Nows and Forevers

My journalism career has taken me a lot of cool and exclusive places. But not the White House Correspondents Dinner.

And I’m OK with that. I did for several years in the 200s attend and cover the Radio/TV Correspondents Dinner, the lesser-known but still star-studded gala that draws the president one year and the vice president the next. And it brings in many of the same crowd, although it hasn’t had the extra touch the WHCD does.

And the Radio/TV Correspondents Dinner interesting to cover. I sat next to a cabinet secretary, a presidential campaign adviser, any number of TV journalists and network presidents. That wasn’t because I was important; it was because my then-employer, The Hollywood Reporter, was. It could have been anyone there, although I’m glad I had the experiences. I ran into a lot of famous people, political and otherwise. But those stories are for another day …

I knew about the WHCD even before I covered politics and the media, because I had been a faithful C-Span viewer in the ’80s and ’90s.
I had watched several of the big moments, including Stephen Colbert’s takedown of President Bush, in character, right next to him in 2006. But my lasting memory of the WHCD came six years before that, in April 2000. Back then, I was living in Caribou, Maine, about 10 miles from the Canadian border and seemingly 1,000 miles the halls of power that WHCD attendees inhabited. And working at a small newspaper in far northern Maine, I have to say that it was 1,000 miles from my thoughts, too.

But one Saturday night, alone and with absolutely nothing to do, I flipped the stations and found the C-Span coverage of the dinner. At that moment, there was a chyron that said “Waiting for the president’s speech” or something like that, and it was just a wide shot of attendees eating and chatting in a hotel ballroom.

Then, a few minutes later, as I debated how long I wanted to wait, there was a video from “The West Wing.”

The political drama starring Martin Sheen and Allison Janey had just started, and was about to complete its first year. I was hooked on it immediately, and it was the only show I watched religiously, now that “Sports Night,” also by Aaron Sorkin, and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” were off the air. “The West Wing” was just that good.

The video, I guess you would call it a spoof, showed the real White House press secretary, Joe Lockhart, finding himself in “The West Wing” universe.
I mean, kind of. The actors were playing themselves, not their characters, on the “West Wing” set. There were a lot of great gas, smart writing, and the payoff at the end is pretty funny. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s funny.
Really funny. And not just because of the “people walking quickly through the hallways.”

I am not going to spoil anything, but it’s priceless to hear Rob Lowe and Bradley Whitford wonder whether they’re going to get the A-story or “whether we’re going to be the guy with three and a half pages of exposition on the Census.”

The skit was, for a long time, hard to find. It was somewhere, hidden away, in the C-Span archive coverage of the event, but the video ran three hours long and there was nothing calling it out so you had to look. YouTube hadn’t been invented yet. And then it took several years later for someone to upload it. To my knowledge, the “West Wing” skit was never available anywhere, no doubt due to clearance issues. It’s not on the Season 1 or Season 2 discs, which I have.

Which is a shame. I know a lot of “West Wing” fans who had never heard of it. I certainly wouldn’t have, even though I am a huge fan of the first two seasons, if I hadn’t accidentally stumbled upon it. The skit was funny 23 years ago and a lot of it still stands up today. (Allison Janey revived her character, CJ Craig, for another WHCD bit a few years ago.)

It certainly holds up better than the other video from the evening, a video chronicle of how President Bill Clinton was spending his last months in office after two terms. I remember being amused at the time, although that one doesn’t age as well.

I don’t really watch the WHCD coverage anymore, although I caught a bit last night. I did watch one or two since I left the media beat a dozen years ago, although I’ve got a relatively strict policy of not looking back, so I don’t seek it out.

Plus maybe it just doesn’t feel as funny anymore.