I share John Hinderaker’s general line on the general loathsomeness of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner – I dislike both the self-flattering fake self-deprecation of the pols and the fawning defanged jabs of the comics. A ghastly business. But I also share his appreciation for the only novel aspect of last night’s affair. My weekend column addressed Romney’s dog-transporting and Obama’s dog-eating – the former referenced by New York Times columnist Gail Collins some four dozen or so times, the latter not at all by her or any other Times bigshot. And yet there was the President of the United States up on stage doing dog-eating shtick in front of the nation. That represents an amazingly swift victory for the man who, all but entirely via Twitter, injected the topic into the public discourse – Jim Treacher.
Indeed, as The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta wrote:
My favorite DC/world disconnect at #WHCD dinner lst nite was when frmr politico now in NY asked why Obama kept talking about eating dogs.
It’s not really a “DC/world” disconnect so much as a housetrained media/freelance bloodhound disconnect. If you rely for your news on the poodles of the Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, or the self-neutered attack-dogs of the late-night comedy shows, you would, like Ms Franke-Ruta’s friend, have been utterly in the dark. Jim Treacher forced the President and his palace guard to break their own embargo. Or as he put it:
I win.
Good for him.