The parties' enduring character is obvious in visits to their offices.
And all the time he is picking her up and dusting her down, forgiving her drunken behaviour ("From now on you are only allowed one drink at any of my office parties"), enduring her petty barbs ("There is no reason to make fun of me for flossing twice a day"), and then finally trying to pick up the pieces of their relationship in the wake of her infidelity.
But even if they fail, the very fact that they tried – for many years on their own – will remind people of their party's enduring political value.
Optimists in the yellow camp say these will showcase the party's enduring electoral strengths: determined local campaigning, the ability to mobilise a tactical anti-Tory vote, and the incumbency factor.
Generations of Kansans have repaid the party with enduring loyalty at the ballot box; nearly always backing the Republican candidate for president, sustaining the nation's longest streak of sending only Republicans to the United States Senate.
Meanwhile Britain's Conservative party, as enduring a three-century symbol of the old politics as you could hope to find, is engaged in what it regards as a titanic struggle for its future: the new session's elections to the executive of the backbench 1922 committee.
So for now, at least, the split appears to be real, the populist anger withering, and the rage at Clinton and her supporters inside the party apparatus enduring.
With the cautionary tale of Roosevelt's failed purge in mind, the White House may be able to develop a more organized and coherent blueprint than that of Roosevelt and his team, one that transfers the president's personal popularity to the party by building strength at the local level; developing a persuasive, enduring party message; and nurturing new political talent like Barack Obama himself.
No party has an enduring hold on the American presidency.
"The Economist has no ancestral fealty to any party but an enduring prejudice in favour of liberalism," it said.
