We’re on the back end of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, an apt moment for a quiz. Wait! Come back! It’s a wee multiple-choice quiz, where you pick the correct political leaders — fictional or real, foreign or domestic, deceased or living — responsible for the following 10 quotations.
The words themselves? Nothing legendary. No “four score” or “it takes a village.” That’d be too easy. Just a few items plainspoken and semi-obscure enough to make you feel smart if you get it right, and “oh, like I’d know that” if you don’t. Pick who said what, and good luck. Answers at the bottom. Enough preamble. To quote Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Democracy is talking itself to death.” And he said that a while ago!
1. “There are now two pieces: one six miles wide, the other a mile and a half.”
A. President Donald Trump, discussing his never-completed wall along the Mexican/U.S. border
B. President Tom Beck, regarding a troublesome comet in the 1998 movie “Deep Impact”
C. President John Tyler, on the 1839 Aroostook War’s ancillary territorial dispute between citizens of Maine and New Brunswick, Canada
2. “I don’t like to practice ahead of time what I’m going to say.”
A. The unnamed president in the 1964 movie “Fail Safe”
B. Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 vice presidential nominee under candidate Walter Mondale
C. Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator and leader of the National Fascist Party
3. “Now we’ll have a perfect country — these improvements, you will see!”
A. Betty Boop in the 1932 animated short “Betty Boop for President”
B. President Donald Trump
C. President James Dale in the 1996 movie “Mars Attacks!”
4. “Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right.”
A. President James Marshall in the 1997 movie “Air Force One”
B. President John F. Kennedy
C. President Abraham Lincoln
5. “Happy days will soon be here!”
A. Vice President Charles Curtis, under President Herbert Hoover
B. Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz
C. Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom in the 1933 Broadway musical “Let ‘Em Eat Cake”
6. “Empty the pool halls. Turn em out! Turn the yokels out!”
A. Governor Willie Stark in the 1946 novel and 1949 movie “All the King’s Men”
B. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance
C. River City, Iowa Mayor George Shinn in the 1957 Broadway musical and 1962 film “The Music Man”
7. “As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, it is within the rights of the president to declare the country under martial law!”
A. President Stephen Henderson in the 1964 Broadway musical “Mr. President”
B. President Jud Hammond in the 1933 film “Gabriel Over the White House”
C. Russian President Vladimir Putin
8. “It is our moments of struggle that define us.”
A. President Theodore Roosevelt
B. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini
C. President Allan Trumbull in the 2019 thriller “Angel Has Fallen”
9. “We have to inspire our children and grandchildren to take on challenges and risks that at first may seem to be overwhelming, or even impossible. They need to understand that the only failure is not trying.”
A. President Jimmy Carter
B. Presidential candidate Ross Perot
C. Presidential lookalike Dave Kovic in the 1993 film “Dave”
10. “What is the use of being elected or re-elected, unless you stand for something?”
A. President Ronald Reagan
B. President Jed Bartlet in “The West Wing”
C. President Grover Cleveland
Answers:
1: B, Morgan Freeman played the fictional POTUS in “Deep Impact.”
2: B, Ferraro, speaking to PBS host Jim Lehrer in 1990 about her 1984 debate with George H.W. Bush.
3: A, Ms. Boop in the 1932 animated short.
4: A, Harrison Ford played the can-do, hands-on president — literally hands-on; he threw Gary Oldman off Air Force One.
5: C, Throttlebottom first appeared in the 1931 Gershwin musical “Of Thee I Sing”; the 1933 sequel flopped, because audiences weren’t up for satire envisioning America on the brink of dictatorship with (no joke) a U.S. Capitol overrun by violent insurrectionists with nooses.
6: A, the novelist Robert Penn Warren’s examination of self-serving, Huey Long-style populism starred Broderick Crawford in the 1949 film.
7: B, “Gabriel Over the White House,” an unhinged 1933 political screen fantasy, must be seen to be disbelieved.
8: C, Morgan Freeman again, here as a different fictional POTUS in “Angel Has Fallen.”
9: A, Carter for the win!
10: C, Grover Cleveland. His words may have lacked eloquence, but not truth.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
