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Thanks, Pippin, and best holiday wishes back to you!

Well, this just ruins my plans:

THE swells who ski in Sun Valley start wrangling about now for an invite to the hottest New Year's Eve party in Idaho - the annual blast thrown by ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz and her hubby, Sen. John Kerry. But this year, Frederic Fekkai, Donna Karan, William O'Shaughnessy and Jann Wenner will have to ring in 2004 somewhere else. The party is cancelled. "The rigors of the campaign trail," a Kerry spokeswoman explained. The presidential candidate is scheduled to be in Iowa as 2003 ends. A book signing scheduled for today at the Chapter One store in Ketchum also was scratched. (PageSix)

Speaking of the Dem dwarves:

At the recent Kennedy Center awards, Sharpton's box was two away from Bush's. At intermission, he went to pay his respects. When he walked through the curtains of the presidential box the two Secret Service guys visibly stiffened. Sharpton gave them: "Easy boys, you'll be working for me soon." The president roared. The president then told Al's supporter James Brown: "This may surprise you - but I'd like to see your man win the nomination." Grinned James Brown: "I bet you would." (Cindy Adams)

HOWARD DEAN attacked Bill Clinton without meaning to last week because his thinking about domestic policy is muddled on the occasions when it isn't simply inadequate. That is because there is often more pure politics in Howard Dean than the leader of a grass-roots movement is prepared to acknowledge. Occasionally, it slips out under the general heading of candor -- the initial explanation for all those secret records in Vermont (tongue allegedly in cheek) was to deny ammunition to the opposition; the explanation for his flip-flop in now opposing the transportation of nuclear waste to Nevada is that he is running for president. ...

What is so fascinating, however, is that this need for enemies -- for a domestic equivalent of people playing footsy with Bush on Iraq -- overrode mature judgment. Dean's words make sense only as an attack. Noting the Clinton phrase from the 1996 State of the Union address ("The era of big government is over"), Dean promised a "new era" -- "not one where we join Republicans and aim simply to limit the damage they inflict on working families."

Dean's rhetoric imagines a domestic party enemy that doesn't and didn't exist. In his damage control frenzy, moreover, he made it clear he wouldn't dare even try to make such an argument explicitly. Oddly, what he did do, in a formulation based a new social contract, is reveal huge gaps in his thinking and one difference with his opponents on taxes that he can only deal with (like Saddam Hussein) through the use of a straw man. ... complete Oliphant op-ed