As I sit in the airport waiting to board my plane from Washington, D.C., back to Minneapolis, I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly of visiting The Swamp.
After all, I have almost two hours until boarding.
Scott Jennings invited me to attend CNN’s lovefest at the British Embassy–which, by the way, is lovely. Unsurprisingly, the location is prime–across from the Vice President’s residence at the Naval Observatory. Unlike more recent embassies from countries with more recent relations with the US government, the British Empire snagged a nice chunk of the best land in DC, and they know how to use it to great effect.
Lovely.
I don’t want to knock my gracious hosts at CNN, but it can’t be too rude to share my impressions of the other White House correspondents, names omitted because it was a private party.
In a word, I find the average journalist to be, unsurprisingly, arrogant. What was striking, though, was that arrogance was the theme of the beautiful people of DC.
In modern America, the higher up the social ladder, the more slovenly or odd you can be. Granted, it was a garden party and a lot more casual than the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to which I did NOT go, but it was striking how many of the most prominent people at the party were the worst dressed, while those of us who were second-tier were the more dressed up.
It’s a weird social norm, best seen in the hoodie or t-shirt-wearing multibillionaire.
This was not true of the few conservatives there. Very different norms.
I chatted with a few of the journalists, and to a person, they not only hated Trump–of course–but defended their coverage of Biden and believe that they are too easy on Trump. When I asked people about coverage of Biden, their general answer was, “How could we have known Biden was mentally challenged until the debate?”
Yeah, right. When your defense against the charge that you lied is that you were merely very stupid, it’s time to find another answer.
What was weird is that the answer felt genuine for a number of them. Is groupthink so powerful that relatively intelligent people miss the most obvious things in the world? Apparently so.
Maybe there should be an implicit rule: everybody should rotate out of DC to the sticks after a few years. Make them touch grass and talk to normal people.
I did meet a couple of women from the Independent Women’s Forum at the event, and they were both lovely women and almost as out of place as I was. They were “insiders” in a way, but very much outsiders as well for obvious reasons. The best conversations at the brunch I had because we were fellow culture warriors in the lion’s den.
Speaking of normal people, I had a lovely evening at a WMAL radio event last night. It was fun chatting with Vince Coglianese, his parents, and his precocious daughter. I didn’t know it, but Vince’s dad was a Marine General and the most down-to-earth guy in the region.
You may know Vince because in addition to being a Washington radio host, he is the replacement for Dan Bongino on his podcast. On the way up, man!
I spent most of the event chatting with Corey Inganamort, Vince’s former producer and now Salem employee. What a great guy, and what a relief to speak to people who are a lot more self-aware than the crème de la crème. Nobody was looking around to see if there was somebody more important than you to talk to.
The funniest thing about my trip is that the Lyft drivers were among the most fun to talk to. Two of my drivers were Afghans who worked for the US and were evacuated from Kabul when it fell. They were fascinating to talk to, and super nice guys.
I can’t say I regret coming–it was great to see Scott, Vince, and Corey, but I am getting too old to care much about the pomp and circumstance of hobnobbing with the elite. I grew up among them, so I am not impressed by status anymore. Maybe when I was 30 or 40, I would have been. Now I just want to talk with smart, decent people, wherever they are on the social scale.
I’m at my rung of the ladder and not on the way up.
Back to Minnesota.
