Two days late, but I'll share my opinion anyway

The double Bush act was entertaining and Stephen Colbert was funny but surprisingly full of recycled material, yet what really struck me about the White House Correspondent Dinner on Saturday was Valerie Plame. When I first saw her on television, shown on CSPAN responding to Colbert's joke about accidentally mentioning her name, I didn't think much of it. But yesterday, when I was reading the Washington Post's piece about the event, her name came up again and it struck me: Valerie Plame, the Woman Who Should Not Be Named, was in a big room surrounded by the journalists that once wanted quotes from her and the politicians who hate her husband and probably authorized the leaking of her name. They were all there, along with Alex Trebek and Ludacris and other people who had nothing to do with her or politics or anything else. Just there. Not getting things from each other. Not hiding things from each other. Just all accounted for, under one roof, laughing and enjoying themselves, reveling in each other's presence.

That's when I finally realized why, year after year, this event strikes me as so odd: It's not just because it seems somehow unwise, in an age of general media distrust, for tons of journalists to publicly hobnob and laugh and break expensive bread with the politicians they cover and the celebrities they have nothing to do with. Instead, it's so odd because when all these people are in one room together, they seem at ease, outside their normal roles as secret-keepers and secret-getters. They look like a cast at the Oscars -- the actors who played the hero and the villain sitting side by side, sharing a laugh, no longer embodying the people we met them as. The White House Correspondent Dinner makes politics look like political theater -- not the metaphorical type, which we see every day, but the literal type in which everyone plays a character on a stage and then takes off their costumes and goes home as friends.

It makes everything feel a bit insincere, as if the roles these people play out in front of us aren’t real and lasting. It’s like we’ve finally caught them after hours, their ties loosened, trading notes after the big show. And while I know it’s not like that, it sure feels that way when watching through a tiny television window. But only for a while. The real theater -- that is, the act of everyone getting along -- ended before the dinner did, when Bush stopped smiling during Colbert’s routine and gave him a straight-faced acknowledgement at the end. Laura Bush didn’t even get out of her seat to greet him. And then, once Colbert sat down, George and Laura got up and left, and the night was over, and everyone went back to their places.

Posted by Jason Feifer at May 1, 2006 11:19 AM