Saturday, November 18, 2006

Mark Shields's lament about the defeat of Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) missed the point ["The Class Act Caught in the Landslide," op-ed, Nov. 11].

Mr. Leach has indeed been a class act and a model of civility, but his occasional votes of independence, including his vote against the Iraq war, were hardly votes of "courage." Rather they were sops to his constituents in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District that the Republican leadership understood he had to make.

But what really mattered to his constituents on Nov. 7 is that Jim Leach had voted 77 percent of the time with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay. And he kept them in power. Many Democrats in this, a Democratic district, including me, periodically begged the congressman to show some real courage by emulating Sen. Jim Jeffords and opting for independence. He said he could not do that.

So he was brought down by a grass-roots campaign (the Democratic National Committee contributed hardly a dime) run by a bunch of college professors and activists who had had enough. It's called

democracy.

JOEL D. BARKAN

Iowa City