Politics & Power Quote by Hugh Sidey

The genius of Sidey’s line is that it flatters and needles at the same time. A “White House dinner” becomes a national Thanksgiving table: comforting, ceremonial, supposedly inclusive. But the closer you look, the more you see the soft power at work. Sidey, a journalist who spent years orbiting presidents and their pageantry, understands that the guest list is never just a list. It’s a portrait of who counts as “America” at a given moment.

Calling it “the American family assembled” sells unity while quietly admitting hierarchy. Families have seating charts. Families perform harmony even when they’re full of rivalries, grievances, and transactional alliances. The roll call he offers is deliberately catholic - labor leaders next to billionaires, athletes beside academicians - a sweep that suggests the White House can temporarily suspend class conflict, cultural snobbery, and partisan trench warfare. That’s the fantasy the institution needs, and the dinner provides it: a choreographed mingling that turns social division into small talk.

Sidey’s subtext is that the presidency doesn’t only govern; it curates. Invitations become a kind of symbolic legislation, conferring legitimacy on some constituencies and withholding it from others. The categories he names are also tellingly safe: prominent, accomplished, photo-friendly. Missing are the people who don’t travel well into chandeliers and place cards - the unemployed, the undocumented, the anonymous. The line works because it captures a distinctly American contradiction: democracy as a spectacle of access, and access as a performance of democracy.