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White House Correspondents' Dinner

King Belshazzar would have loved D.C.'s 'Nerd Prom': Column

Journalists schmoozing with b-list celebrities and pols unveils disturbing D.C. power pageant.

Ross K. Baker
Vice President Biden mingles with journalists at the White House Correspondents' Dinner April 30, 2016.

The Old Testament book of Daniel, Chapter 5, describes the opulent feast of King Belshazzar in which the monarch and his guests revel gluttonously and drink from goblets looted from the sacred temple of the Hebrews. But in the midst of the party the ghostly hand of a man appears and writes a message on the wall of the palace that the king and his courtiers can't decipher. Daniel is summoned to interpret the cryptic passages and gives the king the bad news that the days of his kingdom are numbered, that he has been weighed in the balance and found wanting and that his kingdom will be split up. There was no Daniel present on Saturday night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but there should have been. The vulgarity and excess of the event made Belshazzar's feast look like a covered dish supper in Duluth.

Every year at this time the stuffed shirts of the nation's capital join with a collection of the more polished Hollywood narcissists to celebrate one another in a festival of collective self-regard. Few in Washington's elite can resist the allure of standing on the red carpet along with the vacuous fashion models and entertainers of dubious renown. Journalists who should know better than to make the case for the conspiracy mongers who delight in reviling them for working hand-in-glove with those about whom they are supposed to be objectively critical: Andrea Mitchell, Savannah Guthrie, Megyn Kelly, Chris Matthews and Don Lemon to mention just a few. Is there no prominent journalist in Washington who can resist the allure of this meretricious pageant? Even non-journalists who trade on their reputations as tribunes of the people, such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and Bernie Sanders, came to frolic with the mannequins and high-rollers.

For this unseemly circus to take place at a time when the anger and frustration of Americans at having been left behind has reached a fever pitch is especially disheartening The event is a tribal ritual of an unusually privileged clan of hunters and gatherers. At $300 a ticket and $3,000 a table, it is a slap in the face of Americans who have to think twice before springing for 15 bucks for a movie ticket, and the tab of the D.C. gala doesn't count the gowns, tuxes, limos and overtime pay for nannies. The pretext for the White House Correspondents' Dinner is that the proceeds go to support scholarships for young journalists who, we might reasonably conclude, would be future attendees at this opulent show.

The high point — the low point in fact — of the event was an exchange of insults between the host, in this case Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore, and the president. But everyone with a recognizable name was fair game, and Wilmore unleashed a torrent of tasteless jokes that set a new record for nastiness. There have been some ugly moments in the past at these events, but much of Wilmore's material was so mean and scurrilous that the audience response was often stunned silence. It's a safe bet, however, that some of those who got skewered by Wilmore were more than happy to absorb the punishment just for the honor of being mentioned. It was really difficult to watch the proceedings without squirming.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner is half the fun of World Wrestling Federation exhibitions but offers a much smaller fraction of the panache. It should be stuffed up into the attic of obsolete American political pageants along with torchlight parades and national political party conventions. It's an especially ugly offspring of the threesome of politics and show business and journalism and shows none of them to any great advantage.

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More than anything, it is the contrast that  American viewers saw between the entitled crowd at the Washington Hilton ballroom and their own circumstances that was so stark. The White House Correspondents' Dinner is not the Academy Awards or the Golden Globes, spectacles that offer people a harmless escape. Those events are strictly the realm of fantasy. Nobody expects Hollywood stars to understand, much less emulate, the lives of ordinary people. We can even scoff at their comical excesses. But they don't make or influence policy. The Washington event, however, confronts Americans with the very people who do wield the power to affect their lives in important ways for good or ill, and confronts them in no uncertain terms with the accompanying reality that the elites in their tuxedos and gowns have not the faintest idea of how ordinary Americans lead their lives. They have gone Belshazzar one better.

Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and the author of Is Bipartisanship Dead? A Report From the Senate.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion

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