Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Jim Leach endorses Barack Obama
Jim Leach, the Republican former Congressman from eastern Iowa (the First and then Second Iowa Congressional Districts) from 1976 to 2006, has endorsed Barack Obama. The left is delighted, the right not so much.
I have expected this announcement for more than a year. I'm surprised it took this long.
Longtime readers know that Jim Leach was the first and only politician for whom I actually knocked on doors (wearing that red cap). As a tenth grader at Iowa City High School I devoted literally hundreds of hours in the fall of 1976 working on his ultimately successful campaign to unseat the incumbant Democrat "Fast Eddie" Mezvinsky (who later managed to pyramid a failed political career into a series of fraudulent business schemes, a jail term, and a possible future as Chelsea Clinton's father-in-law). Jim -- we old volunteers never lose that familiarity -- was already an established moderate, having resigned his post at the State Department (along with Eliot Richardson) to protest Nixon's dismissal of Archibald Cox in the famous "Saturday Night Massacre."
In the years since, Jim developed a reputation for internationalism in foreign affairs, conservativism on fiscal matters, and centrism in the culture wars. Suffice it to say that he found himself in disagreement with the Bush administration more often than most Republicans. Like most establishment internationalists, Jim was particularly unhappy about the collapse of foreign support -- public opinion, really -- for the United States during George W. Bush's first term.
When Jim took an appointment at Princeton University last year I sent him an email and asked him to lunch, and he graciously accepted. We mostly talked about old times and that original election campaign, but it became quite clear that we disagreed quite strongly on foreign policy. He said then -- in April 2007 -- that he thought Barack Obama had the potential to transform America's reputation in the world. I walked away persuaded that if Obama were the Democratic nominee Jim would endorse him, or at least vote for him.
That said, Jim Leach has not grown more liberal over the years. He was well within the mainstream of Gerald Ford's Republican Party and felt quite comfortable in it. But thirty years after his first election to Congress he no longer agreed with his own party's leadership on many of the most important matters of the day. I believe he would say that he had not changed so much as the party had, and I would agree with him. Today's GOP is far to the right of the party that was in the permanent minority in the 1970s, and it has dragged the Democrats along with it. Jim Leach, a Ford Republican who has not really changed his views on the big issues, is now quite comfortable endorsing a Democratic nominee who is himself probably closer to the center than the leaders of that earlier era, including George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Edmund Muskie, Mo Udall, and even the 1976 version of Jimmy Carter.
Point is, count your blessings.
14 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Tue Aug 12, 04:53:00 PM:
You really think that Obama is more of a centrist than Carter was?
...
Why?
By Country Squire, at
Tue Aug 12, 05:14:00 PM:
I would also appreciate some amplification/clarification of your premise in the last paragraph.
By 
, at
Tue Aug 12, 05:32:00 PM:
Public approval overseas should mean little to nothing to anyone who has actually paid attention during their lifetime.
Ronald Reagan was probably LESS popular in western Europe than George Bush is now... while he was implementing the very policies which would bring down the Soviet Union.
When you realize that the very same people Jim Leach and Obama seek to curry favor with, and hoped to be liked by - consistently poll in the 60% range of thinking the United States needs to be weakened... it should open your eyes a little. It should make you wonder just why Obama is so popular there at the least!
But nooooo... we continue to have brain dead leftists (and I'm sorry to have to include Jim Leach in this category) who think this is a high school popularity test or something.
As for the old charge leftists have been throwing around the last few years about "squandering the sympathy for us around the world"... I really wish someone would stand up and tell them that you can find sympathy in the dictionary between sh!t and syphilis - and all three have roughly the same value.
By JamesEJ, at
Tue Aug 12, 05:35:00 PM:
I spoke with Leach about a month before he was unseated and I cannot agree more. In fact, at that time, I had the impression that he had basically given up the race. Obama seems very much in line with his views. Probably not as fiscally conservative, but that is a small problem in light of the massive spending Republicans seem to have adopted in recent years.
By , at
Tue Aug 12, 08:35:00 PM:
Like most establishment internationalists, Jim was particularly unhappy about the collapse of foreign support -- public opinion, really -- for the United States during George W. Bush's first term.
I guess ol' Jimbo hasn't figured out that the strength of "foreign support" for anything these days has the consistency of overcooked spaghetti. Just look at Europe's "support" for the Georgians in the past few days. And Jimbo thinks The Obamessiah will bring back what never existed in the first place?
Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and All the Blessed Saints, how did this fool keep getting reelected? I guess miracles really do happen, don't they? Damn, look at his official portrait: he looks like a Corn Belt Fuehrer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JimLeach.jpg
By JPMcT, at
Tue Aug 12, 09:47:00 PM:
Leach was a good guy, but he was a liberal Republican elected by a predominately Democrat population. He voted against Gingrich for Speaker and a number of other somewhat loony environmental measures and is one of those politicos who is too concerned with our "global" image. It's no surprise that he supports Obama, the Harvard trained internationalist. I'm a little surprised he still calls himself a Republican....but he is not much worse than many other Republicans who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over the past few years.
My concerns lie a bit closer to my family and my pocketbook. Also, I'n not gunning to be U.N Ambassador as Mr. Leach obviously is.
By , at
Tue Aug 12, 10:46:00 PM:
This post puzzles me. The issue is not Obama's positions - to the extent he has any - it is that he completely lacks any of the qualifications, experience, or judgment necessary to serve in high office (argueably in any office).
