The White House Correspondents Dinner is one of my pet peeves in the world of politics and journalism. The worst part is that in the past it has featured the President cracking jokes about policy - most infamously, George W. Bush in 2004 yukking it up over the fact that no "weapons of mass destruction" had been found in Iraq - and the ostensibly watchdog press corps grandees laughing along. It is a real symbol of the social and mental corruption of the national press in catering to the powerful.
Trump skipped the dinner last year and this. So by this year, it became the establishment press embarrassing themselves without any help from the President. Charlie Pierce has a caustic commentary on this past weekend's event, The Forces Were Perfectly in Balance at the White House Correspondents' DinnerEsquire Politics Blog 04/30/2018:
Faced with an administration* and a president* dedicated to poisoning both the spirit and the institutions of free government, and faced with an administration* and a president* dedicated only to looting those institutions that it cannot destroy, the representatives of the elite political media, through the woman at the head of their formal association, Margaret Talev, have determined that bowing to the fauxtrage aimed at a comedian on behalf of the administration*’s paid liar [Sarah Huckabee Sanders] is the proper way to respond to the weekend’s festivities. The commitment to a free press is not common to this nation’s people any more, if it ever was, and it damn sure doesn’t have any fans in this administration*. Anyone who thinks that “a vigorous and free press” and “honoring civility” are equally desirable goals doesn’t love the former enough to deserve the latter. [my emphasis]
As the title of his piece indicates, Klein thinks Obama used humor to say what he can't say so explicitly in his formal role as President.
I'm not convinced. As Ezra points out, the instantly-famous "anger translator" segment of his presentation was based on a previous comedy sketch.
So is this what Ezra describes as, "There are no jokes there. There's just Obama saying what he has to say and Luther saying what Obama actually believes."
Maybe it's a bit of political Puritanism on my part. But I really don't like the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Among Presidential rituals, it ranks with the National Prayer Breakfast, sponsored by a rightwing Christian fundamentalist group, and any ceremony that honors the memory of the Confederacy as such as things the President should not do.
On the Dinner, though, I'm willing to give the Presidents a partial break. If the leading Washington reporters and pundits want to throw any pretense of being journalistic watchdogs to the wind and suck up the the President at a glamor-overdose event, the President has strong incentive to play them for suckers. I get that.
But the event has become one where the President is expected to play comedian for the night. And even at its least obnoxious, it contributes to the merger of politics, government and show business to an extent I would rather not see. It encourages the toxic idea that politics is and should be a spectator sport, entertainment rather than serious business.
The low point of this came in 2004, when Shrub Bush did a comedy routine about there being no WMD in Iraq, the lie on which he had justified the invasion. It showed what contempt he had for the American people and how little sense of responsibility he felt about the lives of Americans lost in the war, not even to mention the lives of Iraqis killed for no good reason. A CNN report, Bush takes heat for WMD jokes 05/06/2015, gives a good sense of how grotesque it was, even while sticking to the stenographic this-side-says-the-other-side-says approach:
Democrats have seized on the matter, calling it astonishingly insensitive when Americans have died for their country in Iraq while the search for WMD has turned up nothing.
The administration had cited the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons program as one of the primary reasons for the need for war.
"It's inappropriate to the thousands of people obviously who have been wounded over there," Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday.
"This is a very serious issue. We've lost hundreds of troops, as you know, over there. Let's not be laughing about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction. ... We certainly should not be making light of the situation."
McAuliffe's Republican counterpart, Ed Gillespie, responded by saying people need to lighten up, that the president made the comment in jest.
He noted that the correspondents at the dinner laughed when the president made the remark. [my emphasis]
That last line was the very, very telling about the elite press. They did laugh at it. And those who did so demonstrated that they had no more sense of decency about the thing that Bush did.
On the Sunday morning horror show called Meet the Press of 04/27/2015, Chuck Todd was still complaining about the fuddy-duddies who criticized Bush the Magnificent, Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of the Heathen, for that reprehensible moment. The transcript doesn't appear to be available yet at the MTP website, nor the video clip of that part.
Mabe somebody at NBC News may have thought it was too embarrassing to show on the website? Ha! As if ...
