AN ESTABLISHMENT WITH A FRAGILE EGO

 

President Obama, citing family commitments, announced last week that he would skip this year's dinner at the Gridiron Club. He will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to skip the event in his first year in office.

This isn't going over well in some circles.

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page said, "People feel uncommonly saddened, miffed and burned.

"I don't think he understands the implications of not coming to the club in the first year. It's not your ordinary state dinner. I think it would be helpful for him and his relations with the Washington establishment to come to the club."

Beyond bruised feelings among the pundit class, Obama's snub is a revealing cultural moment.

Gridiron has for decades been an inner sanctum of Washington's political press corps. The club's mostly aging members were considered highly prestigious because they said so -- and because they had the ability to summon the capital's political elite to a spring frolic of skits and songs.

But if a young and glamorous president decides he can afford to blow off an august and tradition-bound institution, one has to at least entertain the possibility that this institution may not be quite as august as its members assumed.

Yes, and what a tragedy that would be.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017311.php