How does Leach justify supporting an dangerously unqualified and ignorant man of poor judgment for President? And why are we supposed to count our blessings?
Curt Johnson
By kreiz1, at
Wed Aug 13, 09:46:00 AM:
The discussion on philosophical evolution reminds me of a recent Jon Stewart clip. When a picture of George H. W. Bush hits the screen, Stewart comments, "hey, remember him? We used to hate this guy- now he's kinda cute." Things do change.
By , at
Wed Aug 13, 01:11:00 PM:
Probably Ethanol.
Keep an eye on Missouri. McCain HAS TO HAVE IT! (and, may not get it.)
Ethanol
By , at
Thu Aug 14, 07:50:00 PM:
I also volunteered for the first Leach campaign in 1976, even though I'm a Democrat and often disagreed with him. I always thought he was highly principled and decent. I also liked Robert Ray from those days.
I think it is funny how much vitriol your post has generated. Sad funny, not haha funny.
Whammer
By Baron Elmo, at
Fri Aug 15, 06:39:00 AM:
Tigerhawk, you and Jim Leach have hit on something that I've thought for a long while now... something about the pickle that the GOP have got themselves into.
Over the last quarter century, the Republican party has lurched ever further to the right, continually rightward until they've moved too far from the mainstream for their own good. Let's face it, most Americans don't think it's a great idea to respond to every international disagreement with a rattled saber, are fed up to the eyeteeth with our economy being run to fill the already choked coffers of the wealthy, and don't think that television shows like Sex in the City ought to be purged from the airwaves. Oh, and most Americans simply aren't that bent out of shape about the simple fact that a lot of their fellow citizens are gay.
The Republican party needs to take a few steps back toward the political center, back to a time when principled men like Jim Leach aren't tagged as traitors by the party faithful. But as the hostile comments above make clear, that day isn't anywhere in view.
Hell, by the GOP standards of our time, prominent Repubs of yesteryear like Richard Nixon or George Romney would be scorned as liberals (Jonah Goldberg has repeatedly tarred Nixon with this very brush), and a Dwight Eisenhower would be physically assaulted for daring to call himself a Republican. When Arlen Frigging Specter is what passes for a "moderate conservative," I humbly submit that the very expression has hemorrhaged away what meaning it ever had.
So, the GOP leadership has essentially right-shifted itself into an electoral cul-de-sac. What would happen if they dared attempt to take even a baby step back toward the cultural middle? Well, the religious right, the neocons and the Club for Growth would be up in their respective grills, hissing "And just where do you think you're going?"
This would not be such a problem, were it not for the corresponding fact that the Democrats have not taken a mirror-image shift to the left. Indeed, as Tigerhawk ably maintains, today's Dems are far less liberal than their predecessors. Imagine, if you are able, the Democrats of 1972 tolerating the legal and constitutional abuses of a George W. Bush with the spinelessness of today's bunch!
(What keeps the GOP from truly crashing and burning, by the way, is its staggeringly effective presence in the mainstream media, something neither the Democratic Party or the left - and yes, they are two very different entities - has been able to equal, though the Internet has leveled the playing field a bit. The Dems/left just don't have an equivalent to the collective might of Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, Malkin, Fox News and the rest. Keith Olbermann simply ain't enough to compensate.)
This armchair observer believes that if the Republican leadership truly desires to save its bacon over the long haul, they need to stop trying to win elections by scaring the bejesus out of white people (a short-term asset that is slowly evolving into a long-term deficit), take a more environmentally friendly stance (after all, dirty air and polluted water make conservatives just as sick as liberals), and tell the religious fundamentalists to sod off and start their own party (even lots of Christians have had a snootful too many of these killjoys).
It won't happen, of course - who would have the stones to attempt such a thing? Much easier to simply start another war (Iran? Russia? Luxembourg?) and thereby spook the populace into pulling the lever for you.
Oh, well - if God hadn't meant for we common people to be shorn, he wouldn't have made us sheep...
By , at
Fri Aug 15, 10:55:00 AM:
Whoo, did you open a can of worms. I expect you'll be denounced as a RINO any time you show don't follow in lockstep with the party line. Republicans have taken Reagan's 11th Commandment to an appalling extreme.
By JPMcT, at
Sat Aug 16, 12:48:00 AM:
@Baron Elmo
Most of the above discussion is pretty sensible...I've seen more vitriol at a bridge game.
The Republicans are losing their seats BECAUSE they are moving to the center...their base is staying home, and their base is conservative. Dems aren't winning as much as it is Republicans who are losing.
The small number of Conservatives who are intolerant of gays and trash TV are well balanced by the moonbat left who want to create a Worker's Paradise out of our Republic.
The rest of us just think that marriage needs two sexes, prime time TV shouldn't have to be prescreened and international threats should be met with strength and resolve, not a sensitivity session.
If you think the American media is slanted to the right because of talk radio and Fox news, the nI suspect that further dialogue will be futile...since you are still awaiting that brilliant flash of the obvious to come your way.
The American media carries a MASSIVE tilt toward the leftist and Democrat agenda. If you think it doesn't, just petition your congressman to rewrite the "Fairness" Doctrine to include televison transmission, prime time news, print media and the Internet...let me know what he says...
By , at
Sat Aug 16, 12:08:00 PM:
Didn't Jim Leach favor Jimmy Carter to broker peace between Israel and Palestinians? That settles it for me.
