(Due to a very heavy editing schedule, this week's essay is taken from my new book, "The Jews of Capitol HIll" Alan Grayson, the Democratic representative from Florida's 8th District (Orlando) is a firebrand with a tendency to shoot from the hip . . . and the lip. In a recent article in "The Nation" magazine, writer Mark Pinsky wrote of Grayson that "Congress has not seen his like since firebrand Vito Marcantonio represented Harlem during the cold war." Grayson has become one of the Republicans' -- and the Tea Party's -- number one targets in the upcoming election, and believe he is -- literally -- insane. His supporters believe he is a breath of fresh air blowing at the speed of a category 5 hurricane . . . .)
In 1968 Pop Art icon Andy Warhol prophesied, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes. At the time – long before the creation of the Internet, Google, Face Book, Twitter and untold dozens of cable outlets – Warhol’s declaration was taken to be “just another peculiar statement from an outrageous artist.” Turns out, Warhol was more than prophetic. What the “Pope of Pop” could not have predicted, however, was that a person could also go from anonymity to notoriety in fifteen minutes.
Consider the case of Florida Representative Alan Mark Grayson.
On the evening of September 29, 2009, in the midst of the highly partisan, highly contentious debate on national health care, Grayson gave a brief speech on the House floor. His speech was, to put it mildly, a doozey. So much so that within 24 hours, he was no longer an anonymous freshman from Florida’s Eighth District; he had become “the darling of the liberal blogosphere.” Moreover, was the topic of a brief, spirited debate on both CNN and Fox News; his speech had received more than one million hits on You Tube; he was the recipient of more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from around the country.
In the tongue-in-cheek speech that took him from utter anonymity to total notoriety, Grayson said:
It’s my duty and pride tonight to be able to announce exactly what the Republicans plan to do for health care in America . . . . It’s a very simple plan. Here it is. The Republican health care plan for America: ‘don’t get sick.’ If you have insurance don’t get sick, if you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick; if you’re sick, don’t get sick. Just don’t get sick . . . . If you do get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: ‘die quickly.’”
Grayson quickly became a “rock star” and totally identified with this one speech. Not long after “the speech,” he attended the Florida Democratic Party’s annual convention, where, “People stood in line to take pictures with him and gush over him, and a room where he was later part of a panel discussion had to be doubled in size because turnout was twice what was expected.” When Grayson began talking about health care, people in the panel discussion audience began shouting, “Say it! Say it!” Grayson complied, “Don't get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.” The crowd cheered.
Not surprisingly, immediately after giving the speech on the House floor, Republicans demanded that Grayson apologize. The next day, Grayson did issue an apology – sort of: Instead of saying he was sorry about accusing Republicans of wanting people to “die quickly,” Grayson gave an apology “to the dead.” “I would like to apologize,” he said, “. . . to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.” Grayson, who actually launched a website “to honor and name those who died from a lack of health insurance” (http://namesofthedead.com) did eventually apologize to the Jewish community for using the term “holocaust.” A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee called Grayson “. . . an unstable man who has come unhinged.” The Chair of Florida’s Republican Party called Grayson “The laughing stock of the House of Representatives, and a complete embarrassment to his constituents.”
The blogosphere, according to New Republic assistant editor Marin Cogan is “the medium of the outsider-the self-consciously rambunctious truth-teller holding the dissembling establishment to account.” “That,” Cogan notes, “is the very essence of Alan Grayson."
Less than a week after his “Republicans want you to die” speech, while being interviewed on a radio talk show, Grayson referred to one of Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke’s advisors as a “K Street whore.” In this case, Grayson did issue an immediate apology: “I did not intend to use a term that is often, and correctly, seen as disrespectful to women.” This time around however, the Florida freshman was even pilloried by fellow Democrats. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called Grayson’s comment “inappropriate.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz called him “A quirky individualist.” Upon initially meeting the 6’4” Grayson – who was wearing a pinstripe suit with an orange and pink shirt and tie, Barney Frank chimed, “I thought he was trying out for the road company of ‘Guys and Dolls!’” Anthony Weiner called Grayson was “one fry short of a Happy Meal.” When Chairman Ben Bernanke himself came up to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Financial Services Committee – of which Grayson is one of the junior-most members – he him about the destination of more than a half-trillion dollars the Fed was lending to foreign bankers. When Bernanke responded, “I don’t know,” Grayson took the former Princeton Economics professor to school: “I find it hard to believe that the power to hand over the half-a-trillion dollars to foreigners was part of Congressional intent in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was written.” By evening, the Grayson/Bernanke colloquy had already received hundreds of thousands of hits on You Tube. His grilling of Federal Reserve Inspector General Ruth Coleman has been watched more than one million times.
