Feminized Politics: Just What the West Needs.

Gideon Rachman purports to be an expert on American foreign policy, but the ex-Economist writer keeps delving into extraneous topics like the candidacy of Segolene Royal in France's presidential election, and generalizing from that to profound-sounding inanities. Here's a taste:

Previous generations of women leaders had to play down their femininity. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir needed to show they were tougher than the men surrounding them. Meir is said to have remarked that: "I’m the only one in this cabinet with any balls."

But the new generation is different. Ms Royal (now universally known as S?gol?ne) has deliberately played up her feminine qualities. She has campaigned as what Le Monde called a "mummy candidate," introducing herself to audiences as the mother of a family of four and announcing that: "I want to do for the children of this country, what I was able to do for my own children." In her book The Truth of a Woman, published in 1996, she argued that a world run by women might be a less violent place. At a time when many French people seem to be longing for change in a generalised sense – but are frightened by specific social and economic reforms – the very fact that Ms Royal is a woman offers the promise of novelty and a fresh start.

Novelty and a fresh start, or more mommy at the helm nanny-state social modeling. On the fashion runway of politics, the frivolous French like to dabble in trendy twaddle. But, of course, Rachman does not examine the flip-side of the equation in this puff-piece. How will the burgeoning Islamic 20% of the French population [prove me wrong, but 33 years ago the French prefet of Rhone Prefecture told me the Arab population in his district was half-a-million, and the French deliberately avoid a census that reflects the true number of Muslims in their country] regard a female president. Probably as more proof that they live among cheese-eating.....never mind.

Mark Steyn makes many powerful points in his book America Alone, which is inching up the charts among US best-sellers. One of his chief theses is that Europe is depopulating in states which have adopted the so-called "social model" that provides cradle-to-grave nanny services to its citoyens. Steyn notes that abundant welfare and pension benefits persuade people not to have children, who in the past would have supported their parents in old age, because the state now supplants the parent-supporting kids that formerly also enriched their parents' lives. But nowadays, countries with plunging population rates [Germany will be down 15 million people by 2050 according to government calculations and also Spain and Italy] will not have the working population whose taxes will support their elders when 40% of Germans will be over 60 forty years hence, for example. In the meantime, natterers like Rachman gibber on about Global Warming, which of course a declining population sort of takes care of by itself, doesn't it?

In the meantime, Steyn notices population figures that indicate Muslims are proliferating like rabbits in their high-rise ghettoes surrounding Paris and other major French bourgs. Guess those hard-working Muslims will replace French ouvriers in the future?

Germany is avoiding this problem, that of immigration, by not allowing workers from Eastern Europe to fill jobs left vacant by German arbeiters. The fact that there is a 20% unemployment rate in former East Germany doesn't mean the unemployed will fill the many jobs begging for being filled. Evidently, the hard-working burghers prefer unemployment benefits to actual employment.

Does anyone besides Steyn and his entourage get the sense that the Europeans are busy exulting in US failure in Iraq while their own economic house slowly diminishes?

Maybe what Europe needs is more mothers and fewer nannies? Or super-nannies like Segolene?