Grin & Bear It, Mr. President

It may not be much fun for you, but don't skip the Gridiron Dinner.

Washington is a city of folkways. Some are good (cherry blossom visits, the city stopping during Redskins home games); some are bad (corruption, earmarking). Sometimes the bad folkways are actually good, such as President Truman and Arthur Vandenburg, among others, in quiet offices and gathering for bourbon and cards at Sam Rayburn’s “board of education,” which helped save the West in a very dark hour.

The Gridiron dinner is one of those Washington folkways. It’s an annual affair for well-connected politicos, diplomats, and journalists (the actual members of the Gridiron Club), who sponsor the annual dinner. Generally, the President speaks, along with members of the two parties, and hilarious skits on current events are performed by Club members (including Limited Members, non-journos chosen for their singing and acting skills). It’s off the record, but the best lines tend to appear in the Post the next day.

Presidents don’t necessarily enjoy the Gridiron Dinner and similar events. Bush 41 never particularly liked the forced joking (I vaguely recall that in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War, President Bush made a wonderful speech about the troops to the tune of Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell,” which had just been a musical theme of Ken Burns’ series on the Civil War). Bush 43 didn’t especially like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (and who could blame him)?

But think of it as a cost of the job. It’s part of the Washington ritual; it’s part of how “Washington” decides whether it likes a President or not – and rightly or wrongly, that can have big implications for a presidency’s success. Nancy Reagan used the Gridiron in 1982 to defuse a controversy over her use of designer clothes by singing a parody (“Secondhand Clothes”) and she recovered from what had been a testy relationship with the press.

Officially, the President is expected to be in Chicago for his daughters’ spring break, and Vice President Biden will speak in his place. And there will probably be lots of talk from the White House podium about the economy, how it would be inappropriate to go when the President is criticizing excess among financial institutions, etc.

All that is beside the point. What’s the line they use? “The Gridiron singes, but it never burns.” If the President is so thin-skinned that he cannot stand a singe, he should ask himself why he ran for office. Just because John McCain beat him in laughs at the Al Smith dinner last year (here for the full thing) is no reason not to take the occasional opportunity to poke fun at himself.

And while the people who voted for “change” almost certainly don’t care, Washington almost certainly does. After a couple of rough beginnings (like this one) testing the loyalty of The Press is a risky strategy, even for a popular President. The folkway may be right, it may be wrong. But make no mistake: This is one way that presidencies start to fail. That may be unfair, but it’s true.