The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has always been a peculiar institution. It is a room where the people who cover power and the people who wield it dress formally and eat together and tell jokes at each other’s expense and then go back to the adversarial work of governance and journalism. It has been called the nerd prom and the dinner that ate Washington, and its critics on both left and right have argued for years that it represents exactly the wrong kind of relationship between the press and the government it is supposed to hold accountable.
On the night of the most recent dinner, a man armed with guns and knives attempted to storm the building. Federal prosecutors released video this week showing the moment he tried to force his way in. A Secret Service agent was shot. The suspect was stopped in the lobby.
The straightforward version of this story is about a security failure and its prevention. The more complicated version is about what the room represents to someone who wanted to destroy it. The Correspondents’ Dinner is not just a party. It is a symbol — of access, of the intermingling of Washington’s two most powerful classes, of a relationship between press and power that has always made ordinary Americans feel like they are watching something take place behind glass. That symbol has accumulated resentment for years, from directions that do not overlap politically but share the conviction that what happens in that room does not represent them.
The Secret Service agent who was shot did the job. The attack failed. The dinner went on, or close enough. But the fact that someone tried, and tried with the specific target he chose, is a data point about where the country is that deserves more attention than the logistics of the security response.
The Correspondents’ Dinner will happen again next year. The question of what the room means, and who feels excluded from it, and what that exclusion produces over time, is not going away with it.
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