)
So what of it? Kass isn’t deferential. They meet as a couple of high-order personages who each knows the value to himself of a cordial relationship with the other. If they also meet frequently for lunch, which I’m told they do, good for them. Kass’s journalism won’t suffer for actually knowing what’s on the mayor’s mind.
In addition to the Illinois combine and journalists with their noses deep in the establishment butt crack, Kass likes to assail the “Chicago way.” “Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses,” Kass wrote ten months ago, in a piece I approvingly quote from in my column this week. “And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut. Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.”
The correspondents’ dinner is about guest status. The media outlet whose table includes a new chief justice or the eye candy on the arm of George Clooney is considered a smashing success.
The Gridiron is about singing and dancing on stage, and the president applauds as the journalists put on a musical show. They wear costumes, and the lyrics of their songs are replete with witty inside jokes.
What these rituals accomplish is to wed journalists to the establishment.
Today Kass writes as that son of Greek immigrants who has grown older, wiser, and angrier, not as a mover and shaker in an expensive suit.
