Valerie Plame Wilson, Ready for Her Close-Up

The media love Valerie Plame Wilson.

Scratch that. Everybody loved Valerie Plame Wilson at the National Press Club this morning, where Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, announced their civil suit against Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. And where Valerie herself spoke, walked, and smiled for a grateful media audience, for perhaps the first time since the scandal broke.

“She’s pretty,” commented a desk clerk after a large scrum of camerafolk and reporters followed the infamous outed former CIA operative to the exit of the club. A fellow employee nodded his agreement.

“She looks great — they both do,” one reporter said to another, as they waited for the Valerie and Joe Wilson to emerge from a huddle with their lawyers after the announcement.

The press conference itself was notable mainly for the sheer number of television cameras and photographers present — I counted 16 television cameras and over a dozen news photographers who hiked up to the 13th-floor club for the occasion. And the noise they made: a hard rainfall of shutterclicks began when Plame — oh, and her husband — entered the room. And it barely let up, even when they made it to their seats.

“If you’re gonna be here, you need to stay down,” the buzzing scrum of photographers was warned as it crowded around the dais, snapping shots of Valerie approaching her seat, Valerie sitting down, Valerie looking at her husband, Valerie looking at her lawyer, Valerie looking down to her lap — Valerie looking.

After the conference, the couple disappeared into a nearby room with their entourage. (“Down! Stay down!” the TV camerapeople in the back of the room shouted at the photographers in the front, who had sprung up to capture Valerie standing, Valerie walking, Valerie leaving.) The camerafolk and reporters — acting on an instinct, perhaps, which has laid dormant since the Clinton years — moved to surround the room’s exit. They had been told, numerous times, that neither Valerie nor her husband would answer any questions. But the group didn’t care. We need more Valerie.

Waiting there, I heard one cameraman joke to another about leaving the Press Club to stake out Ken Starr’s house. Indeed, the Plame suit appears to have stirred up heady memories for these D.C. reporters: summer, scandal, lawsuits and the White House, with a beautiful woman at the middle. Noting the size — and eagerness — of the mob, one journalist on the fringe commented to another, “I think this officially qualifies as a feeding frenzy.”

Valerie (and the others) emerged shortly from the lounge and walked to the bank of elevators which serve as the club’s exit. The scrum, whose anticipation (and size) had only grown while it cooled its heels, closed in around her to form a clicking, murmuring, walking mass.

At the exit, Valerie, Joe and the lawyers took the only waiting elevator. Moments later another arrived, and the more eager members of the mob rushed to get in, lest they lose their Valerie (and Joe). “No, no!” came cries from inside the elevator, as more reporters pushed to get inside.

Finally the doors closed on that elevator, and a sense of release seemed to come over the remaining group. It would be a stretch to call it contentment, but the mood was upbeat. “It’s just like the old days,” one journo joked happily, sounding almost like he meant it.

For the morning, anyway, he was right.