I've previously referred to a few sentences from Jerry Brown his Inaugural Address as Governor in 2011. He was referring to the poor opinion Californians had of state government, not the White House Correspondents' Dinner. But his observation is relevant to it, as well: "Perhaps this is the reason why the public holds the state government in such low esteem. And that’s a profound problem, not just for those of us who are elected, but for our whole system of self-government. Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void." (my emphasis)
I'm to the point that I just don't like to see the President appearing at celebrity press events where stars of the allegedly serious news media do high-level celebrity networking and listen to Presidents and aspiring Presidents do a comedy act. These events promote the notion that politics is mainly a variation of show business and deepen the already shamelessly deferential attitude that the national press shows toward politicians in good standing with the business Establishment.
Attending the Gridiron Club dinner, Obama made light of a recent back and forth between his administration and Woodward, the veteran Washington Post journalist whose reporting on the Watergate scandal helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency.
"Can anybody tell me when an administration has ever regretted picking a fight with Bob Woodward?" Obama joked. "What's the worst that could happen?"
Woodward and White House economic adviser Gene Sperling had a public tussle that played itself out in a leaked email, in which Sperling told the veteran journalist he would regret taking a position on one of Obama's policies. Woodward suggested the move was an example of White House intimidation.
"Who knew Gene could be so intimidating," Obama joked about Sperling. "Or let me phrase it differently: who knew anybody named Gene could be so intimidating?"
Woodward received some well-deserved criticism and ridicule for being such a whiner and a schmuck around that incident.
But Woodward's claim was ridiculed not only because it was silly whining. It also reflected Woodward's go-with-the-flow brand of journalism, in which he tailors not only his analytic spin but his reporting according to changing Beltway Village fashion. Gene Lyons called out an important point in the Woodward flap in Ignoring The Sequester's Inconvenient TruthsNational Memo 03/06/3013, which is that Sperling was trying to correct Woodward from making a Republican-friendly claim that was not only factually wrong but embarrassingly obviously so:
Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor ... spent much of last week on national TV demonstrating that he can’t distinguish a warning from an apology.
"You do not ever have to apologize to me," Woodward had responded to an allegedly intimidating email from longtime White House source, Gene Sperling. "I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening."
Wow, that must have been scary! Faced with incredulity after the inoffensive email became public, Woodward alibied that he'd never exactly called it threatening.
Which begs the question of why he was talking about it on TV. Look, people frequently wander into newspaper offices describing government plots against them — often spelled out in all caps, with lots of red-ink underlining and rows of exclamation points. Most often they’re gently shown the door.
But I digress. Sperling's point was that Woodward was completely off base in saying President Obama had "moved the goalposts" by seeking to close tax loopholes enabling guys like Mitt Romney to pay lower income tax rates than his wife's horse trainers.
Could there be anybody in America who didn't know that?
Obama's not-especially-funny joke, at which no doubt the crowd laughed politely - shoot, this crowd may have thought it was hilarious! - actually flattered Woodward by suggesting that he was still some kind of go-getter investigative reporter. In fact, he is mainly known now for his hagiographic sketches of the powerful. Though in his various account of George W. Bush's Presidency, he eventually shifted from hagiography to safe criticism. Rick Perlstein sketches out the evolution of Bod Woodward's George W. Bush in Reading Bob WoodwardThe Nation 03/06/2013. He also summarizes how the Bob Woodward of the Watergate story is a very different figure that the Woodward of polite Presidential jokes:
All credit to David Folkenflik of NPR for having the presence of mind to invite us to turn to page 105 of All the President's Men to remind Woodward what a real White House threat sounds like: John Mitchell in September 1972 telling his partner Carl Bernstein that if The Washington Post published what it knew about Mitchell personally approving the payment of political spies, Post publisher Katherine Graham was "gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer."
They ran it anyway, of course. They ran it even though Richard Nixon’s re-election juggernaut was proving impermeable to Woodward and Bernstein’s ongoing Watergate full-court press, and many among Georgetown’s cocktail set had begun to consider the Post's ongoing indulgence of the story a bit of an embarrassing obsession, kind of the way a blogger like Glenn Greenwald is looked upon now. Because back then, Woodward had guts. He’s something different now: a barometer of Washington conventional wisdom, who more appears to say what he chooses to say based upon his continually evolving sense of who is up and who is down among precisely that same Georgetown cocktail set. ...
Continue reading Bob Woodward. But not the prose. You won't learn much from that. Read the man instead. That way you’ll learn what the people in power think about what you’re supposed to think.
But even though Woodward wasn't threatened, the Obama Administration has pursued the most drastic approach to Executive secrecy and prosecution of leakers of any Administration ever. Bradley Manning's treatment in military confinement, for which the officials responsible for it should be prosecuted as torture perpetrators, is facing decades of prison time under the prosecution the Obama Administration is bringing against him.
