On Friday, Republicans in the House and Senate elected their leaders for the coming Congressional session. Unfortunately, the members of the House conference left the current leadership structure largely in place. To be sure, Speaker Hastert will leave leadership, but that was by his own choice. Congressmen Boehner and Blunt were reelected as leader and whip, respectively. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the qualities that it takes to be a successful leader in the majority are the same as those needed to lead a party in the minority.

Of course, that assumes that the leaders were successful leading the majority. In the case of Mr. Boehner, it’s hard to tell. He wasn’t on the job long enough for us to make any fair judgements, so I’m happy to give him a chance to demonstrate that he’s the right man for the job. Mr. Blunt, on the other hand, had a chance to establish himself as an effective whip and never did. Indeed, he has never been able to extract himself from the shadow of scandal-tainted former Majority Leader Tom Delay with whom Mr. Blunt was bound at the hip for much of his Congressional career. With apologies to my friends who have worked for Mr. Blunt and know him to be a friendly and caring man, it seems apparent to me that the House conference would have done better to select a new whip — someone ready to be an effective leader in the minority.

Beyond that, I don’t really have any great insight on the rest of the House leadership. I hope they’ll be effective. Most importantly, I hope they’ll be able to settle on an agenda that brings the conference together around shared principles: smaller government, better control over spending, common sense reform of entitlement programs.

In the Senate, I am thrilled that Senator McConnell will be the party’s leader. He’s an outstanding tactician, has a firm grasp of Senate rules, debates well, and is willing to stand on principle even when that stand is unpopular. He’s also tough as nails. I think he’ll do a great job.

But as my sarcastic, quicky post on Thursday suggested, the Senate conference’s decision to putt Senator Lott back in leadership is almost comically stupid. To be sure, Mr. Lott demonstrated a thorough knowledge of Senate rules during his prior service as whip and leader, but he also demonstrated no ability to stand up to the Democrats or hold his conference together in tough votes. Then there was the whole thing where he got drummed out of office for idiotic comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party.

Leadership matters an awful lot in Congress. Leaders are the public face of the party. They also have important day-to-day responsibilities for moving — or holding up — legislation and making sure the party is effective.

From that standpoint, it’s hard to believe we couldn’t have done better. And the next two years are important. If we can’t recover the majorities in 2008, history suggests that, at least in the House, it could be along time before we do.

Jim: I’m not optimistic. I think one of the most depressing things I read during the whole leadership battle were the lame comments various GOP leaders made in response to Dean Barnett’s no-brainer question, “What books on the war on terror have you read lately?” Basically, none of them could name one. I’m not saying I expected these members to have read all of the latest bestsellers, but I would have liked for at least one of the candidates to have said, “I really liked Robert Kaplan’s latest.” Or Mark Steyn. Or “The Looming Tower.” Or Peter Bergen, or one of the Miniter brothers, or Bruce Hoffman, or Melanie Phillips. Even if they could have named one, and said, “I’ve been meaning to read it,” I would feel better about the answer.

(By the way, I didn’t expect any of them to have read my book; my book is about the political effect of terrorism, not terrorism itself.)

In the last book I finished, “The Way to Win” by Mark Halperin, they suggest that Washington reporters — the “Gang of 500″ that ABC News’ The Note refers to — don’t read books, or don’t read many of them. If that’s accurate, and the three potential GOP leaders are representative of Congress as a whole, we’ve got an entire political governing and media class that gets all of their information from television, newspapers, and magazines. (If that.) Thoroughly depressing, since that I think a good book can expand one’s knowledge and understanding of difficult topics exponentially.