The Ballot of Bill McKay
The Biden presidency could be our sequel to The Candidate.
I like to think I’ve gotten good at anticipating the pop culture parallels Jack Hughes would draw with American politics, but I didn’t see this one coming. The Biden presidency is the sequel to The Candidate that we’ve been promised for decades. So what do we do now?
by Jack Hughes
The year is 1972. A young, thirtyish, lawyer has won the Democratic nomination for United States Senator. It was a prize no big-name candidate wanted because it meant challenging a longstanding, seemingly unbeatable, Republican incumbent. Yet, an insurgent campaign focused on the environment, civil rights, root causes of crime, and other progressive themes earned the upstart an upset win. His name? Bill McKay.
McKay is the fictional character played by Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning The Candidate, often considered one of the best political movies of all time. Of course, readers will be forgiven if the above description made them think of another thirtyish Democrat lawyer who surprised an entrenched Republican Senator in 1972 – a real flesh and blood person who’s been in the news a fair bit lately. His name? Joe Biden.
Box office McKay preceded ballot box Biden by a few months and wasn’t based on the future president but, rather, one-term California Senator John Tunney – son of boxer Gene Tunney and the upstart who upset Republican Senator George Murphy in 1970. He even had a cameo in the movie. (Many, not least Governor Moonbeam himself, have wrongly claimed the movie was about father/son Pat and Jerry Brown.)
While McKay’s initial candidacy was inspired by Tunney, Redford’s aspirations for the character would’ve seen him enjoy a longer political career more like Biden’s. Back in 2003, Redford floated the idea of a sequel in which an older Senator McKay would be running for President or as an incumbent president seeking a second term. Alas, much like Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign, it never got off the ground.
Fast forward a few years and the thin line between fact and fiction would be further blurred when Redford wrote a rare CNN op-ed endorsing Biden for president in 2020. Citing Biden’s passion – and compassion – in fighting economic and racial injustice, while at the same time criticizing Donald Trump’s environmental record, Redford sounded a lot like a wiser, weary, and weathered version of his alter ego Bill McKay.
It’s important to note, The Candidate was satire. Jeremy Larner, a speechwriter to Eugene McCarthy during the senator’s quixotic 1968 campaign, won an Academy Award for his original screenplay mockumentary. McKay starts as an independent-minded idealist who, as the campaign wears on, gets worn down by a growing group of campaign advisors until he becomes just another run-of-the-mill party politician.
Back in 1988, Larner was moved to write an op-ed of his own in the New York Times in which he lamented that actual senators proudly claimed to have been inspired by his satirical senator – most notably one from Indiana: “Sorry, Senator Quayle, you thought we were telling you ‘how-to,’ when we were trying to say: watch out. You missed the irony…Unless, in a way I never could have foreseen, you are the irony.”
Larner, then, wouldn’t want Joe Biden to emulate Bill McKay. Yet, there’s reason to think the Biden presidency could be the closest thing we’ll ever get to a sequel to The Candidate (especially given Robert Redford has retired from acting, despite being only six years older than the president-elect). Go watch the movie, then read about Biden’s 1972 campaign – you’ll catch some perceptible, if imperfect, parallels.
The Biden presidency could be the closest thing we’ll ever get to a sequel to The Candidate.
Take, for example, the issue of school busing as a vehicle for desegregation. Both McKay and Biden started their 1972 campaigns with strong stands on the issue, and both slid towards a moderate middle in their debates before election day. The busing issue might have been ‘long forgotten’ but for the fact Biden was challenged directly on it during the 2020 Democratic Primaries by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
The past, then, might be prologue. Redford’s idea for his sequel to The Candidate would’ve shown us how McKay had changed after a long career of horse-trading in Washington. The next four years will show us, in real life, the effects of prolonged exposure to political realities on Biden. Prominent social progressives have already raised red flags about some Biden cabinet picks which they view as too conservative.
Biden’s congressional conscience might be Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who, at 31, is the type of young liberal firebrand a thirty-year-old Biden or McKay would’ve have seen as a kindred spirit. AOC, in turn, may see present-day President Biden as cut from the same cloth as the Republican Senator, Cale Boggs, he beat seventeen years before she was born – as McKay could’ve resembled his opponent Crocker Jarmon.
If this were a Hollywood sequel, one could easily predict the formulaic ending: At some decisive eleventh hour, on the eve of a crucial showdown, the young insurgent would convince the old incumbent to reverse his character arc from the first movie and return to the principled roots of his youth. After the horror movie that was 2020, might appeal to some as the kind of a schmaltzy feel-good redemption story we need.
These days, though, there’s one thing that Hollywood likes more than sequels – and that’s reboots. Imagine in 2022, 50 years after The Candidate was released and Biden was elected to the Senate, their story is rebooted with a thirtyish insurgent Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez challenging a three-term incumbent Chuck Schumer. Would that kind of refreshed reboot do well at the ballot box office or would they change the ending?
Jack Hughes is a communications consultant based in Canada. His previous contributions to The Experiment include “Same of Thrones,” “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew,” “Harris / Shuri 2020,” and “Firth and Firthiness,” among others. His previous writings on Dan Quayle are “The Unusual Suspect” and “The Unusual Suspect II.” His most recent contribution was “The GOPfather.” Connect with him on LinkedIn here.
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