I don’t know what Frank Rich is talking about. America is not in decline. The problem is that people don’t go to Sally Quinn’s house to fraternize anymore. The problem is even deeper than than that, though. I mean Sally Quinn was never any Marietta Peabody Tree. Ms. Quinn is practically trailer-trash in comparison. The right kind of people used to run this joint. That is no longer true.

But don’t think it all started with the Kenyan-Hawaiian interloper in the Oval Office. Back in 1998, Sally Quinn collected the grievances the Beltway crowd had accumulated about the no-class redneck president from Arkansas:

1. THIS IS THEIR HOME. This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.

“It’s much more personal here,” says pollster Geoff Garin. “This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work. . . . Clinton’s behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern.”

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”

“This is a company town,” says retired senator Howard Baker, once Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. “We’re up close and personal. The White House is the center around which our city revolves.”

Bill Galston, former deputy domestic policy adviser to Clinton and now a professor at the University of Maryland, says of the scandal that “most people in Washington believe that most people in Washington are honorable and are trying to do the right thing. The basic thought is that to concede that this is normal and that everybody does it is to undermine a lifetime commitment to honorable public service.”

“Everybody doesn’t do it,” says Jerry Rafshoon, Jimmy Carter’s former communications director. “The president himself has said it was wrong.”

Yes, you see, President Clinton came to town and he trashed the place. What was his pedigree, anyway? Why do the Democrats keep nominating people whose fathers were no-account deadbeats? Remember when people went to Groton?

If America has a problem it is that it has evolved to a point where the political natures of the two major parties are not able to co-exist in a functional way. Our system works when party loyalty is weak. But, right now, party loyalty is strong. No one can govern in an ideologically rigid system where you need 60% of the Senate to move legislation and no party has anywhere near 60% control.

There are only two ways out. Either the parties will become more fluid, or one party must be crushed underfoot.

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