Is this (from right-leaning New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin) the version of the election story that's going to take hold?

The rise of the Mommy Party
Pelosi's at the helm, Hillary's in the wings and - for now - Bush is in the doghouse

...Republicans, with their macho men and muscular policy prescriptions, are in decline because they are out of answers. Dems are getting better at seizing their opportunities, and doing it with women playing a leading role.

Put another way, Mommy is taking over because Daddy screwed up.

Nancy Pelosi is a case in point. Despite attacks on her fitness to lead in a time of war, voters made her the first female speaker of the House. The belief that Dems, as the "nanny" party, are squishy on security was trumped by fury at the Bush administration's incompetence in Iraq....

Goodwin seems to be using "Mommy Party" as a compliment, which may make him the first member of the political class ever to do so, and maybe that's good -- but I worry, because if voters think the Mommies have taken over, soon this will be declared a huge problem, a threat to our national greatness, and pundits (seemingly from across the spectrum because they'll include quite a few who claim to be liberals) will be scanning the horizon looking for signs that the demasculinized national nightmare is not permanent and "men are back." (You remember that phrase from the fireman-fetishizing immediate aftermath of 9/11.) The last thing we need right now is a punditocracy-wide search for macho men to make everything all better -- that's basically how we got into this mess.

Of course, it's a bit odd to say that Democratic "Mommies" are on the rise when this year's victors included James Webb, Jon Tester, and Heath Shuler.

Really, what happened is that people who have no sense of personal responsibility were defeated and people (female and male) who seem to believe messes need to be cleaned up were chosen to replace them. The winners also believe that life is tough for ordinary Americans, and that a steady diet of wedge-issue rage isn't what people need to pay the bills. A real depravity in our culture is that the shocking lack of personal responsibility in Bush/Rove-style politics is seen by so many people as consistent with manly virtue. If that's what it means to be a man, then hell, maybe Webb, Tester and Shuler are "Mommies."

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Incidentally, according to Goodwin, it appears that we've already won the 2008 presidential election, too:

I think the mood of the country has shifted so sharply that Hillary Clinton has gone from being the front-runner for her party's 2008 nomination to being virtually unstoppable.

This echoes the words of John Wilson, editor of the Christian-leaning journal Books & Culture, in yesterday's New York Times Book Review:

At the moment, it appears unlikely that a Republican of any stripe will win the White House in 2008....

Can you take those predictions to the bank? Oh, sure -- just as you could safely the bet on the reelection George H.W. "91% Approval Rating" Bush in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, and just as you could bet the farm on Bill Clinton's defeat in '96 after Newt cleaned his clock in '94.

I know that new Newsweek poll shows a hypothetical unnamed Democrat beating a hypothetical unnamed Republican for president, 48%-28% -- but it also shows McCain and Giuliani running nearly as strong as Hillary (with less positive response but also less negative response). It's especially ridiculous at this particular moment to make predictions two years out -- it really seems right now that voters, more than I can ever remember, will vote in the next cycle based on what the parties do (about Iraq, economic anxiety, and so on), rather than on some ginned-up phony issue. And we simply don't know what's our pols, Democrat and Republican, are going to do. So right-leaners should back off and stop volunteering to help Hillary measure the drapes.