Blue and Gray Take Stage as Gridiron Club Hits Its Marks

Gov. Gray Davis was spoofed Saturday night as part of the Gridiron Club’s 116th annual bout of musical lampoonery.

The dinner features formal attire and wry jokes, plus songs and skits performed by journalists and directed at the political figures they cover--and invite to the dinner.

This year there were lots of jokes about the long ballot count in Florida, the election-deciding Supreme Court, the Bush family’s “Tex-Mex” blueblood, the Clintons’ new furniture and last-minute pardons.

But the governor of California also came in for some laughs. Five members of the Gridiron chorus--all dressed in gray suits, gray shirts, gray ties, gray socks, gray shoes, gray hair and gray faces--sang of Davis’ recent travails in negotiating the state’s energy crisis. The point: Rolling power blackouts have turned his presidential sky from blue to gray. To the tune of Willie Nelson’s “The Party’s Over,” they sang:

“Who killed the lights?

My party’s over

The power’s down

But I’m still toast

Seems like only last night

My star was rising

Now I’m just another nut from the coast.”

Every president since Benjamin Harrison has been a Gridiron guest, and President Bush got his first opportunity Saturday night to display his take on stand-and-deliver comic style.

“These stories about my intellectual capacity do get under my skin a little bit,” Bush told the white-tie gathering.

He said it appeared to him that even his staff doubted his brain power because every day he got an “intelligence briefing.” And he said he was heeding some advice he got from longtime Democratic power Robert Strauss: “You can fool some of the people all of the time--and those are the people you need to concentrate on.”

The president said there was much people didn’t know about him, such as his interest in the human genome.

“I hope it eventually clones another Dick Cheney. Then I won’t have to do anything,” he joked of his vice president’s reported heavy influence in the administration.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, responded for his party. And Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, fresh from a bruising Senate confirmation battle, was taking up the comic slack for the Republicans after a Gridiron singer portrayed him as owing his Cabinet post to “the right wing never failing.”

Washington’s streets were lit with gas when 15 journalists in 1885 founded a club, named it for a kitchen griddle and invited every officeholder in sight for an evening of mostly good-natured ribbing.

The latest production continued the tradition.

* While a wretched figure in convict stripes knelt at his feet, Bill Clinton’s stand-in sang, “Even though you are a fugitive, I will pardon you.” From the chorus: “He has proved that sin’s in vogue, that’s his legacy.”

* Former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was shown leaving the White House, singing, “We just took what’s owed to us and grabbed ourselves a fistful; sofas, tables, ottomans, bric-a-brac and crystal.”

* The Ralph Nader character was portrayed as a green Green Party frog croaking about the abuse he has received, “Just because these idiots think I’m the guy who took Florida from Al Gore.”

* The Gore character: “I thought I had won, the polls and anchors all told me so. But those GOP judges told me it was time to go.”

* Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his postelection interest in the GOP tax cut were targeted: “He’s a pip, he’s knowing. He sees how the wind is blowing.”

* Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton’s stand-in sang: “The tundra’s alive with the sound of drilling; let Democrats dry their caribou tears.”

* The heat was being turned up a notch for Sen. John B. Breaux of Louisiana and other “turncoat Democrats.” As in, “John Breaux’s for sale or rent, to our new president.”

By Gridiron tradition, sitting presidents are not portrayed directly onstage. But the Bush family, “full of blueblood genes” and “Tex-Mex beans,” was shown as lining up a nearly endless cast of future presidents.

And the Gridiron chorus serenaded “this fellow who’s from Texas with an initial for a name. He didn’t win the most votes, but he’s president just the same.”