War of the DC socialites: Sally takes on Desiree

War has been declared between two of Washington DC's best known femmes sociales - Sally Quinn, the Georgetown hostess and wife of the Watergate-era Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and Desiree Rogers, President Barack Obama's social gatekeeper.

In short, Quinn - or La Quinn, as her detractors like to call her - has stated that Rogers should resign forthwith following the revelation this week that three not two people gatecrashed the November state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The story of how Tareq and Michaele Salahi, two wannabe reality TV stars, inveigled their way into the White House dinner has been the talk of Washington ever since they managed the feat on November 24. But on Monday it transpired that yet another person had gatecrashed the same event - a DC party promoter called Carlos Allen, who allegedly passed himself off as a member of the Indian delegation.

There have been mutterings in Washington ever since November 24 that Rogers and her staff should take responsibility for the Salahis' escapade. There was even talk that Rogers, a member of the Obamas' Chicago social circle before she was invited to join them at the White House, considered herself above the mundane task of checking that the people who came through the White House door were the same as those on her guest list.

Now that the Secret Service has admitted to the presence of a third gatecrasher, Quinn has let rip.

"The Salahi story may have been delicious," she wrote in a column for her husband's old paper, the Washington Post, yesterday, "but the implications of the appalling breach of security are immense. The president could have been assassinated. And had that happened, the Office of the White House Social Secretary would have been as culpable as the Secret Service."

Quinn, who is 68 to Rogers's 50, then went on to advise that "one of the first lessons any administration needs to learn is that somebody has to take the hit for whatever goes wrong. If another culprit is not identified, the president gets the blame.

"One incident after another in the past few months has shown that members of this administration would rather lay low and let Barack Obama be the target. This has got to stop."

Had Quinn stopped there, she might not now be receiving flak for sounding extremely high and mighty. Whether she intended to or not, she has managed to expose a gap between old, white Washington - which she ably represents - and the new, black elite that came into town with the Obamas, many of them big hitters in Chicago's social and political circles.

"From the start," wrote Quinn, "Rogers was an unlikely choice for social secretary. She was not of Washington, considered by many too high-powered for the job and more interested in being a public figure (and thus upstaging the First Lady) than in doing the gritty, behind-the-scenes work inherent in that position."

Quinn believes Mark Sullivan, head of the Secret Service, and therefore ultimately responsible for the Obama family's safety, and Rogers should take equal blame and both resign.

Among those who have in turn attacked Quinn for her "holier than thou" attitude is Chris Lehmann, blogging for the US site, mediaelites.com. Reminding readers that Quinn was a former reporter who "famously engineered her own elevation into the Georgetown social empyrean by romancing and marrying her boss", he said this was not the first example of Quinn's "arch" style.

She once dismissed Hillary Clinton for "floundering about" and, when Obama first announced his presidential ambitions in 2007, sniffed: "As attractive and likable as Obama is, we still need references."

As Lehmann put it, "Quinn seemed to be under the impression that he was putting in for the post of personal valet". ·