and asked, "President of what?"

The show's ability to shatter the wall between entertainment and politics seemed strange at the time. But no more. Ponder the case of Martin Sheen, a man who plays a president on television, hitting the campaign trail on behalf of Howard Dean, a presidential candidate who doesn't perform particularly well on TV. How about the serious speculation that actor Warren Beatty, who viciously lampooned politics in his 1998 film "Bulworth," would actually run for president in 2000?

"Tanner '88" may have been the inspiration for HBO's "K Street," in which real pols and pundits such as Dean and James Carville were thrust into the midst of a fictional series. But "K Street" was less entertaining than HBO's "Journeys with George," an amusing documentary that captured George Bush on the stump during his 2000 presidential campaign.

In recent years, politicians from Bill Clinton to Kerry have learned the value of yukking it up on a late-night talk show. But the highlight for that genre had to be Bush and Al Gore playfully poking fun at their own weaknesses on a "Saturday Night Live" appearance just a few days before voters went to the polls in 2000 and proved they had problems with both men.

Altman, who is a Kerry fan, says that given subsequent events, "Tanner '88" was a trailblazing effort that holds up quite well.

"We didn't know what we were doing because we didn't have a model," he says. "We were into new territory, the beginning of the full reality kind of stuff. . . . We were very lucky with the timing of it. The only thing I can see that really dates it is the size of the cellphones."

That's not the only anachronism. But the show's journey through the political sausage factory feels impressively real. Dukakis, who watched a little of the series, contrasts it with the unrealistically snappy patter and pace of NBC's "The West Wing."

" `Tanner,' to me, seemed to be a lot more authentic," he says.

The series opens with Tanner dutifully tromping through the New Hampshire tundra, engaging in the humbling retail politics that the Granite State demands of its suitors. During a scene in which the candidate's life story is being tested in front of a focus group, one man knowingly blurts out: "He's the perfect vice-president." And Tanner's dramatic reinvention of himself should resonate with viewers who have watched Kerry's metamorphosis in 2004 and Dean's regular tinkering with his message and temperament.

Some of Tanner's positions, including a call to legalize drugs, seem like a Hollywood-inspired pipe dream. But one of the series's strongest scenes occurs when he meets with people who have lost loved ones to drugs and gangs in a blighted Detroit neighborhood. Watching Tanner's resolve and lower jaw crumble as he listens to folks hammer away at his legalization position produces one of those memorable moments when campaign sloganeering clashes with harsher realities.

Not surprisingly, the press corps, or "scorps" as they were called in "Primary Colors" (a later blend of the real and the fictional), play a major role in "Tanner '88." And here the show does as well as can be expected. In 1988 there is no Internet-driven supersonic news cycle, and the only cable news outlet is CNN. Thus newspapers play a disproportionately important role in the media landscape. Some of the journalists are a bit caricatured. But the series does a good job of capturing the healthy egos that drive the boys on the bus and the nature of the ubiquitous campaign journalist lying in wait for scandal or misstep.

There are, to be sure, a few theatrical touches that strain credulity. A young Cynthia Nixon, in her pre-"Sex and the City" days, stars as Tanner's bull-headed daughter Alex, who ropes him into various misadventures, including an arrest at an antiapartheid rally. A real campaign would have reined in the most dangerous political relative this side of Billy Carter.

Then there is the romance between the divorced Tanner and Joanna Buckley, deputy campaign manager for his rival, Dukakis. Even during a campaign season in which womanizing drove Gary Hart from the race, this seems a bit much. Yet when asked about that dubious plotline, Dukakis doesn't dismiss the possibility.

"Nobody's more oblivious to what's going on in a personal-relations sense than a candidate," says the 1988 nominee, adding that many romances did grow out of his campaign. (In another bizarre mingling of fact and fantasy, six months after the series, Murphy married the actress who played Buckley, Wendy Crewson.)

The new Sundance version of "Tanner '88" also contains brief "fireside chats" with Tanner, Alex, and campaign manager T. J. Cavanaugh (Pamela Reed). Still in character, but now in the year 2004, they reminisce about 1988.

Tanner, now a silver-haired professor, seems to have been sobered by the whole experience. During one chat, he wearily declares that "there are no moral victories in politics. There's only winning." In an interview, Altman says that Tanner seems "wiser and sadder" and "very truthful" these days, but that's "because he knows he's not ever going to run again."

As for the course of the 2004 presidential campaign, Murphy has one thought: "It's probably what we were doing, even crazier."