GREEN & GLOVER: Tipper the drummer

Tipper’s traps

Who was that blonde playing alongside drummer Mickey Hart at Tuesday night’s Dead show at the Verizon Center?

Why, it was Tipper Gore, rocking out to “Sugar Magnolia.” Our colleague and longtime Deadhead Karen Goldberg Goff reports that Mrs. Gore - who used to play drums in an all-girl rock band back in high school in Arlington - was actually quite good when she joined the band in the third set.

Mrs. Gore remained onstage through the encores, dancing along to “Uncle John’s Band” and “Ripple” before joining the reunited band members for a final bow.

Earlier in the day, band members dropped in on President Obama at the White House and paid a visit to their favorite D.C. haunt, the Old Ebbitt Grill.

Tapper taps

Jake Tapper, ABC News White House correspondent and Political Punch blogger for the network’s Web site, is the first to admit he’s had trouble reconciling the breezy rhetorical license of the blogosphere with the self-restraint and impartiality expected of a network correspondent.

The multimedia straddle may have just gotten a little harder.

“Lovely pix of the Obamas,” Mr. Tapper tweeted April 14. “Very much the Camelot Huxtables. Btwn this + yesterday’s Easter Egg roll, i’m going into diabetic shock.”

Did he say … “Camelot Huxtables”?

“It’s like the only frame of reference people have is one African-American couple they fell in love with on the Cosby show,” Roland Martin, a senior analyst for “The Tom Joyner Morning Show” and contributor to Essence magazine, told Green and Glover when informed of Mr. Tapper’s tweet. “There are thousands upon thousands of Barack and Michelle Obamas out there. Let the Obamas be the Obamas and the Kennedys be the Kennedys.”

Defenders of Mr. Tapper - and, believe us, he is able to mobilize a few on short notice - were quick to dismiss the idea that the reporter had any intention of racially stereotyping the first family.

“Knowing Jake, it was a compliment meant to convey that the Obamas are a cross between the fictional Black family and the real deal,” e-mailed political strategist and CNN commentator Donna Brazile.

“I was searching for a cultural reference of a gorgeous African-American family with little girls,” Mr. Tapper explained to G2. “I guess I rely on TV references too much. Once I compared Charlie Gibson to Ward Cleaver from ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ That anyone interpreted my comments in any other way says to me it was a dumb thing for me to tweet.”

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