The choice of Senator McConnell as the new minority leader in the upper house strikes us as a fine move for the Republicans. We’ve long admired the principled stand Mr. McConnell took in opposition to campaign speech regulation under the guise of rules in respect of financing elections. We predict that his fidelity to the First Amendment will come to be seen, even by liberal members of the press, as farsighted, even heroic. Sometimes these things take years to come into focus, but we have no doubt that Mr. McConnell will gain ground on this head.

What, however, the Republicans were thinking with the choice of Senator Lott as the minority whip is beyond us. The senator from Mississippi did his own turn as majority leader between 1996 and 2002 before stepping down amid an uproar over his suggestion that had the country would not have had its problems had it elected as president the Dixie-crat segregationist, Strom Thurmond. It was an episode that left the more generous analysts trying to figure out whether he was a racist or, as a friend of ours likes to say, one frigate short of a battle group.

But aside from Mr. Lott’s leadership in the passage of President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, he has little to show for his years as leader. He stood by as Senator Kennedy hijacked Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education reform. He has grown notorious lately for his support of Amtrak. And when we think of him, we think of old-fashioned pork-barrel politics and not of the kind of liberating principles around which President Reagan ignited the Republican ascendancy. The best hope for the Republicans in 2008 is a return to those principles. So all eyes are now on the minority in the House.