But the major media types who show up to chuckle at the President's bad jokes aren't boycotting the event because of Obama's treatment of Manning. And certainly not because of his push to shut down Wikileaks and arrest Julian Assange.
The Obama Administration has been making some real and substantial threats to the kind of investigative reporting that originally made Bob Woodward famous. (Though Gene Sperling's now-famous e-mail to Woodward was not one of them.) And this Gridiron Club Dinner gives them both Obama and the media bigwigs to pretend that it's all a big joke.
One more grim irony in this is that both the Bush and Obama Administrations gave Woodward extensive access to classified documents to write about the Obama White House when it benefited their PR spin. Yet neither the leakers nor Woodward himself are being subjected to the kind of treatment that Bradley Manning or Julian Assange are facing.
Before I begin, I know some of you have noticed that I'm dressed a little differently from the other gentlemen. Because of sequester, they cut my tails. (Laughter.) My joke writers have been placed on furlough. (Laughter.) I know a lot of you reported that no one will feel any immediate impact because of the sequester. Well, you're about to find out how wrong you are. (Laughter.)
Of course, there's one thing in Washington that didn't get cut -- the length of this dinner. (Laughter.) Yet more proof that the sequester makes no sense. (Laughter.) ...
But don't worry. We're all friends again in the spirit of that wonderful song. As you may have heard, Bob invited Gene over to his place. And Bob says he actually thinks that I should make it too. And I might take him up on the offer. I mean, nothing says "not a threat" like showing up at somebody's house with guys with machine guns. (Laughter.)
Yesterday, the same day he was joking with his pals in the press about how important people like themselves weren't affected by the sequester he and the Republicans agreed on back in 2011, he was giving his regular weekly address about how important it is to come up with a deal to pass the sequester. The White House titles the Saturday message End the Sequester to Keep Growing the Economy 03/09/2013 (transcript here):
I would say he's delivering very mixed messages.
But maybe I'm being too hard on him. He said in his supposedly serious message:
As Democrats and Republicans, we may disagree on the best way to achieve our goals, but I'm confident we can agree on what those goals should be. A strong and vibrant middle class. An economy that allows businesses to grow and thrive. An education system that gives more Americans the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future. An immigration system that actually works for families and businesses. Stronger communities and safer streets for our children.
He should have used that for his comedy routine in the evening. That might have gotten some genuine laughs. He could have thrown in that the Republicans also agrees that rain falls from the sky and that we can see stars at night.
There are other such events, the most egregious being the Nerd Prom, aka, the White House Correspondents Dinner coming up on April 27, sponsored by the White House Correspondents' Association. Comic Conan O'Brien will be the Master of Ceremonies. Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian are expected to be among the guests. (Josh Grossberg, Conan O'Brien to host White House Correspondents Dinner E! Online/NBC Entertainment 02/20/2013) Here is an undated press release at the website, "2013 WHCA℠ Dinner News":
Team Coco is coming back to Washington.
Conan O'Brien, the Emmy award-winning comedian and late night talk show host, will headline the annual White House Correspondents' Association’s annual dinner on April 27, 2013, it was revealed Wednesday by association president Ed Henry.
"Conan is one of television's most innovative and influential talents and I am absolutely thrilled that he has agreed to be this year's featured act," said Henry. ...
The President traditionally delivers his own set of jokes, poking fun at himself as well as his political opponents, before the comedian gets the podium. It's all in good fun and for a good cause.
The dinner is affectionately known as the "nerd prom" because it is a hit on C-SPAN. It draws a wide cross section of movers and shakers from the worlds of journalism, politics, as well as Hollywood all coming together for one night to help shine the spotlight on the next generation of journalists.
The event is also known for featuring some of the hottest names in comedy over the years, including when a boyish, 32-year-old O'Brien turned in a brilliant performance at the 1995 dinner. That was when O'Brien was starting his 16 year run as the host of "Late Night with Conan O’Brien" on NBC.
And this jolly event that bring "Team Coco" back to Washington is sponsored by the Very Serious People at the White House Correspondents' Association, the cutting edge of Beltway Village journalism that takes its adversarial role as the Fourth Estate of American democracy oh-so-very seriously.
The White House got the video of Obama's annual stand-up comedy act at the 2012 Nerd Prom, aka, the White House Correspondents Dinner, onto YouTube while it was still Saturday, with the clunky title The President Obama at White House Correspondents Dinner 04/28/2012:
He starts with a joking reference to the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Then he goes to a Birther joke.
