“President Yucks It Up At White House Press Dinner While Disaster Heads for Gulf Coast” – That would have been the media angle if this were May 2007. Not today. The difference is the man in the White House.
President kills at annual correspondents' dinner.
The annual White House Correspondents Dinner was last night. The nation’s elite partied as if all was right with the world, and to those in attendance, it is. The Washington and Hollywood elite meet every year to say, “Hey, we run the country and we are pretty cool. Let’s make sure those maroons in the press think we are on the same level as them for a night.”
The host of the event this year was Jay Leno. Gone are the days when the host would dare say something that skewered the White House in earnest. Stephen Colbert comes to mind. Don Imus also had some choice words as a presenter during a Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner during the Clinton administration. Last year Wanda Sykes called for Rush Limbaugh to die, but Rush isn’t actually President yet.
By all accounts Jay Leno was a dud last night. The truth is Jay did the job he was hired to do. No hardcore or edgy Obama jokes to be found. I imagine this is how a roast for Joe Stalin would have been. My comparison between Uncle Barry (Obama’s nickname among federal workers, not a reference to a Civil War era novel. They are all called uncle.) and Poppa Joe ends there. This is America after all. No one has been sent to North Dakota to work in the sulfur mines. So far!
Interestingly, the real hit of the evening was the President himself. The AP headline declared this morning, “Obama Kills At White House Correspondents Dinner.” An oil spill the size of Lake George is heading for the Gulf Coast, and the President is giving Shecky Greene a run for his money. The AP disconnect is rather absurd here. A better headline, even for the Democrats, would have been “President Shows Lighter Side, Seeks to Calm Nation on Eve of Ecological Disaster.”
Bush was excoriated for years over not immediately jumping on Air Force One and parachuting into New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. I don’t mean after, actually during the middle of the hurricane. If he had, I still think the press would have slammed him: “Bush Parachutes into Hurricane, Still Republican.”
The goal of the post-Katrina coverage wasn’t to shine a light on how we deal with natural disasters in America, it was to hurt Bush. Paving the way for a Democrat in 2008 was the real goal of the Katrina coverage, and it worked.
In reality, there is only so much a President can really do during a crisis like Katrina or the oil spill of 2010. Whether they are George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter or even, yes, Barack Obama. Whatever apparatus a government, as a whole, has in place before a natural disaster is much more consequential to the outcome of the disaster than anything an individual President says or does afterward. Calmer folks among us know that.
If the narrative starts to focus on the limits of what a President can actually accomplish in the middle of a natural disaster, some may start asking exactly why Bush was hammered so badly after Katrina. That would be a disaster the press would really like to avoid.
Most likely, if the oil spill ends as badly as most think it will, the press will find a way to say that Bush flubbed Katrina, however nothing could be done in this case. Or better yet, let’s just blame British Petroleum in full for the disaster. Obama still greatest, oil still evil, and Bush still worst leader in recorded history, nothing will have changed. So it goes, so it goes.
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John Romano is the publisher and editor of Yes, But However!, a musician, a former political correspondent for BBC Radio London, and a serial web entrepreneur. Follow him on twitter: twitter.com/yesbuthowever or John Romano on Google+John Romano article archive.
