Former Iowa Republican Rep. James Leach to Speak at DNC

Jim Leach and Me

It was just announced that former Iowa Republican Representative James "Jim" Leach, now serving as the interim Director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado on Monday's opening night, August 25.

Trotting out this esteemed 30-year Republican legislator, who endorsed Barack Obama on August 12, is a coup for the Democrats. It's akin to the use of Senator Joseph Leiberman, (a former Democratic vice presidential running mate with John Kerry) at the Republican convention.

Jim Leach is one of the most respected politicians ever to serve. And serve he did -- for 30 years, from 1977 to 2007, when, after being re-elected 14 times, he was upset in the 2^nd Congressional District in eastern Iowa by a mere 6,000 votes by former Cornell College Professor David Loebsack.

Leach, a graduate of Princeton, Johns Hopkins and the London School of Economics, and a Davenport, Iowa, native, has been a voice for moderate Republicans ever since he defeated Ed Mezvinsky (who later served time in prison) in 1976.

If all politicians had the integrity, smarts and scruples of James Leach, this country wouldn't be in the mess it's in at this time in our history.

Leach was fiscally conservative, socially moderate, but progressive on such issues as stem cell research, which he supported at a time when President Buch was banning the use of all but a few strains. Leach also had the integrity to quit during Watergate, in protest over the "Saturday Night Massacre," when Richard Nixon fired Eliot Richardson and Archibald Cox. (At the time, Leach was serving as a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the U.N. General Assembly). He never accepted PAC money, refused out-of-state contributions to his campaigns and put limits on how much one individual could contribute.