Bridging a Divide -- and Crossing an Ocean

Hobson is close friends with Boehner; the two represent adjoining congressional districts and have a long personal history.

"I haven't talked to John about it," Hobson said. "Boehner has a different job than I do; he's the minority leader."

Boehner's spokesman, Brian Kennedy, said that "there's no tension or hard feelings there whatsoever."

Pelosi invited Hobson to travel to the Middle East because the two have a good rapport, according to her spokesman, Brendan Daly. "He's a good guy, she likes him," Daly said. "She thinks he's a very smart and able member."

Hobson sent a box of chocolates to Pelosi to thank her for including him in the trip.

"If asked, I would go again," he said. "I thought it was a good trip."

Hobson, who serves on the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense, has been to Iraq five times. When Republicans controlled Congress, he took trips with Pelosi and Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a fierce critic of the Iraq war, and got to know both well.

"You can't do this stuff behind the desk in Washington," Hobson said of making spending decisions involving military actions. "On this trip, I'd never been to any of the countries I went to, and I wanted to understand them."

Foreign travel gives members from opposite parties a chance to get to know one another, Hobson said. That is lacking in Washington these days, he said.

"I learned that Keith Ellison is a nice young man -- he and his wife," said Hobson, referring to the freshman Democrat from Minnesota, who is the first Muslim elected to Congress and was part of the delegation.

While Republican leaders lit into Pelosi for taking the trip, Hobson said he has not suffered any criticism from his party.

"I don't care about that -- my job is to represent the people of my district and my country," he said, spoken with the confidence of an incumbent who won 61 percent of the vote in November in his district, which forms a horseshoe around Columbus.

"Rather than playing politics, there's a more serious problem here, and that is: How do we get peace in this area?" said Hobson, who was elected to Congress in 1990. "A huge problem is Lebanon and the Palestinians, and it's all being lost in politics."