A Satirical Look at ‘Dark Horse’ Campaign

Wise and devilishly funny, “Tanner ‘88: The Dark Horse” puts HBO on the cutting edge of campaign commentary.

Written by Garry Trudeau and directed by Robert Altman, it’s TV’s truest look yet--and that includes news coverage--at farcical elements of the presidential ritual that reached its first crescendo with last week’s Iowa caucuses.

Airing at 10 tonight as the first of at least two programs about a fictional Democratic candidate named Jack Tanner (played by Michael Murphy), “The Dark Horse” is so subtlely absurd that it’s real. And hilarious? I haven’t laughed so hard since the last presidential debate.

This is “Doonesbury” genius Trudeau in cool satirical form and Altman at his improvisational best, his ever-fluid camera constantly gliding and searching, exposing the emptiness and cynicism of this electioneering process. Gaining added authenticity through the use of newscast-like videotape instead of film, Trudeau and Altman pull off the hard task of parodying a marathon process that is itself a parody. And they get in their digs at the media too.

TV’s closest cousin to “The Dark Horse” was a 1984 “Frontline” documentary that caught the frenzy and chaos of Gary Hart’s run for the Democratic nomination that year.

“The Dark Horse” pushes many of the same buttons, but punches more holes and injects its own sardonic twists, often becoming as much of a mock documentary as Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap.”

We meet Tanner as he’s campaigning in the cold and snow for Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, a former Michigan congressman who’s more an invisible horse than a dark horse--underfinanced, understaffed and undercovered, his entourage on the stump consisting of his 19-year-old daughter, Alex, and a lurking Boston Globe reporter who’s interested in his private life.

One of his first visits could have been excerpted from actual news footage. It’s to Farmer Bob’s, a play on one of those obligatory campaign stops that draws every candidate lusting to be perceived as a populist. But the TV crew there to meet Tanner is sent away by Farmer Bob even before the candidate arrives. So a media event is reduced to a social call, with Mrs. Bob proudly displaying her Polaroids of other candidates and Farmer Bob hauling out his guest book so that Tanner can sign right below Al Haig.

“Jack Tanner?” asks Farmer Bob, looking at the new signature. “Who’s that?”

With Murphy heading a swell cast, it’s all grand stuff, including Tanner dropping in on a group of elderly quilters who continue chattering to each other as he tells them: “People like you are truly the backbone of the country.”

The line separating this show business and actual campaign show business blurs further with the cameo appearances of such candidates as Republicans Pat Robertson and Bob Dole and Democrat Hart as themselves. Hart arrives immediately after we hear Tanner steal a line from Hart about “the exercise and power of ideas.”

What strikes you most about these scenes is that the real candidates sound and seem no different in this artificial setting than when you see them campaigning on the evening news. And Tanner fits right in.

Tanner on the stump is intercut with pointedly funny scenes of a demographically perfect focus group assessing--and rejecting--him as a candidate. Meanwhile, his campaign strategy is being plotted by his minute staff of volunteers, including campaign manager T. J. Cavanaugh (Pamela Reed) and a gushing campaign groupie (Ilana Levine), who exclaims about her hero candidate: “He’s such an intellekshul !”

In some ways, Jack Tanner’s stumbling vote crusade is the low-budget embodiment of what political scientist John David Barber had to say about the campaign process in the Columbia Journalism Review not long ago:

“The clear implication of the coverage to curious voters is that the campaign tests presidential qualities--which, of course, it does not. These days a presidential campaign tests the candidate’s capacity to endure the physical stress of extended travel, to deliver the same speech over and over again, to beg money from rich donors, to spin out TV commercials, to announce detailed plans for action in an unknown, yet-to-come political context, to impress crowds of recruited teen-agers, and, what is perhaps most important, to puff up one’s pictorial image for TV news.”

Although Tanner’s pilgrimage to Farmer Bob’s is in New Hampshire, it recalls a 1984 cartoon in the Des Moines Register that suggested that candidates in that state’s caucuses could save time and money if a facade of a typical Iowa farm were constructed at the airport. A candidate could then fly in, give his standard agricultural speech in front of the facade for the cameras, then reboard his plane and fly out. No muss, no fuss.

Nothing is quite that easy for Tanner, however.

Murphy delivers the right moves, body language and nuances for this likable character, who seems to be a composite of many political faces. Tanner is nice, intelligent and passionate, but an uncompelling candidate, articulating his idealism but not his program for America, leaving doubts even in the minds of his supporters on exactly why he is running.

All that apparently comes to a head when the second hour, “Tanner ‘88: The Real Thing,” arrives next month, following the candidate on a fund-raising trip to Nashville. The fate of a proposed third episode may depend on public acceptance of tonight’s episode.

That’s politics.