Leach to G-20
By Dylan Matthews - Nov 12th, 2008 at 4:07 pmIt shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that President-elect Obama is sending Madeleine Albright to represent him at the G-20 summit. What’s more interesting is who’s accompanying her: former Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA).
Leach’s involvement in the Obama campaign–from his initial endorsement, to his speech at the convention, to this–may seem unlikely, given his party affiliation and Obama’s alliance with Dave Loebsack, the man who beat Leach for reelection in 2006. But Leach actually has a startlingly progressive record on foreign affairs. He was one of six Republican congressman to vote against the war in Iraq in 2002. He spent the 1980s fighting the Reagan administration’s decision to reject the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in the United States, and is a longtime member of the pro-United-Nations, internationalist Parliamentarians for Global Action.
He’s sufficiently solid on foreign affairs that FrontPage Magazine has denounced him as a “a vocal advocate of retreat, appeasement, disarmament, and increasing the power and authority of the United Nations.” Anyone who provokes that kind of response from David Horowitz’s crew is good by me.
By including Leach in his foreign policy team, Obama is engaging in the kind of smart bipartisanship CAPAF blogger Matt Yglesias has written about. Co-opting the most progressive end of the Republican foreign policy community results in broader backing for progressive policies in the short term, and eventually helps cleave that wing from the conservative movement altogether. Leach makes a fine addition to the Obama braintrust on his own merits, but this is a masterful piece of political jujitsu as well.
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