Tom Brokaw: It's time to put the Correspondents' Dinner out to pasture

His point is not invalid. Not at all.

But.

What's that event in New York late in every presidential election cycle? About three weeks before Election Day? The candidates have been shredding each other all over the country for weeks on end. They get to this and make nice for a couple of hours.

It's OK to put down the swords and shields and drop the guard once in a while - have some fun, be a regular human. This is one of those nights. Again, Brokaw isn't wrong. But is it really that bad?

Granted, that's coming from a guy who has been an admitted star-gazing geek at this thing two years running. I think my point still stands.

 

The New York dinner is the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. It's a bit different in that the purpose is to raise money for the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation, which gives money to charities.

That event is less about the glitz of the people who attend (it is really Catholic and New York centric, actually -- always with the Cardinal sitting front and center) than about the politicians they get to speak. One of my favorite highlights from that dinner was when Tony Blair spoke in 2007. He was funny as anything. But then he got serious and went all Churchillian. It's not so much that I think Blair is really in the class of Churchill, but at the time, we had a president who looked like a goof and stumbled over his words whenever he spoke in public, and here was a guy with a great accent giving an inspirational speech. I remember thinking, "Why can't THAT dude be our president?"

 

White House dinner raises a ton of money for scholarships and, I'm pretty sure, some other things. Point is, drop the guard once in a blue moon - it doesn't make you a bad person.