There’s some head-spinning intellectual dishonesty at work in the first two major-media columns that argue, counterintuitively, that Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen
“„On May 24, 2001, I wrote an op-edfor The Post in the wake of Vermont Sen. James Jeffords’s party switch. I argued that the switch, which cost Republicans control of the Senate, could well turn out to be good for President Bush. Not entirely for the reasons I speculated on in the op-ed, I turned out to be right. Bush was still able to get enough cooperation to govern over the next year and a half, and he was also able to run successfully against the Democratic Senate in the fall of 2002.
“„Many pundits today will say that this a wakeup call, a time for the Republican Party to moderate its views in order to attract more to its ranks. We didn’t subscribe to that strategy back in 2001. Instead, when the world changed after the Sept. 11 attacks, a newly focused Republican agenda produced a new Senate majority in November 2002. And the Jeffords switch became completely irrelevant.