Then there's a weak joke about Congress.
You get the drift. He even made two jokes about eating dogs. And one about the War on Christmas. This is just sadly dumb.
I just think the whole thing is bad.
It's bad enough that we started expecting the President to be the national pastor. Now we expect him to be the Comedian-in-Chief, too.
And of course, the occasion calls for non-partisan, good-natured humor. But it's one thing for a comedian whose not, you know, a responsible elected official to poke fun at the serious goings-on of the day. But for an incumbent President to do a 15-minute stand-up comedy routine about the serious issues of the day just feeds the celebrity-ization of politics and conveys that the Serious People don't actually take the real problems of governance seriously. Or at least they don't take the issues that affect real people's lives seriously.
The White House Correspondents Dinner has become an annual enactment of the problem Jerry Brown warned about in his Inaugural Address as Governor in 2011: "Perhaps this is the reason why the public holds the state government in such low esteem. And that’s a profound problem, not just for those of us who are elected, but for our whole system of self-government. Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void." (my emphasis)
The White House Correspondents' Dinner, aka, the Nerd Prom, is both a symbol of the shallowness and corruption of our national press and an institution that significantly promotes that shallowness and corruption.
The 2012 White House Correspondents' Dinner is upon us, which means media figures, celebrities, politicos and more are party-hopping all over the nation's capital.
Media figures kicked off the weekend by attending the People - TIME party at the St. Regis hotel in Washington D.C. Cable news broadcasters including Chris Matthews, Norah O'Donnell, Andrea Mitchell, Greta Van Susteren, Wolf Blitzer and Willie Geist got down with fellow journalists and celebrities. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Sam Feist and Rashida Jones were in attendance, as were "CBS This Morning" hosts Gayle King and Erica Hill. CBS Chief Leslie Moonves attended with his wife and "The Talk" host, Julie Chen.
The official dinner is on Saturday, but various sponsors do Friday night social events as a warm-up. Even Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks appears in the accompanying slide show, "at a red carpet event hosted by Google and the Hollywood Reporter" on Friday.
This is not to say every person who attends the White House Correspondents' Dinner or its related events will trim their reporting with getting an invitation to next year's version and/or its related events. But the Dinner has become an elite institution of sorts. Charlie Pierce links to another related slide-show which he thinks offers Several Dozen Signs of the ApocalypseEsquire Politics Blog 04/27/2012:
I present to you, in one single slideshow, many of the reasons why we are so very screwed in this country. I even like a lot of these people but, by god, if you were going to put together a diorama of a courtier press corps, you simply couldn't do better than this. A red carpet? A red fking carpet? For pundits? I mean, I like Ed Schultz. Truly, I do. The big mook's heart is in the right place, which is a fishing hole in South Dakota, dammit, not on a red fking carpet like he and his wife are the Newman and Woodward of the fly-tackle store. This photo with [CNN star] Wolf [Blitzer] looking as though [actress] Mila [Kunis] is telepathically fondling him under the table belongs in every journalism textbook in every university in America as an example of what a complete loss of your professional soul looks like. These people have lost forever any right to complain about bloggers's referring to them as The Villagers. Res ipse, motherfkers.
The New York Daily News provides their own slide-show of the White House Correspondents' Dinner's celebrity guest list 04/26/2012. Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan are two of the biggest names this year. Pierce Broznan, Elizabeth Banks of Hunger Games, George Clooney, Dakota Fanning, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer of True Blood, Charlize Theron, Sofia Vergara, and Reese Witherspoon are among the invitees. And also Uggie the dog from The Artist. (Seriously!)
As a tool of governance, it makes sense for the White House to host such an event. It creates and reinforces social ties among the elite of the Beltway Village. And it makes media outlets and individual "reporters" less inclined to report stories that might displease the White House or embarrass other members of the celebrity media. So, if you take a leak of highly classified information from an Administration official and use it to write some glowing story about the Administration's performance on, say, Bin Laden's death, your chances of getting an invitation to the next year's Nerd Prom will improve. On the other hand, if you accept leaks of a low-level classified document from a Bradley Manning and use it to write a story that embarrasses the Administration, you may find yourself prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
Sadly, for many of our star "reporters" and pundits, the threat of not being invited to socialize with Uggie the Dog is probably more than enough incentive for them to tow the Village line.
