Sally Quinn's Washington

Jamison Foser
MediaMatters
January 28, 2010

You cannot caricature Sally Quinn. Don't even try. It simply can't be done. No matter how hard you try to exaggerate her preening self-regard and utter frivolity, she comes right along and shows herself to be worse than you could possibly imagine.

Quinn -- who gained fame when The Washington Post was forced to retract her false claim that Jimmy Carter's national security adviser unzipped his fly during an interview -- makes the extraordinary claim in her January 26 column that Carter lost his re-election campaign due to his failure to attend Washington dinner parties. Not only that -- according to Quinn, Ted Kennedy ran against Carter because of it:

When Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington, he and Rosalynn and many of their advisers were decidedly not interested in the locals and made it known. That chill was such a mistake that Teddy Kennedy felt free to challenge Carter, which doomed Carter's reelection.

Wow. Who knew that when Kennedy declared "the dream shall never die," he was referring to the dream that one day Sally Quinn would once again rub elbows with presidents?

(More here.)