For a guy who famously does not read the papers, George W. Bush
sure knows how the fourth estate gets its kicks. So when the
president appeared last week at the 60th annual dinner of the Radio
and Television News Correspondents Association to roast himself for
the benefit of people whose contempt for him comes with a dental
plan, he brought his best stuff.
While screening a slide show of photographs of himself in
various amusing positions, the president put up a picture of himself searching for something under Oval
Office furniture. “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be
somewhere!” he announced.
The journos yukked it up. This they could understand. If
Alexander Pope had it right about wit being “what oft
was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” then the president and
the press were finally speaking the same language.
The president concluded on a somber note, with a picture of
soldiers in Afghanistan at a site where they had buried pieces of
the World Trade Center. It was a stirring moment. The journos
clapped their appreciation. Maybe that Bush wasn’t so bad after
all.
THE VERY NEXT DAY, it was business as usual for the press.
Scribblers who delighted in the president’s self-deprecating shtick
overnight had lost their sense of humor. Out went the laugh line,
replaced by the old-line cynicism: the president, headlines
screamed, had overstepped his bounds by joking about WMDs.
The Nation’s David Corn, who by his own admission passed the
evening chuckling and sipping vin blanc, sobered up to
spew his signature stream of anti-Bush bile. CNN trotted out a host
of huffy emails claiming the president was insensitive to all the
soldiers who had died in Iraq. Maureen Dowd took the prize for nuttiest
Bush-smear with her suggestion that the president was implicated in
the death of David Bloom, the young NBC journalist who died in Iraq
and was honored at the dinner. Bloom, insisted Ms. Dowd, “would not
have been there without the hyped claims for WMD.”
Leave aside Ms. Dowd’s warped conviction that journalism exists
solely to discredit an administration she doesn’t fancy. Ms. Dowd
seems to have missed Melanie Bloom’s touching ode to her husband,
during which she read aloud from a letter he wrote praising the
“soldiers fighting to help the people of Iraq.” No matter, though;
the damage was done.
The Kerry campaign, sniffing blood, issued a faux-outraged press
release. Meanwhile, Clinton shill Terry McAuliffe bellyached, apparently without a trace of irony,
about decency: “It’s inappropriate to the thousands of people who
have been wounded over there,” he whined to ABC’s Good Morning
America on Friday. Even that was a mere slip of the tongue
compared to the chutzpah of Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz, whom CNN fished out to carp that the
president “should not be making light of the situation.”
Katz, it is helpful to remember, is the wag who had little
trouble “making light” of allegations that Clinton was using the
Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign funds. For a 1997 White House
Correspondents’ dinner, Katz penned this zinger: “The bad news is that our only
child is going off to college. The good news is, it opens up
another bedroom.” Get it? It’s funny because Mr. Clinton was
grossly abusing his presidential privileges.
ALREADY IN FULL ATTACK-DOG mode, the press wasn’t about to allow
these tiresome details curb its fervor. Truth be told, I wasn’t too
keen on the WMD-bit myself, partly because I preferred the
president’s line about having the “fab-five” from Queer Eye for
the Straight Guy makeover John Ashcroft, and partly because I
assumed, correctly it seems, that the media wouldn’t be mature
enough to handle it. Oh, they’ll chime on about how the president
has only to admit an Intel-failure for all to be forgiven, but
their vein-popping overreaction to the WMD joke proves what bushwa
that is: They don’t want the president to be sorry; they want him
to supplicate.
Mr. Kerry had a different agenda. He wanted to talk morality,
mostly because with polls showing that the president is more
trusted than he is — a March 19-21 Ipsos-Associated Press poll
found that voters, by a margin of 45 percent to 40 percent, thought
Mr. Bush was more honest than John Kerry — credibility is not on
the table. Instead he railed against Mr. Bush’s bad taste in
jokes.
Mr. Kerry knows all about tasteless jokes. If the surest way to
kill a joke is to explain it, then the surest way to have to
explain one is to joke about killing. And back in 1988, Kerry had a
whole lot of explaining to do. The reason was a howler he told
about Vice President Dan Quayle: “Somebody told me the other day
that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot,
they’re to shoot Quayle,” cracked Kerry. Then he wondered, “There
isn’t any press here, is there?” Indeed, an Associated Press
reporter was there, and as a result, today we know this about John
Kerry: He may share a Chiracian cheering section with Jerry Lewis,
but he’s not nearly as funny.
THAT MAY BE A BIG advantage for the president. Likeability is a
difficult thing to quantify, but if comfort using humor is any
measure, Bush has a clear edge. Hitting joke after joke last week,
the president appeared warm and charming — a guy you could talk to
without suffering through a pseudo-populist dissertation on the
nobility of New England brahminhood. Better still, he’s funny. And
in a close election, the fact of squaring off against a Democrat
who can hardly get off a punch line without lapsing into
finger-wagging pedantry could prove decisive.
What’s more, if history is any indication, the electorate loves
a good laugh. Ronald Reagan’s popularity is a testament to the
potential of humor. In fact, Reagan weathered a WMD-like moment in
1988, when, under fire for arms sales to Iran, he joked at a dinner
for Washington correspondents that the missing money from the sales
had been diverted to the Southern Methodist University football
team. Despite the media’s grumbling, Reagan stayed steadily
popular.
Mr. Kerry, too, has history in mind — a strategy evidenced by
his desperate attempt to drape himself in the Kennedy mantle. He’ll
fail for various reasons, not least of which is the fact that he’s
not as funny as JFK was. Consider, whereas Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam
service has become another cumbersome block in his much-touted
personal narrative, Kennedy made the best of his military service
by selling himself short. Asked how he became a war hero in World
War II, Kennedy once joked, “It was absolutely involuntary. They
sank my boat.” But then, JFK was distinct in yet another way: He
was the last sitting senator to win the White House.
