Roasting the president: a rare ritual
A couple of years ago, in my former incarnation as a newspaper reporter, I wrote a story about the difficulties White House speechwriters face when the president is expected to be funny during a time of national crisis.
It was the eve of President Bush's appearance at the annual White House Correspondents' dinner here in Washington, the biggest in a series of annual black-tie events during the capital's spring "silly season," and many reporters and their dinner guests were wondering what the White House could possibly mine for humor. The situation in Iraq at the time was, at best, worsening, and Bush had recently taken hits for doing a humor bit at an earlier dinner that parodied his failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A pretaped video showed him looking behind White House draperies and around corners while puzzling aloud that "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!")
Fast-forward to this past weekend, when the always-anticipated correspondents' dinner rolled around again. These days, "worsening" doesn't even begin to describe the disaster the Bush administration faces in Iraq, the domestic front offers little refuge, and, at this point, an ill-advised dinner joke would be the least of the White House's worries.
So what's a president with historically low approval ratings to do? And why should he even bother to do it?
First question first. Landon Parvin, a Republican speechwriter dating to the Reagan years who also works on Bush's humor speeches, and Mark Katz, who wrote funny for President Clinton, told me that the cardinal rule of humor speechifying for politicians is self-deprecation. It can charm even jaded reporters and also plays better with the at-home audience, which since 1993 has been able to watch the event live on C-SPAN.
In 2004, the president largely punted the humor, joking briefly about his inability to recall any mistakes he may have made as leader of the free world and choosing to spend much of his time honoring the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, he avoided the speech and sent a surrogate to the podium—his wife, Laura, who delivered a funny and ribald take on her husband's habits. And this past weekend, Bush was joined on stage by a presidential doppelgänger, impersonator Steve Bridges, who verbalized the president's secret thoughts between the commander in chief's bland platitudes. Bridges as Bush: "The media really ticks me off—the way they try to embarrass me by not editing what I say." Bush: "I'm absolutely delighted to be here."
They joked about Vice President Dick Cheney, about the first lady's "hotness," about poll numbers, about the president's penchant for mangled pronunciations. It played well.
Bush, however, was noticeably dyspeptic during the entertainment that followed: Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, who in character as the conservative, flame-throwing Bill O'Reilly-like character he plays on the late-night Colbert Report delivered a blistering critique of the president and, to a lesser degree, the Washington press corps. A number of White House aides walked out during Colbert's performance, which has been alternately praised as spot-on satire or panned as too long, not funny enough, and just plain mean.
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.