Tanner for President? Not This Year : Television: Jack Tanner would be a great candidate in ‘92, but there won’t be any sequel to Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau’s incisive mock campaign documentary.

Johnny Carson joked Thursday on “The Tonight Show” that being the front-runner among the current crop of Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination is the equivalent of being “head lemming.”

Democratic Party bosses may not have been laughing, however. Desperate for an electable candidate, they seem to be keeping their options open. Some may still be praying for Mario. Some have gone begging to Gephardt and Gore.

Maybe they’re looking in the wrong place. The man they really need is former Rep. Jack Tanner of Michigan.

Surely you remember Tanner? Tall, nice suits, graying temples, a cross between Gary Hart and Gary Cooper.

Unlike any of the other Democrats in the race, Tanner ran for President in ’88. In fact, his last-ditch bureaucratic challenge at the Democratic Convention almost wrested the nomination from Michael Dukakis.

He was the one who gave up his seat in Congress to spend more time with his Hodgkin’s disease-stricken daughter. He was the divorced man secretly sleeping with Dukakis’ deputy campaign manager. He was the candidate who proposed legalization as the best weapon in the war on drugs.

OK, OK. Tanner isn’t real. He was invented by Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman for their HBO “Tanner ‘88” series. But, as played by Michael Murphy, Tanner often seemed more real, more interesting, even more electable, than any other candidate who ran that year, and maybe more so than any running now.

Written by Trudeau and directed by Altman, the 11-episode series spoofed the marathon that we call “running for President.” In an improvisational, guerrilla style that blended fact with fiction--Kitty Dukakis, then-candidates Bob Dole, Gary Hart and Bruce Babbitt and many others appeared in the show as themselves--the mock documentary series poked fun at photo opportunities, adoring wifely gazes, Hollywood fund-raisers, the media’s lust for dirt on the candidate’s personal life and the ease with which the candidates’ handlers manipulate that same media.

So, where is Tanner when you really need him? Nowhere to be seen.

“Tanner ‘88,” the victim of low viewer turnout and an empty war chest, isn’t running in ’92. Altman, the director of “MASH,” “Nashville” and the upcoming film “The Player,” said that he, Trudeau and Murphy were willing to set aside all other projects to do it but couldn’t find anyone to put up the $1.2 million an hour they needed.

Though proud of the attention and acclaim that the series brought to HBO, Bridget Potter, the pay cable network’s senior vice president for original programming, lamented that the series drew a “minuscule audience” in 1988.

“It’s sad because we love the series. It was brilliant, but it just wasn’t a commercially viable venture,” Potter said. “It was a series about the political process and I’m sad to say that we as nation don’t seem to care very much about that. How many Americans are even registered to vote? And it was difficult. Those were a challenging and complicated set of ideas that Altman and Trudeau were espousing and it just wasn’t suited for a mass television audience.”

Potter said that HBO had talked with Altman about reviving Tanner this year as a less costly, one- or two-time special, but Altman, who won an Emmy for the series, rejected that idea. Potter said that she hopes that Altman reconsiders and agrees to produce a scaled-down “Tanner” before the November election.

But Altman, who shot “Tanner” on the 1988 campaign trail alongside the actual candidates in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington, Michigan, California and at the Democratic convention in Atlanta, insisted that for the series to truly mirror the absurdities of the process, “Tanner has to be out there running with the other guys.”

He approached other film and television companies, Altman said, but most told him that the series offered no residual or repeat value. He added, however, that he is close to selling “Tanner ‘88” to home video, and expects it to be available late this summer.

“I’m very bitter about this,” said Altman, who considers “Tanner” the best and most important work of his career. “I think it’s so stupid and gutless that nobody has the foresight to see the value in this. We should be right this moment out there filming in New Hampshire. What a field day it would have been. And what a great service and great entertainment we would have provided.”

“Tanner ‘88,” when not flat-out sublime, was flat-out hilarious. Where else would we have found TV journalist Linda Ellerbee wishing that the 1980 race had been decided simply by having Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan battle it out in a pit? How else would we have been privy to a candidate bribing his teen-age daughter with the promise of a new car in exchange for her appearing alongside him and his girlfriend in a network TV picture of “post-modern family” harmony? Who else would have invited us to watch Kitty Dukakis, the wife of the Democratic nominee, appeal to the fictional girlfriend of a fictional candidate for support for her husband’s presidential bid?

“Tanner” somehow exposed the surreal circus of the presidential campaign without demeaning it entirely. It showed that the making of a President can be the very unmaking of his ideals, convictions and all things that make him human. And yet, in Tanner, it offered the promise of somebody we’d not only like to see as President, but somebody we’d actually like.

“In a way, it’s good we didn’t do it,” Altman concluded, “because this year Tanner probably would have won.”