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Report: Obama Pokes Fun at Self at Gridiron Dinner

Barack Obama (center) leaves the Gridiron dinner on Saturday. President Barack Obama poked fun at himself, Bob Woodward and Washington reporters on Saturday at a dinner that brought together the country's press and political elites. Attending the Gridiron Club dinner, Obama made light of a recent back and forth between his administration and Woodward, the veteran Washington Post journalist whose reporting on the Watergate scandal helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency. "Can anybody tell me when an administration has ever regretted picking a fight with Bob Woodward?" Obama joked. "What's the worst that could happen?" Woodward and White House economic adviser Gene Sperling had a public tussle that played itself out in a leaked email, in which Sperling told the veteran journalist he would regret taking a position on one of Obama's policies. Woodward suggested the move was an example of White House intimidation. "Who knew Gene could be so

Why Obama's having dinner with Republicans

NBC News grabs a key detail from the dinner President Obama held with 12 Senate Republicans last night:     It was serious. It was respectful. And it was informative. (In fact, one senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn’t shared that list with them before). The number of Republicans who don’t know what the White House is actually offering is stunning. Last week I wrote about a Republican legislator who didn’t know Obama had publicly said he’d be willing to move to chained-CPI.     Would it matter, one reporter asked the veteran legislator, if the president were to put chained-CPI — a policy that reconfigures the way the government measures inflation and thus slows the growth of Social Security benefits — on the table?     “Absolutely,” the legislator said. “That’s serious.”     Another reporter jumped in. “But it is on the table! They tell us three times a day that they want to do chained-CPI.”