Will Bush try humor at D.C. dinner?

By Liz Halloran
The Hartford Courant

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

Related stories Notebook: Ashcroft's 2000 Senate bid probed

WASHINGTON — Hey, did you hear the one about the president and the missing weapons of mass destruction?

You know, the one where President Bush pretends he's searching the White House for WMDs, peering around corners and behind draperies while insisting that "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!"

Funny stuff. Or not?

The president's joke about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq — the perceived threat that led the nation to war — elicited hearty laughs at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C., but raised a factious storm in the days that followed.

So when Bush appears tonight at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, the biggest of four black-tie gatherings during the capital's annual "silly season," 2,000 reporters and their guests will be waiting to see whether the president dares to be funny when world events are providing so few punch lines.

"This is one of the odd Washington rituals. It says something about us as a people that we ask our president to be funny," said Mark Katz, who wrote humor speeches for former President Clinton, including many for the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

"It's no less random than to ask them to sing, juggle or spin plates," he said. "This is what's required of them; this is what we value as a culture."

But Bush's job at the dinner — to be funny and self-deprecating — has become trickier in recent weeks as the situation in Iraq worsens and partisans debate the appropriateness of the president's previous attempt at humor.

Even Carl Cannon, president of the White House Correspondents' Association, which sponsors the event, isn't sure what to expect.
 
"President Bush has accepted, and he's planning to give remarks," said Cannon, the National Journal's White House correspondent. "Whether they are funny, I do not know."

Landon Parvin, a longtime humor speechwriter who wrote many years for former President Reagan, is among those working on Bush's speech and declined to comment on the nature of the president's remarks.

Presidents in the past have opted not to give humor speeches. After the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Clinton scrapped his White House Correspondents' Dinner speech 10 days later, and Bush confined his remarks at the dinner last year to a tribute to Michael Kelly and David Bloom, reporters who died in Iraq during the war.

"It was moving," Cannon said of Bush's speech last year. "It was a different kind of time."

If there's one thing all can agree on during this most partisan of times, it's the tightrope that presidential joke-writers must walk when writing humor speeches for the springtime events, which include the Gridiron Club and Alfalfa Club dinners, where the nation's leader is expected to be funny.

"A really good joke-writer will push politicos to do more, but the real challenge is figuring out where the boundaries are," said Katz, whose recent book, "Clinton & Me," gives an entertaining insider's view of the life of a presidential humor-speechwriter.

"You have to walk stridently to the edge of the boundary, wrap your toes around that line and say, 'Hi there,' " Katz said.

Said Parvin: "You usually get a better laugh if you pick on your own party rather than the other party. You can always do good-natured jokes about the other party."

If a president hits it, the correspondents' dinner humor speech — which has been broadcast live on C-Span since 1993 — can be a political boon.

"The Clinton White House put great importance on it," Katz said. "He got a nice bump every year. The clips would be replayed, and it showcased a great part of his personality, his charisma."

The celebrity quotient at the traditionally nerdy White House dinner also ratcheted up during the Clinton years, in part because of the president's Hollywood connections, but also because of the emergence of "The West Wing" television show. Some news organizations vie to bring the splashiest Hollywood celebrity to the dinner, while others use their extra tickets for "people who have been good sources or who would be good sources," Page said.

Among guests invited this year by USA Today, for example, are Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. CNN, on the other hand, will host Wayne Newton.

Celebrity-seekers can catch a glimpse of everyone from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to actors Ben Affleck and Meg Ryan from a rope line at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner will be held.

The real star, however, is always the president.