Snap Polls and Caviar at 'Atlantic' Obama Dinner

Eliot Spitzer. Steve Schwarzman. Marc Ecko. Alan Patricof. Moby. These were some of the people who gathered at an Upper East Side mansion last night to watch Barack Obama deliver his first joint address to Congress, at a viewing party hosted by The Atlantic. Is that a random enough crowd for you? What if I told you hotelier Andre Balazs, actress Julia Stiles and former Massachusetts governor William Weld were there, too? Exactly.

The centerpiece of the dinner, which The Atlantic hosts every year (usually for the State of the Union address) is a discussion, hosted by its writers, with audience feedback supplied via handheld keypads. Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nahesi Coates led the discussion. By way of a warmup, they asked how many of the 60 or so guests had voted for Obama in the general election: 89 percent. They then asked how long people expect Tim Geithner to last as treasury secretary. A surprising 41 percent predicted he'd make it to the end of Obama's first term in office.

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg was asked to offer some general observations. Obama, he said, is "very serious about bipartisanship. It's not what Bush meant by bipartisanship, though, which is the other people giving up and agreeing with him."

Weisberg's wife, Deborah Needleman, was there, too, looking tanned and relaxed. The tan is from a recent trip to Mexico; the relaxation is because she's been idling since Condé Nast (which owns Portfolio) shut down her magazine, Domino, last month. Needleman said she's been spending lots of time with her kids -- "I know, it's such a cliche" -- and that her plans for the immediate future involved spending more time at the gym in order to acquire "one of those Connecticut-housewife bodies."

Ecko, the designer, had more serious things on his mind. Standard small talk quickly gave way to a lengthy disquisition on the end of America's "self-indulgent culture," the need for serious economic rebuilding and the rise of the middle class in China and India. Ecko said his thinking has been shaped by recent visits to both places.

Balasz, who's made out quite nicely from America's self-indulgent culture, thank you very much, seemed content to enjoy what remains of it. After dinner, he gratefully accepted a platter of caviar and toast points from money manager Boykin Curry, who was a co-host of the party, along with his wife, interior designer Celerie Kemble. Balazs devoured scoop after scoop of caviar while absorbing Obama's lecture about greedy bankers and reckless consumers. "This is like 'Let them eat cake,'" he observed. Later, when Obama said something about how bailout money wouldn't be used by CEOs to buy "fancy drapes," Balazs caught Patricof's eye. "He's totally talking about you," he said.