Jay: “Bowling Night” is a great story, and you are of course right to praise Mrs. Perk. The president is a person appointed, by common consent, to be in temporary charge of one of the three branches of the federal government. Citizens should be respectful, but not worshipful.

It doesn’t help that manners among actual White House functionaries seem to have morphed from a proper republican respect for the office of the president into a style of groveling adulation more appropriate to the court of Heliogabalus. Gene Healy offers a particularly stomach-turning example in his 2008 book The Cult of the Presidency.

Robert Draper, a journalist granted unique access to [George W.] Bush in 2006 and 2007 to write the president’s biography, notes that in every cabinet meeting since White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten took over for Andy Card in 2006, Bolten has begun by looking at Bush and saying, “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.” At no point, it seems, did Bush thank Bolten for his deference and then tell him to cut it out.