Jim Leach, a soft-spoken, cerebral Iowa Republican who spent three many years in Congress tirelessly lofting the banner for the reasonable political heart — a lot in order that he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and switched events in 2022 — died on Dec. 11 in Iowa Metropolis. he was 82.
His daughter, Jenny Dix, stated his demise, in a hospital, was from a coronary heart assault and a hemorrhagic stroke.
Mr. Leach was most likely the one U.S. consultant who may converse learnedly, in the identical interview, about faculty wrestling, banking laws and the affect of Thomas Hart Benton on the work of Jackson Pollock — after which, if obligatory, repeat his phrases in Russian.
He belonged to what conservatives as soon as pejoratively known as the “Gypsy Moth Republicans,” a unfastened group of reasonable and liberal get together members, principally from Northern states, who sat out the Reagan revolution, notably its embrace of tax and spending cuts.
In 1984, he helped kind the Republican Mainstream Committee, which pushed for arms management, girls’s rights, civil rights and environmental protections on the get together’s nationwide conference that summer time in Dallas. He additionally supported abortion rights, earned excessive marks from the Sierra Membership and was a campaign-finance ascetic — he took cash solely from inside Iowa, and not more than $500 per donor.
“I basically have always been a progressive in international affairs, a moderate on social issues and somewhat restrained on spending,” Mr. Leach stated in a 2009 interview with the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities, which he ran from 2009 to 2013.
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