Gerard Baker thinks we should elect a Democrat in 2008 because it will cause us to get serious about the things that really matter (like the global jihad against Western modernity).*** Well, not if America’s finest progressives, Ivy League graduates, and political strategist wannabes have anything to say about it.

Right now, for example, at TAPPED they’re busy talking about the division of labor inside the family:

FEMINISM AND EX ANTE HOUSEWORK STANDARDS. Matt interprets data adduced by Jessica and finds more evidence for my assertion that the typical arrangement of housework in households occupied by heterosexual couples reflects unjust gender balances combined with actually different ex ante standards of cleanliness/tidiness (which are related to said inequalities, of course, but a feminist analysis doesn’t require any specific ex ante level of domestic work beyond what is necessary for sanitation, cooking, childrearing, etc.) With all due respect to the great Marcotte and Waring I continue to disagree with the implied solution of creating equality within domestic work norms that are an unholy marriage of 1) patriarchy, 2) the related assumption of one partner devoted full-time to domestic work, and 3) general cultural assumptions that unstructured leisure time is somehow immoral. Instead I think that it makes more sense to try to achieve equality within a more rational allocation of priorities that doesn’t take 50s-bourgeois standards of tedious domestic busywork as a given.

If you didn’t understand a word of that, you’re not alone. In my house, I yell at the various guilty parties to clean up after themselves, or if I get really annoyed, I do it myself and harangue the guilty parties afterward. And we live happily ever after.

But that’s not my point. My point is that in November 2002, after the Dems were destroyed in the midterms, Heather Hurlburt, a former speechwriter for Clinton (and now a participant at Democracy Arsenal), wrote a devastating essay (”War Torn: Why Democrats Can’t Think Straight about National Security”) about then-Democrat wonks’ lack of interest in anything having to do with foreign affairs and their surfeit of interest in the minutiae of domestic policy.

Nothing has changed, I see. Young progressives may talk and write about foreign policy these days, but they understand it (and, worse, care about it, to the extent they do) only as it relates to domestic politics (or else they wouldn’t write the jargon-and slogan-filled, naive, detached, callous, and unhelpful things they tend to write).

Have a nice weekend!

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*** Yes, I know I wrote about this before.

Gerard Baker thinks he sees a time (when America won’t have George W. Bush to kick around anymore) that the opinion elites and Democrats will wish he were still around:

 It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes. [e.a.]

Oh yeah? Andrew Sullivan is already pointing his finger. Admiringly, he quotes a Euro-blogger who knows how things went down: We [in the West] are to blame for the mess we made after 9/11. Sullivan admires the guy for writing about the fact that he was ”complicit.” In our [the West's] ”mistakes.”

This argument—the notion that 9/11 arrived on a blank slate and it is our reaction to 9/11 that has caused all our problems— (which Tony Blair has called a “mad anti-Americanism” and which he has warned against as a fatal inversion of Western liberalism) will become very popular, I’m sure.

The culture wars will continue…until they are drowned out by the shooting wars. Which, I’m afraid, will come.

George W. Bush is well-read, according to Daniel Johnson:

So how does this distinguished historian [Andrew Roberts] think President Bush compares to his predecessors? “He’s an amazingly well-read man, contrary to the way he’s portrayed in the media,” Roberts told the Daily Telegraph.

This chimes with the experience of my father, Paul Johnson, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Mr. Bush last December. In his eulogy, the President listed a few of my father’s many books and added, with typically self-deprecating irony, “I’ve read them all, of course.” The audience laughed, but it emerged in conversation that he actually had read some of them. Like Reagan, whose reading—including Modern Times, my father’s history of the world since 1917—encouraged him to persevere in his mission to win the cold war, George W. Bush has been strengthened by books in his determination not to give up in the war on terror.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we get to the part where you just want to throw up [e.a.]:

Is it only the natural modesty of this President that leads him to wear his erudition so lightly that a cynical intelligentsia assumes that he has never opened a book? Or is it native cunning? Far better to be “misunderestimated” by your enemies than to flaunt your academic prowess …

This president is in a major player the Swims with International Sharks game. When you’re swimming with any sharks, the first rule is to play the game that’s being played, not the game you wish were being played.

All that history and biography reading being done by GWB? Well: it’s the Swimming with Sharks literature for the presidential set (including the hopefuls: why do you think Rudy Giuliani showed such familiarity with Winston Churchill on 9/11?), to see how those other guys did it.

It hardly requires a crystal ball to see that he will rarely crack a book again after he leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

If campaigning were a musical performance, Rudy Giuliani’s appearance at CPAC, described by Captain Ed, would have to be considered bravura:

George Will introduced him to the CPAC audience by noting that only three Presidents have served as mayors previous to their national election: Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge, the latter being the last President with whom Will completely agreed. Will noted that the mayoralty of New York City carries specific challenges, calling it “liberalism’s laboratory” and a center for “learned dependency”. He spoke about Giuliani’s conservative instincts — such as when he declared fatherhood the best social program, or raising taxes a “dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic idea”. Will assured the CPAC activists that Giuliani’s conservatism is the same flavor as Lady Thatcher’s, and that pugnacity is his political philosophy.

Rudy spoke afterwards, and he hit some familiar themes. He started by talking about the non-binding resolutions on the war, which he acknowledged Congress had every right of debating. However, Giuliani used this to show the general bankruptcy of leadership in American politics. America does not elect people to Congress to be commentators, but to make decisions. Let George Will do commentary, he said, as Will knows what he’s doing. Congress should make decisions and live with the consequences, not abdicate their responsibilities or use the process of legislation to make meaningless, useless gestures.

Giuliani returned often to the theme of leadership. He talked about how Ronald Reagan defied public opinion to do the right thing so often, and becoming a great President in the process. He staged Pershings in Europe even though he got roundly excoriated for it. He refused to sign a bad deal at Rekjavik, and people claimed he would bring the end of the world.

He also alluded to his differences with CPAC activists. Giuliani said that he understands that we will have some differences, but told people to beware making your 80% ally a 20% enemy. He joked that he might have just described some marriages. Giuliani urged CPAC to focus on areas of agreement and to determine who will most effectively carry those points of agreement to the White House.

Afterwards, he spoke at length on national security. He says that the Democrats want to go back to the way we handled national security in the 1990s, allowing the US to remain paralyzed waiting for international approval. He drew great applause with this line: “We don’t have to be ashamed of acting in our own interests.”

It’s awfully early (as everyone, including me, keeps saying over and over), and his clear front-runner status will make him an even juicier target for his political enemies, but is it not now evident that he can win the Republican nomination?