'Growing in Office,' Earning 'Strange New Respect'

Wlady Pleszczynski, editorial director of The American Spectator, writes today:

More than a quarter century ago, our longtime Washington correspondent (and now senior editor) Tom Bethell began bestowing the Strange New Respect Award on once-reliable conservatives who won liberal praise by adopting liberal policies. Of a sudden, an erstwhile Neanderthal would be treated in the Washington Post as someone who was no longer "simplistic" and "shrill" but rather a figure who had "grown" and showed himself to be "nuanced." 

David Frum has described the phenomenon this way:

"Strange new respect" is of course the formula of praise with which the big media welcome any conservative who veers leftward. As in: "When Senator Joe Jones arrived in Washington, he was widely regarded as a wild-eyed ideologue. But as he has worked to support [fill in name of liberal sacred cow here], many have come to view him with a strange new respect."