The New York Observer sent two reporters, Gabriel Snyder and Sridhar Pappu, to Washington last weekend to cover the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner, a topic discussed here yesterday. [See “Ingraham’s Autobiographical Slips,” May 8, below.]

As is customary at such events, the real action comes after dinner, when the celebrants head to the after parties and the after-after parties, where they continue drinking for hours on someone else’s dime.

The big after party for the WHCA dinner is given by Bloomberg News. Not by Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, but by Bloomberg News. This is an important distinction, we’ve been told by Mayor Bloomberg’s people, because Bloomberg News is a “corporation” and the corporation -- not Mayor Bloomberg -- was throwing the booze-and-grope fest. Now, as it happens, Mayor Bloomberg is the sole owner of said corporation (actually it's a limited partnership), so the partiers were spending his money, but the significance of this was completely lost on Mayor Bloomberg’s media handlers. (The mayor demonstrated at least some restraint: He was a no-show at the party.)

The Popular Girl

With seemingly instinctive knowledge of where to find a good after-party story, the Observer reporters mingled with Ann Coulter, whom they describe as “the skinny blonde and former National Review Online columnist,” kindly leaving out that in this particular case “former” means “fired.” Coulter was holding the dregs of a drink that she managed to describe as a combination of "banana, strawberry and some sort of alcohol.”

When asked whether young conservatives such as she had experienced “newfound popularity” during the Bush administration, Coulter managed to slur out a few words: “[Matt] Drudge was saying during the Clinton years we were out, and now, with Bush, everyone [sic] wants to have their [sic] picture taken with us.”

Photo sessions or not, however, Coulter insisted she always has been popular: “But I think lots of people liked us during [the] Clinton [administration], too. I think people have just seen us a lot more.” Indeed.

Product Placement

Popular she may be, but like a budding teenage poetess seeking the approval of her sensitive young English teacher, Coulter wants her prose to be noticed. And noticed by the President of the United States, no less, a man she would like to promote her forthcoming book as if it were a soft drink product-placed in a second-rate horror flick.

Spotting Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s press secretary, across the room, Coulter went into a tizzy, the Observer reports. “Leaping up, she pleaded with Mr. Fleischer to have Mr. Bush read and publicly carry her forthcoming book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right,” write Snyder and Pappu. [Ed.: Emphasis added.]

“I will do anything! I’ll swear to you you’ll like it! I will do anything!” Coulter promised Fleischer in the familiar refrain of the most "popular" girls in high schools across America and one of the most frightening oaths we have ever encountered in the annals of American politics.