I’m not sure the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is worth paying attention to these days, if it ever was. The pall of failure hangs over the Obama administration, and liberals are openly anxious to turn the page and get on with Bill Clinton’s third term a Hillary Clinton presidency. So the final rituals of the Obama era are ever less newsworthy.

Based on news accounts, the dominant tone of last night’s dinner was mean-spiritedness. Thus, the Dems couldn’t resist Nancy Pelosi’s video “joke” about the Koch brothers:

Do the Democrats ever move on from anything? Not in my lifetime, I’m afraid. Not to mention that the joke–a reworking of the old line about a condominium in Des Moines–wasn’t funny.

Then there was President Obama’s monologue. Whenever I watch Obama in this kind of setting, I get the impression that he is struggling to prevent his real personality from showing. Most people think of Obama as inept but likable; I think inept and mean-spirited is closer to the truth. As he has so often recently, Obama attacked Fox News. He seems to think that he might have had a successful presidency, if only Fox had gotten with the program:

Let’s face it, Fox, you will miss me when I’m gone. It will be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya.

The only person trying to keep birtherism alive is Obama, as it suits his purposes to portray his critics as a bunch of wingnuts. But Fox News was not the source of birtherism, Obama himself was. For close to twenty years, his official literary bio said that he was born in Kenya. Also–this is pure speculation–I suspect the main reason why Obama’s college and law school records are a state secret is that he applied as a foreign student born in Kenya, and received favored treatment as such.

How many more of these dreary events will there be before Obama finally departs from the scene? Only two, happily.

PAUL ADDS: I have heard from contemporaries of Obama at Harvard Law School that he liked to make it known that he had not self-identified as Black when he applied. Apparently, Obama did not want people to think of him as an affirmative action admittee.

Of course, Obama’s name might well have been enough to alert Harvard that he would add to its “diversity.” If Obama also told Harvard that he was born in Kenya, then he left even less to chance.