Tanner was drawn to politics early on, winning his first race in 1976 for the Tennessee House of Representatives, where he remained until he saw a chance to move to Congress in 1988.

House Elections

Rep. Ed Jones, a Democrat who held the 8th House seat in northwest Tennessee for nearly 20 years, retired in 1988 and Tanner entered the race. Tanner beat Republican Ed Bryant, who would go on to become an organizer for conservative televangelist Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential bid and, in 1994, to win a congressional seat of his own in a different, more conservative Tennessee district.

Tanner faced little or no serious competition in his next nine bids for reelection to Congress. In two of those elections, Tanner's chief opponent was James L. Hart, who campaigned wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying a gun while touting his determination to keep "less favored races" from reproducing or immigrating to America. Though Hart won the Republican nomination in 2004 and 2008, the GOP denounced him in both races.

Unwanted National Attention

Tanner has achieved national prominence in his 20-year congressional career, but not in ways he would have preferred or his colleagues would have envied.

Tanner first came to the attention of the American public in The Starr Report, the voluminous, official investigative narrative of President Bill Clinton's 1998 affair with White House intern Monica Lewinski. Tanner is named as one of two congressmen who talked with Clinton on the phone while the president and Lewinski were having sex in the Oval Office.

In 2004, Tanner made another unintended cameo appearance, this time in "Fahrenheit 9/11," a film by liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who ambushed Tanner on Capitol Hill to ask if Tanner, a supporter of the Iraq war, would allow his children to fight there.

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