April 27th White House Correspondents' Dinner & Tanabe's The List

The April 27th White House Correspondents' Dinner is fast approaching. Whenever I hear about the Dinner, I think of Colbert's epic 2006 speech at the event:




But it sounds like it's now become something of a celebrity circus. Here's today's Washington Post editorial, "E! to livestream White House Correspondents’ Dinner red carpet for first time:"

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has finally, formally been crowned The Hollywood Petting Zoo.

E! Entertainment network announces Friday it will livestream the dinner’s red carpet for the very first time. The celebrity suck-up network will telecast highlights from the clambake the next night.

Ashley Judd, Connie Britton, Courteney Cox, Elizabeth Banks, Eric Stonestreet, Hayden Panettiere, Jon Bon Jovi, Kate Walsh, Kevin Spacey, Kristin Chenoweth, Matthew Perry, Nicole Kidman, Olivia Munn, Patricia Arquette, Shaquille O'Neal, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, and Tracy Morgan are expected on this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner red carpet,

E! noted. Conan O’Brien is hosting this year’s entertainment at the dinner in which, E! explained, Hollywood, media, “and political royalty” all come together for a night.

For a novel about DC correspondents, try The List by Karin Tanabe:

Meet Adrienne Brown, a twenty-eight-year-old Wellesley College grad who recently left her glamorous job at Town & Country for a spot at the Capitolist. Known simply as the List to Beltway insiders, it’s the only media outlet in D.C. that’s actually on the rise.

Taking the job means accepting a painful pay cut, giving up perks like free Louboutins, and moving back in with her parents, but Adrienne is certain that her new position will be the making of her career. And it is—but not at all in the way that she expects. The Capitolist runs at an insane pace: Adrienne’s up before five in the morning, writing ten stories a day (sometimes on her BlackBerry, often during her commute), and answering every email within three minutes.

Just when it seems like the frenetic workload is going to break her, she stumbles upon a juicy political affair, involving a very public senator—and her most competitive colleague. Discovering that there’s much more to the relationship than meets the eye, Adrienne realizes she’s got the scoop of a lifetime. But should she go public with the story?

Canadian Politics & Fallis' The Best Laid Plans

From yesterday’s Guardian article “Justin Trudeau takes up father's torch for Canada's Liberal party:”

There are few equivalents to the political power and promise associated with membership of the storied Kennedy clan. But in Canada, being the eldest son of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau comes close…

Now, more than a decade after Trudeau's death, his first-born son, Justin, has taken up his father's torch. An MP since 2008, he was elected leader of the Liberal party last weekend with an overwhelming 80% of votes cast…

Now Trudeau, 41, has a task more daunting than living up to his famous name. His challenge leading up to the next federal election in 2015 is to return the once dominant Liberal party to power. It is no easy job given that the Liberals, who made up the government in 2006, are now in greatly diminished third place in the House of Commons.

For a novel about Canadian politics, try The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis:

A burnt-out politcal aide quits just before an election — but is forced to run a hopeless campaign on the way out. He makes a deal with a crusty old Scot, Angus McLintock — an engineering professor who will do anything, anything, to avoid teaching English to engineers — to let his name stand in the election. No need to campaign, certain to lose, and so on.

Then a great scandal blows away his opponent, and to their horror, Angus is elected. He decides to see what good an honest M.P. who doesn’t care about being re-elected can do in Parliament. The results are hilarious — and with chess, a hovercraft, and the love of a good woman thrown in, this very funny book has something for everyone.

Political Appointees, Diplomats, & Boyd's A Good Man in Africa

 From last week’s Washington Post editorial, “Presidents are breaking the U.S. Foreign Service:”

…What accounts for the Foreign Service being marginalized? The most visible factor is the overwhelming — and growing — presence of political appointees in mid-level and top leadership positions at the State Department.

For all their merit, political appointees are short-term officials, subject to partisan, ­personality-specific pressures. They do not notably contribute to the institution’s longer-term vitality, and their ascension creates a system inherently incapable of providing expert, nonpartisan foreign policy advice…

Since 1975, the number of top leadership positions … filled by career Foreign Service officers has fallen from 61 percent in 1975 to 24 percent in 2012. Only five of the 35 special envoys, representatives, advisers and coordinators appointed during President Obama’s first term were Foreign Service officers.

For a hilarious, satirical novel about life as a diplomat (in this case, a British diplomat), try A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd -- one of my top ten favorite novels of all time:

In the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job. His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success.

But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment.

After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan...

Sex Scandal Rebounds & Klein's Primary Colors

From yesterday's Washington Post article "Vitter, Sanford and Weiner: Comebacks having a moment:"

It only took a few years in the Senate woodshed, and now the political rehabilitation of Sen. David Vitter looks complete. Our colleague Paul Kane Tuesday has Vitter — whose number showed up in the notorious black book of the “D.C. Madam,” causing the Louisiana Republican to admit before the cameras a “very serious sin” — back in the good graces of voters and colleagues alike. 

But the senator’s reversal of fortune isn’t unique. There seems to be a boomlet of political comebacks underway. Maybe it has something to do with the onset of spring, the season of renewal? Take Mark Sanford down in South Carolina. The former governor, who lied about hiking the Appalachian Trail while visiting his mistress in Argentina, has a legitimate shot at becoming the Republican candidate in the Palmetto State’s special congressional election. And in the three-makes-a-trend rule, there’s also former representative Anthony Weiner, who this month tested the waters with polls gauging the public’s willingness to put aside those photos of his undie-clad crotch he sent to a young woman who wasn’t his wife.

Want a novel about a politician who gets caught in a sex scandal and bounces back? Try Primary Colors by Joe Klein:

The book begins as an idealistic former congressional worker, Henry Burton, joins the presidential campaign of Southern governor Jack Stanton. As the primary elections grind on, Stanton's affair with Cashmere, his wife's hairdresser, comes to light and threatens to derail his presidential prospects...

Town Council Politics & Rowling's The Casual Vacancy

I've previously posted about corruption in India.  How about some shady dealings a little closer to home?

From today's San Francisco Chronicle article "Ex-officials convicted in Calif. corruption case:"

Five former city councilors in a small, blue-collar Los Angeles suburb that became a symbol of political greed were convicted Wednesday of stealing taxpayer money by creating a panel that helped boost their part-time pay to nearly $100,000 a year... The trial was the first such proceeding following revelations that Bell's leadership had bilked the hardscrabble city of $5.5 million, using the money to pay huge salaries to the city manager, police chief, City Council members and others... At the heart of the case is whether the six officials broke the law by paying themselves annual salaries of up to $100,000 to govern only part-time in the city of 36,000 people where one in four residents live below the poverty line.

What's a novel about local council scheming? The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling:

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils... Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations? Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

UPDATE:  There's a good review of The Casual Vacancy on Novelicious (and also on Pagelady).

Declassified Nixon Info & Mallon's Watergate

It's been a big year for declassified documents.  First we learned secrets about Pinochet, and now newly released tapes by LBJ reveal just how much Nixon was willing to damage the U.S. in order to further his own career. Here's the BBC article, "The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason':"

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing. 

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign. He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared. Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out... Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

To me, that seems almost as bad -- if not worse -- of a crime than Watergate: deliberately sabotaging peace talks in order to help your political campaign.

Anyway, to get more background on Nixon, try Thomas Mallon's novel Watergate

In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt’s sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter (“The clock is dick-dick-dicking”), and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself, home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the president’s attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars.

UPDATE:  a well-written review of Mallon's book can be found at Blogging for a Good Book.