The Sally Quinn Suicide Watch

DC Social life is deader than Bob Dole’s dick with President Cartoon Network at the helm.

The capital’s most glamorous annual evening, the Kennedy Center Honors, was far from over. The gala finale, a stirring rendition of “America the Beautiful,” led by James Taylor, was still under way — and the supper dance had yet to begin — when Karl Rove, President Bush’s political mastermind, darted out of the center’s Opera House last month.

Mr. Rove had a good reason: his boss was leaving, too. “The security aide came and said, `Mr. and Mrs. Rove, it’s time to move now,’ ” he recalled. Last fall, at a Kennedy Center concert commemorating the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the finale was taped for television at the end of the first act, so the president could leave early, stranding the live audience to sit through the rest of the show

Apparently that was the night of a “very special episode” of Boy Meets World.

“Well, it’s difficult to make a judgment, because these are serious times,” said Buffy Cafritz, a veteran Republican hostess. “The Reagan years were more joyous, and people were out more. President Clinton could stay up and keep my hours, 2 and 3 a.m. in the morning. The town is just different. If it’s not Iraq, it’s the market. There isn’t a lightness as there has been in the past.”

Looks like Buffy the Vampire Hostess misses Big Bill.