Grayson’s shoot-from-the-hip style of commentary also garners a lot of attention. Speaking of conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Grayson called him “. . . a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention.” “Limbaugh,” he added, “actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did one percent of what he wanted us to do, then we'd all need painkillers.” In an April 2009 Huffington Post editorial he quipped, Wall Street “is apparently the only place in the world where you can steal from the taxpayers and then bill them for services rendered.” While comments like this enhanced his standing with progressives and liberals, it also put a bull’s eye on his back. Before the end of his first year in Congress, Alan Grayson had become the number one target of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. By mid-Fall, there were already a minimum of five well-known Orlando-area Republicans considering challenging Grayson in 2010. By December 2009, political writers were sharpening their pencils, getting ready to write Alan Grayson’s political epitaph.
However, as one writer noted, “Don’t think that Alan Grayson is down and out; he has been overcoming long odds for virtually his entire life.”
Alan Mark Grayson, the son of Daniel Franklin and Dorothy Ann (Sabin) Grayson was born in New York City on March 13, 1958, where his father was a teacher and the principal at Public School 43 in the Bronx. His Canadian-born mother was also a teacher. It was not an easy life. Alan and his sister Joan (Cohen) “grew up in the projects in the Bronx” in a 21st floor apartment next to an elevated train. “Asthma-inflicted” from a young age, Alan’s mother took him “four times a week to the hospital for treatment.” “I had a lot of trouble breathing, and needed special injections four times a week,” he remembers. “Each time, she had to take me to the hospital.” “Without health coverage,” he notes on his Congressional web site, “I would not be alive today.” At age 8 a third-grader at his father’s school threatened him with a knife. At age 11, a bully threw Grayson “under a moving bus.” His website matter-of-factly notes, “He lived.” At age 12, he began taking the subway to school on his own; at age 13 he became bar mitzvah at Temple Israel in New Rochelle.
His mother, he notes, “made huge efforts to ensure I got a good education." Her efforts paid off: after acing an entrance exam Alan, who was valedictorian of his junior high school, was admitted to the “highly selective” Bronx High School of Science. While in high school, Grayson, along with tens of thousands of other students, took standardized tests. Scoring the highest among 50,000 or so seniors, Grayson next went off to Harvard University. As noted in The Almanac of American Politics, “To help him get through financially, he lived modestly and took odd jobs cleaning toilets and working as a night watchman. Despite this regime, Grayson graduated in the top two percent of his class, Phi Beta Kappa, in only three years. Following his 1978 graduation, Grayson spent the next two years working as an economist before deciding to enter Harvard Law School. Earning his J.D. – cum laude – in the standard three years, Grayson simultaneously earned an M.A. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government, and completed exams for a PhD in government.
Grayson wrote Master’s thesis on gerontology – specifically “how to improve the health of older people.” In the thesis, he called for the creation of “an organization to support research on the health of seniors.” Within two years of writing those words, Grayson formed an organization called “The Alliance for Aging Research.” He would go on to serve as an officer of the Alliance up until his election to Congress in 2008. According to his Congressional website, “In 22 years, (The] Alliance has increased federal support for aging research by 500%, leading to breakthroughs in the treatment of blindness, weak bones, Alzheimer’s disease and other afflictions of the elderly.” A.R.R.’s motto is “Living to 100 – and Loving it.”
Although widely courted by prestigious Wall Street law firms, the 25-year old Harvard Law graduate went out west to Denver, where he became clerk to Colorado Supreme Court Justice George Lohr. While out in Colorado, Grayson went to a Halloween party in Boulder, costumed as a Catholic Priest. There, he met Shellie Ruston, the daughter of Harry Hadley Ruston a retired Federal Tax Court judge and Florence (nee Kessler) Ruston a doyen of Denver society, who long claimed that she had acted in the “Our Gang” comedies of the 1920s. under the name of “Baby Fleurette,” The two were married in April 1984. The marriage was short-lived and left Grayson so broke that at one time he “found himself locked out of the motel room where he’d been living.”
