By: Sarah Abruzzese

Taking another swing at Washington “elites,” John McCain suggested last week that a “Georgetown cocktail party” is the last place you’d ever see Sarah Palin. 

Maybe. 

Georgetown is still a neighborhood full of well-educated, well-paid Democrats — McCain-Palin signs are about as common there as dead moose and snow machines — but residents say the high-brow cocktail parties of McCain’s memory have given way to family-friendly events that just might suit a mother of five. 

“Right now, at our stage in life, with a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, most of our parties revolve around chicken nuggets and mac and cheese,” says George Stephanopoulos, Georgetown resident, former Clinton adviser and host of ABC’s “This Week.” 

Cherie Cannon moved to Georgetown so that her journalist husband could work with then-Washington Post publisher Phil Graham. “Now,” she says, “Georgetown is filled with young people. There are babies upon babies on every block.” 

Even when children aren’t attending parties, they are a major topic of conversation, along with pets and real estate, said Carol Joynt, who hosts the popular Q & A Cafe at her restaurant, Nathans. 

Today’s Georgetown parties have less to do with downing highballs, more to do with raising money for local causes such as planting trees and renovating parks. 

Gahl Burt, a Georgetown resident and full-time volunteer on the McCain campaign, acknowledges that the place is full of kids now. When McCain speaks of “Georgetown cocktail parties,” Burt figures he’s speaking metaphorically of place that remains “a bastion of Democratic thought.” 

One piece of evidence: When Burt walks her dog at night, she says the only McCain-Palin signs she sees are those in front of her house and the one belonging to the head of the local Republican Party. 

Frida Burling, the 93-year-old grande dame of Georgetown, says the days of the real cocktail party came to an end when men stopped arriving home at 5 p.m. — in time to don their evening attire. Burling remembers the era as a time when everyone drank too much simply because they drank too often. 

That Georgetown had its zenith in the Kennedy era and rebounded a bit when Reagan was president. Glamorous, well-heeled couples — politicians, journalists, government appointees and embassy folks — would go from party to party, swirling around the five hostesses who ruled the day. 

Today, Joynt said, “Nobody has the money, nobody has the time, everybody has kids.” 

Betsey Apple, widow of the legendary New York Timesman R.W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., has lived in Georgetown for many years — and dined often with McCain, whom she described as a good friend of her husband’s. She remembers the cocktail parties as “lovely, harmless things.”

“There was nothing malicious at all in mind, and I’m surprised he is trying to paint it like that,” she said. “It is a little strange. It was all a perfectly simple thing. It was just drinks.”

Joynt was harsher. McCain’s invocation of the Georgetown cocktail party “just dates him,” she said.

In an interview last week, NBC’s Brian Williams asked Palin to say who she thinks is an elitist. Palin gave her answer — “anyone who thinks that they’re better than someone else” — and then McCain chimed in to say that he knows where “a lot of them live.”

“Where’s that?” Williams asked.

“Well, in our nation’s capital and New York City,” McCain said. “I’ve seen it. I’ve lived there. I know the town. I know — I know what a lot of these elitists are. The ones that she never went to a cocktail party with in Georgetown — I’ll be very frank with you — who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.”

It wasn’t the first time McCain has used the “Georgetown cocktail party” as part of his “elitist” charge.

Answering a question about Palin in a session with the Des Moines Register in September, McCain said: “If there’s a Georgetown cocktail party person who … calls himself a ‘conservative’ and doesn’t like her, good luck.”

After that comment, Sally Quinn, the wife of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, suggested that McCain knows of what he speaks. “I’ve sat next to him many times at dinner parties in Georgetown,” Quinn told the Post’s Libby Copeland. “He’s an absolutely delightful dinner partner.”

Asked in an interview with Politico about the senator’s Georgetown visits, Quinn, who is the co-moderator of the Post’s On Faith, said it’s “completely bogus” for McCain to “fall into the trap of disparaging Georgetown” when so many of his friends live there.

“It is completely misrepresenting who he is and his life in Washington,” she said.

McCain campaign spokesman Ben Porritt says the senator is simply “using Georgetown as a metaphor for D.C. elitism.”

“Certain parts of Washington are filled with self-aggrandizing, narcissistic people who feel as though they understand the political landscape better than anyone,” he said, “when in fact they are more detached from it by being inside the bubble of Washington.”

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