Date Night

ABC has Rahm and Jon Bon Jovi! CBS has Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner! CNN has Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore! Time has Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw!

Yes, it's that time again when Washington journalists get to put aside cap-and-trade and hobnob with Hollywood celebrities. The importance of this annual exercise is:

a) it breaks down the artificial barriers between media, politics and entertainment.

b) it fosters a greater understanding of differing cultures.

c) it makes Beltway grinds feel really cool.

And it's no longer just the White House Correspondents Dinner, D.C.'s black-tie version of the spring prom. There is the Time/People party, the Hotline party, the Creative Coalition party, the Tammy Haddad party, the Atlantic party, the Newsweek party, the Capitol File party, the Vanity Fair/Bloomberg after-party. If some government official has bad news to break, Saturday night would be the ideal time; there will be no one around to cover it.

In the meantime we're busy chronicling our own fabulousness. There are stories and items about who's throwing which shindig and which stellar guests are expected to show up. My colleague Tammy has started a blog about the doings of White House correspondents and their pals (don't miss the picture of Christopher Hitchens and Paris Hilton at the Kennedy Center).

All this is harmless, I suppose, despite the inevitable questions about whether journos should invite administration officials and members of Congress to the annual dinner. And I for one am dying to know what Ashton Kutcher, who has more Twitter followers than CNN, thinks about the banking stress tests. But the level of bragging and celebrity-bagging is getting to be a bit much, reinforcing my view that Washington is like high school, without the parental supervision.

While lawmakers can't compete with the likes of Ashton and Demi, they are looking for a touch of celebrity themselves. In the New Republic, Michelle Cottle takes a look at the CNN.com video series Freshman Year, which follows the exciting exploits of Reps. Jason Chaffetz and Jared Pols:

"For members of Congress, it's always a struggle to avoid vanishing into the shadow of the White House. Whether your team is in or out of power hardly matters, gripes one Democratic Hill aide via e-mail: '[H]onestly, if you're rank and file it's tough to get press no matter who's in charge.' But, in the new Obama era, legislators find themselves in an unusually difficult spot: Our 44th president is the hippest, hottest star on the world stage today--a guy with so much buzz he makes your teeth vibrate. The average House member, by contrast, is one of 435 charisma-challenged, comparatively powerless dweebs. Under such circumstances, what's an ambitious but unglamorous lawmaker to do?

"The same thing, it turns out, as any other American looking to scale the mountain of celebrityhood: become a reality star. Chaffetz and Polis may be the only two legislators with their own network-affiliated show. But plenty of their colleagues have embraced the whole casual, up-close-and-personal ethos of the genre. Forget C-SPAN gasbaggery or starchy pronouncements in the New York Times. Today's savvy Hill denizens, aiming to project a mix of grassroots connectedness and hip, new-millennium with-it-ness, are using tools like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, the celeb-obsessed TMZ.com, and 'The Colbert Report' to give America a peek at what its elected officials are really like. At the rate things are going, even the staunchest fans of transparency in government might soon have had enough . . .

"As for using old media in new ways, recent congressional guests on 'The Colbert Report' have included Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis and Illinois's Aaron Schock, the 27-year-old freshman who--in one of the strangest signs of both the political and the media times--has been winning national coverage of his six- pack abs from outlets ranging from TMZ.com (which has taken to stalking Schock) to CNN's 'State of the Union' to ABC's 'Good Morning America.' "