I’m not sure about Laura Bush. Imagine if Hillary had pushed her
husband aside to deliver the presidential address at the annual
White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Then we’d have had two
impeachments for one.
As it is, her elegance, grace, and lovely elocution aside,
Laura’s Saturday surprise was appalling. How many scores did she
settle — with her own side? She mocked Dick Cheney’s tricky
health. She depicted Mrs. Cheney as a male strip club tipper. She
described the three architects of the Iraq war as butchers and
brutes. This is what passes for humor while we still have soldiers
dying in Iraq? Her clincher of a laugh line — “George, if you
really want to end tyranny in the world, you’re going to have to
stay up later” — reduced her husband’s singular goal to
nothingness.
Either that, or Laura confirmed she was on MoveOn’s payroll. As
it is, her description of her husband as a bore of a man who’s
asleep by nine each night should keep the Tina Brown/Maureen Dowds
in business well into their retirement. Soon enough we learned that
Laura herself actually has never watched “Desperate Housewives,”
but heard about the show from her two daughters, who just love it.
That’s reassuring: to be reminded of the twins’ and their ghastly
performance at the 2004 GOP convention. Which in turn reminded one
of Laura’s speech to the delegates, in which she joked about a
father turning his children’s clothes pink in the wash while their
mother is off serving in Iraq. It simply is amazing how
complacently accepting the princely Bush first couple is of all the
cheapness and rot in our culture. (And I won’t begin to analyze the
Bush milking the male horse joke and what it says about the Bushes’
cynical use of the religious right.)
At least, in the case of the Correspondents’ Dinner, the Bushes
came to the right place. Without celebrity, it seems, there is no
politics anymore. We got a hint of this empty reality during the
president’s press conference two nights before, when the most
pressing matter on the agenda was whether primetime TV programming
would be discomfited by the event. Some (who should know better)
were wowed by president’s “dazzling” performance that evening.
Dazzling? He gave away the store to what’s left of Social Security
reform, refused to fight for his judicial nominees, and affected a
breeziness that just about had him checking his watch the way Dad
once did.
Worst of all, he let the pressies off the hook. It’s a sign of
how Bush’s numbers have dropped with the economy that he no longer
displayed contempt for his interlocutors. It could be that the
January 26 conference,
capped by Jeff Gannon’s all-time softball, will mark the high point
of Bush’s second term. Thursday’s questioners weren’t particularly
in an ornery mood themselves. Terry Moran was an exception, but
then he would be, wouldn’t he? The president hardly noticed. Edwin
Chen, of the lowly L.A. Times, asked an insulting
question, about whether Bush’s “personally bear[s] any
responsibility in having contributed” to the “poisonous partisan
atmosphere here in Washington.” Two nights later at the
Correspondents’ Dinner Chen sat at the head table, several
partisans down from Bush. The president’s people never bothered to
poison Chen’s food.
Chen was there by virtue of his being secretary of the White
House Correspondents’ Association. Less charismatic than Cedric the
Entertainer, he never got a chance to speak. That honor fell to the
association’s outgoing president, Ron Hutcheson of Knight-Ridder,
and incoming president Mark Smith, of AP Radio.
Hutcheson, on introducing Smith, praised his supposedly
legendary voice and the nickname Smith earned as an aficionado of
spicy food during his student day’s at Cornell: Frank’s Hot Sauce
Boy. But that was then. Laura was hot, perhaps, on Saturday. Smith
proved rather whiny and presumptuous.
Not that anyone in the polite audience listened to his remarks.
Fortunately, C-Span’s mikes captured some of them, as Smith recited
the liberal journalist’s creed. It began with shots at the people
he covers. As the White House press briefing room is being
remodeled, he noted, one set of plans calls for it was found in a
folder marked “Guantanamo.” Looking at Dick Cheney, he promised to
provide full records of relevant meetings and their participants.
Then he turned serious, noting how his family (whom he “love[s] to
bits”) has sacrificed for his “choice of profession” (later he’ll
call it a “calling”), which is anything but glamorous: “brutal
hours, long absence, nightmare logistics, constant
pressure…” The story gets sadder. “Few of us are actually
getting rich” doing journalism. Tragic in fact: “Nor are we getting
much love these days.” All those “irate e-mails” he’s received
after his broadcasts. Not to mention the “steely-eyed” stare Bush
gave him at a press conference when he asked the president about
“torture.” All because Smith believes in “skeptical, downright
antagonistic questioning,” which constitutes the “daily diet of
democracy.” Like all members of the herd, Smith still believes he’s
performing an “essential…public service.”
But again, it doesn’t appear anyone at the journalists’ gala
paid any mind to what Smith had to say. What a sad state of affairs
when even trusted liberal bromides no longer have cachet.
