Roasting the president: a rare ritual
Which brings us to the question of why Bush and other presidents even bother to show up at this event and others like it.
Mostly, it's tradition: President Coolidge was the first to show up, and attendance and a speech have become pretty much mandatory in this traditionbound city. (There are exceptions: Clinton, for example, canceled his speech after the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.) Some of it is public relations—the president can look like a good sport. And some of it is press management. Since the audience is largely reporters and editors, the president is more likely to grit his teeth for several hours on a Saturday night than weather the stories and speculation that a cancellation would generate.
In the wake of this year's dinner, there has been the usual backwash from critics calling for the thing to be canceled because—take your pick:
• It suggests coziness between the press and the administration.
• It's a waste of money at a time when media companies are laying off reporters.
• It has become a parody of itself.
There is some merit in all of those arguments. But at a party that followed this year's dinner, I spoke with a very thoughtful fellow—a nuclear physicist who attended as a reporter's guest—who convinced me that the silliness should continue.
He'd never been to the dinner before and so saw it through fresh eyes and, he said, an anthropological lens. He was pleased and surprised—delighted, even—that such an event could take place and that the president would sit with people who most often are bedeviling him, that he would poke fun at himself and then listen to a scathing commentary on his own performance. The physicist told me he turned to a dinner-table companion, a reporter from Germany's Die Zeit newspaper, and asked if he could imagine this happening in his country. He couldn't.
Nice that it still happens here.
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