Not that they deserve it, but Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee are so desperate to throw a party for the Obamas that maybe Barack and Michelle should relent and go along. Let me tell you how bad it is. Here’s Sally Quinn contemplating the idea that maybe it isn’t so bad after all that she can no longer “attend…five-course dinners a couple of nights a week, with a different wine for each course, served in a power-filled room of politicians, diplomats, White House officials and well-known journalists.” Read it and weep.
Washington has become a community of small groups of people, mostly staying within their circles, occasionally making a foray out into the bigger world to large events, only to be turned off by the endless corporate “fundraiserness” of it all. How special can you feel when you know you have to pay to go to an event and then get a bad seat on top of that?
Could it be that the Obamas, not knowing Washington, think that’s all there is to the social life here? Who wouldn’t want to stay away? On the other hand, he is the president of the United States and, whether he likes it or not, the leader of social as well as political Washington.
But maybe this small-group trend is not such a bad thing. Maybe, as in one of those post-apocalyptic movies where the planet has been destroyed by war, people will begin to make their own lives.
Every time a Democrat comes into the White House, Sally Quinn says that they “don’t know Washington.” I thought that maybe she had a point when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton arrived on the scene. I mean, Jimmy Carter only spent five months (in 1952-53) living in the Washington area, which is hardly enough time to “know” the town. And Clinton interned with Senator Fulbright while earning his undergraduate degree from Georgetown. But, you know, what do college students know about power circles in Washington? As for President Obama, he only spent four years as a U.S. Senator before moving into the Oval Office. Being a senator doesn’t help you “know” Washington, either. Obviously.
Sally Quinn’s planet has been destroyed by war. Maybe we should rename the Beltway as “Alderaan.” And I’d be more willing to credit her touching conclusion (about her smaller more meaningful dinner parties where people celebrate something other than money and power) if she didn’t compare her fate to that of Princess Leia. How many more times will Sally Quinn humiliate herself with complaints about her own irrelevance?
To the Obamas, I say, please make it stop. Call up the Bradlee/Quinn house and invite yourselves over. Invite your kids, too. Stop the pain.
