The pivotal scene in Robert Altman’s 1988 miniseries Tanner ’88 happens early in the show—in fact, it happens near the very end of the pilot, as former congressman Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), a fictional addition to the already stuffed roster of Democrats running for president that year, winds down with his staff after a humiliating day on the campaign trail, one of many to come. Earlier, he’s told, members of a focus group who viewed his ads had peppered his team with different versions of the same question: Why, exactly, was he running? As the campaign’s videographer films him surreptitiously from under a glass coffee table, Tanner, comically aloof and diffident up to this point, rationalizes his long shot campaign in a rare moment of unguarded authenticity—a monologue soon to be fashioned into an ad that will briefly make Tanner a real contender.
It begins with an anecdote about a Democratic Leadership Conference meeting he’d attended in South Carolina, where his daughter, Lexi (Cynthia Nixon), had asked the other presidential candidates assembled to share their favorite Beatle. Gary Hart had fumbled around for a name. Michael Dukakis had unconvincingly chosen Paul. And Joe Biden hadn’t bothered to give an answer at all. “Now, I don’t know if Lexi knows the names of all the Beatles herself, let alone the answer to her own question, but it suddenly dawned on me that I sure as hell did,” Tanner says. “And I knew for sure that anybody who didn’t had absolutely no claim to generational leadership. Now I must have—what—10 years on Joe Biden. But, dammit, he wasn’t paying attention back then, and I was.”
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/aBrsjdO
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