Rebounding and returning east in the Fall of 1984, Grayson landed a job as a clerk for the D.C. Federal Appeals Court, where he worked for future Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 1985, he joined Ginsburg’s husband Marty at his “renown” law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, where, according to Grayson, “I learned the smallest details of the law that applies to government contracting.” Over the next several years, Alan Grayson applied himself almost exclusively to representing military contractors, which he once referred to as “the most heavily regulated business in existence anywhere in the world.” Speaking of those days for a 2007 Vanity Fair Article, Grayson recalled, “There was a tremendous bureaucracy that existed to make sure that contractors stuck to the rules, and also to punish those who did not stick to the rules very severely.”
In 1990 he took a temporary leave from suing on behalf of government contractors and launched a telecommunications/Internet company on the second floor of a funeral home. Called “IDT,” Grayson served as its first president. The company grew to become a “$2 billion-a-year business on the Fortune 1000 . . . the world’s largest calling-card corporation.” In 1998, half of IDT was sold to AT&T for $1 billion. Grayson also became the third-largest shareholder in Kentucky Fried Chicken in Indonesia. Speaking of his wealth – estimated at anywhere between $30.9 and $78 million in 2008 – Grayson says with a shrug, “I made all of this money in my spare time. I don’t quite know how it happens. I’m like Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rain Man.’”
While practicing law in Washington and living in Virginia, Alan Grayson met Philippine native Lolita Botado. They married in April 1990, and eventually headed south and moved into a “palm-fringed mansion” in Orlando, Florida. Grayson says they moved south “partly because the climate alleviates his chronic asthma, and partly because they wanted their five children – Skye, Star, Stage and the twins, Storm and Stone – to have access to the area’s many theme parks.” All five Grayson children attend Hebrew school at Chabad. As Grayson notes, “We belong to a local synagogue and observe all the Jewish holidays.” Interestingly, the first words on the biography page of Alan’s Congressional website come from the Torah: “Justice, justice, ye shall seek.” (Deut. 16:20), followed by the comment, “There is right and there is wrong.”
Once in Orlando, Alan Grayson started his own law firm – “Grayson & Kubli” – where for the next 16 years he would specialize in cases involving what he termed “. . .colossal frauds against American taxpayers by private contractors operating in Iraq. In other words, Grayson went from defending military contractors against the Department of Defense, to suing many of these same contractors on the behalf of his clients – mostly former employees of these firms – under terms of the “False Claims Act.” (Note: The False Claims Act – 31 U.S.C. § 3729-3733 – often called the “Lincoln Law,” is a statute which permits people who are not affiliated with the government to file actions against federal contractors claiming fraud against the government. Congress passed the “False Claims Act” in March 1863. It permitted a reward to be offered in what is called the qui tam provision, which permits “citizens to sue on behalf of the government and be paid a percentage of the recovery. Qui tam is short for the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, which means, “He who brings a case on behalf of our lord the King, as well as for himself.”)
Grayson estimates that the dozens of qui tam cases he has filed against contractors in Iraq over the years – the lion’s share against Halliburton and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, now known as “KBR” – have cost him upwards of $10 million out of his own pocket. Grayson told a reporter, “When all is said and done on these cases I will have lost a substantial amount of money. I'm O.K. with that. Some things you do because they're really worthwhile and important . . . . In my mind, one of the basic reasons, maybe even the basic reason, why the war has gone badly is war profiteering. You could say that the only people who have benefited from the invasion of Iraq are al-Qaeda, Iran, and Halliburton.” In one of his first victories, Grayson won a $10 million claim against defense contractor Custer Battles which was found to have “supplied the military with trucks that didn’t work properly.”
By 2007, Alan Grayson had made enough of a name for himself that Vanity Fair sent writer David Rose to Orlando to do an in depth article. Rose’s piece, “The People vs. the Profiteers,” begins with a description of Grayson: “On first meeting him, one might not suspect Alan Grayson of being a crusader against government-contractor fraud. Six feet four in his socks, he likes to dress flamboyantly, on the theory that items such as pink cowboy boots help retain a jury's attention.” Rose quickly dismisses whatever visual quirkiness may surround Grayson, noting that due to the very serious nature of what he does, “He can be forgiven a bit of frivolity.”
In 2006, Alan Grayson decided at almost the last moment to run for Congress. He entered the Democratic primary in Florida’s 8th Congressional District, and came within 2,000 votes of defeating Charlie Stuart, “a marketing consultant from a politically experienced Orlando family.” Stuart wound up losing 54%-46% to three-term incumbent Ric Keller, a staunch Republican conservative best known for the so-called “Cheeseburger Bill.” (Officially “The American Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act,” this measure sought to protect prioducers and retailers of foods – such as McDonalds – from an increasing number of suits and class actions on the part of obese consumers. The bill passed the House, but was never taken up by the Senate.)
Upon his election in 2000, Keller pledged to serve only four terms. However, two weeks after defeating Stuart in 2006, he said he had made a mistake. “As a rookie candidate I underestimated the value of experience and seniority.” He then announced his plan to seek a fifth term in 2008, but not spend “my entire career in Congress.” This angered both Democrats and Republicans, and convinced Alan Grayson that he should run again.
In 2008, Grayson, who would eventually pour nearly $3 million of his own money into his campaign, overwhelmed Charlie Stuart in the Democratic primary, defeating him 48%-28%. For his part, Keller had an extremely tough primary battle against Orlando attorney and radio talk show host Todd Long, who repeatedly scored Keller for his broken term limits pledge. For his part, Keller sent out a direct-mail piece slamming Long for “a past drunk-driving arrest and a recent incident of public intoxication.” Despite being outspending his opponent by a better than three-to-one margin, Keller’s margin of victory ominously slim for an incumbent: 53%-47%.
In the general election, Keller attempted to paint Grayson as an “ultra liberal,” of “advocating cutting off funds to troops in Iraq,” and of being “allied with the Code Pink anti-war protest group.” For his part Grayson – who would Keller $3.21 million to $1.77 million – accused his Republican opponent of “being the deciding ‘no’ vote on a bill that would have supplied returning war veterans with replacement limbs.” Grayson was greatly helped by a “surge in Democratic registration” and by the general popularity of presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 8th district. Obama wound up defeating John McCain 52%-47% in the 8th – which has a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+2; Grayson defeated Keller by nearly the same margin, 52%-48%.
Grayson, who entered the House as the 6th richest member of that body, was given seats on Financial Services and Science & Technology. Along with Texas Representative Ron Paul – who calls his young colleague “very energetic and very bright” – Grayson rallied bipartisan support for a bill that would authorize “regular audits of the Federal Reserve.” Grayson continues to attack “contractor profiteering,” moving to cut off federal funds to all “government contractors who file fraudulent forms.” Grayson was one of the few Democrats – and the only member of the Florida congressional delegation – to vote against further funding for the war in Iraq. When Grayson held up his vote for a global-warming bill until he was promised “a $50 million hurricane research center,” for Orlando, more than one commentator noted that it was “a brazen move for any lawmaker, let alone a rookie.”
Many pundits are predicting that Alan Grayson – the man who used to drive around Orlando in a Cadillac with a bumper sticker proclaiming “Bush Lied, People Died!” will only be a one-term member of Congress. They believe Grayson is far too liberal for the Orlando-area district and note that before his defeat of Ric Keller, conservative Republicans had held the seat for the past quarter-century. But even with that “#1 Republican target in 2010” label, Grayson is undaunted. He has access to an almost unlimited campaign war chest – he does have hundreds of thousands of friends in cyberspace plus his own resources – and feels that he is motivated by that which is both right and just.
“I don’t need the job for income or satisfaction,” Grayson told a reporter shortly after the speech that took him from anonymity to notoriety. “The truth is, it's really a hardship. I took an enormous pay cut to take the job. Every week, I leave five young children and my wife to come up here. I don't owe anything to anyone here. I don't owe anything to lobbyists. I don't owe anything to leadership. The only thing I owe to anybody is the well-being of 800,000 people who depend on me.”
When asked what his motivation is, he unhesitatingly quotes the verse from Deuteronomy . . . and begins to weep.
©2010 Kurt F. Stone
He is definitely the man!
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Posted by: coach bags | November 08, 2010 at 01:39 AM
Vito was a strong socialist, maybe communist that defended his East Harlem District minorities and perhaps worked in a less ostentatious manner. You seem to like Grayson, but maybe he needs to use a little more finesse in dealing with the public and press, if, as you imply he is so talented, and bent on defending his constituent's rights and upholding the constitution. He may wind up getting thrown under the congressional wheels of a bus, this time and his talent, like so many others is not fully utilized.. Thanks for the info on his high school, as I went there also, and didn't know he was bringing up his children religiously.
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