I Warned You About Grayson

I warned you about Alan Grayson way back in November 2009. Admittedly, I had the distinct advantage of meeting the man and conversing with him, which is how I could tell he wasn’t someone to trust with any kind of progressive banner. But, the point is that I warned you about likely serious and debilitating character defects. It was only a matter of time before these defects either came to light or manifested themselves in some way.

I will reiterate this warning again today. You may vastly prefer Grayson’s politics and style to some of his likely opponents. I could have said the same thing about Anthony Weiner, John Edwards, and Eliot Spitzer. It’s important to have progressive champions who are willing to fight.

However, what you want is a real champion who has the personal integrity to keep the focus on the issues you care about and not hand the gun you get shot with to your enemies.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

26 thoughts on “I Warned You About Grayson”

  1. There was a time when it wasn’t clear whether the Democratic ticket in 2012 should be Weiner/Grayson, or Grayson/Weiner.

    Good times, good times.

  4. I’ll admit to having been blind about Grayson and Edwards. Crooks, hypocrites and liars do more to undermine the cause than moderates or even triangulators. I’m convinced that the Democrats lost the House in the early “90s because there were so many sleazebag good old boys in power at the time.

  5. I have contributed campaign money to Grayson, and whenever you brought him up in the past I defended him. But recently he chose to ally himself with AIPAC instead of Obama on the Iran nuclear issue, and that really pissed me off, and I wrote and told him so.

    That was a political calculation I couldn’t stomach, but it wasn’t crazy. I did lose respect for him, though.

    With this latest thing, I begin to suspect he’s really got a screw loose.

    1. But recently he chose to ally himself with AIPAC instead of Obama on the Iran nuclear issue, and that really pissed me off, and I wrote and told him so.

      Pretty much every Democrat does this.  There are very few exceptions.  Even the best ones, like Warren and Sanders, don’t buck the AIPAC line.

      1. I was referring specifically to the Iran nuclear negotiations, which are strongly opposed by Netanyahu, AIPAC, etc.

        Warren and Sanders certainly do support these talks. In the House, as the Washington Post announced on May 7, 2015, 150 Democrats signed onto a letter to President Obama spearheaded by Dem Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Lloyd Doggett, and David Price supporting the Iran talks. In other words, of 207 House Democrats, 150 are bucking AIPAC and supporting the president. Grayson is not among them.
        http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/07/the-odds-of-an-iran-nuclear-deal-just-go
        t-higher/

        Note, “Seven of the 18 Jewish Democrats in the House signed the letter: Schakowsky, David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Susan Davis of California, Stephen Cohen of Tennessee, Alan Lowenthal of Californian, Jared Polis of Colorado and John Yarmuth of Kentucky.”
        http://www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/political-insider/obama-gets-backing-iran-talks

  6. The progressive home team needs to do a more thorough job of vetting candidates they support.  That means they need to not pick up candidates in desperation at the last minute.  Where do you find a red-meat rhetorician without the baggage?  There needs to be someone with a little fire among all the policy wonks.

    The personal issue here is symptomatic of a more systemic party issue relating to ideology, vetting, and opposition research.

    1. Alternatively, it might just be a side-effect of the demand for purity. Finding an honest (well, scandal-free) politician is rare enough in itself. Finding an honest politician that also pegs all of the important progressive viewpoints.

      I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that the left is placing their hopes on complete no-hopers like Sanders. He’s pure and has no visible skeletons in his closet, so he’s supposed to be the Great Liberal Hope despite his alarming age and lack of non-Vermont  experience or electoral accountability.

      2. He’s pure and has no visible skeletons in his closet, so he’s supposed to be the Great Liberal Hope despite his alarming age and lack of non-Vermont  experience or electoral accountability.

        Why is he a no-hope candidate?  What non-Illinois experience did Obama have before becoming President?  Electoral Accountability?  What is that supposed to mean?

        1. He’s a 75-year old self-described socialist from a small state who has until recently never been on the national stage in any significant way nor has had to prove himself in a trying election.

          None of those by themselves sink his candidacy but all of those at the same time doom him from the very start.

        2. also, he’s bringing all the progressive issues to the forefront of discussion – and he articulates them forcefully and succinctly – something Grayson would not since Grayson is all about Grayson not about the issues. the cynics on this thread miss the fact that not all politicians are all about me me me, some are concerned about their constituents and the country; to govern one must make compromises, but that’s not the same as me me me

  7. So you want DINO Patrick Murphy in the Senate?  The guy represents a swing district now and can hardly be bothered to vote with the Democrats.  Also, Sunshine State News isn’t an unbiased source.  They whine because Grayson accurately called Webster “Taliban Dan”?  And that district wasn’t a swing district in mid-terms.  As someone else said, there are no angels in politics.  You need a bomb thrower or two on your side.  Hell, 3/4 of the GOP in both the House and Senate are bomb throwers.  It doesn’t hurt them at all.

    1. Several (but not all) of these stories go back to Politico as the original source.  I wouldn’t take Politico’s spin on anything at face value, myself.

      I don’t like Grayson much myself.  Even when he’s on the right side of an issue, he can be extremely obnoxious about it.  We’re not electing kings and presidents to Congress – we’re electing people who need to find ways to work together to solve national problems.  Grayson doesn’t seem to have the temperament to do that – especially in the Senate.

      Yeah, bombthrowers can be good at times, in small doses.  Sometimes.

      Divorce is messy under the best of circumstances.  Those of us hundreds of miles away really have no idea what is going on.  BI’s take.

      Lots and lots of people would love to take Grayson down via whatever route possible.  I try to keep that in mind when interpreting stories about him.

      FWIW.

      Cheers,
      Scott.

      1. It’s clear the only way to solve national problems is to beat Republicans into the mud. Grayson is pretty handy for that.

    2. Quite the concern troll, wasn’t he?

      Sorry, I want political purity, not sexual.  Some of our best would have been major fails in that department.

      1. I miss Spitzer the most of the people on that list, because he really has a fine mind, but it’s a fact that the same sense of entitlement that ruled his sex life also made him unable to work with the state legislature (might be different now that he’s humbled). Weiner was never a real person of the left, and I doubt that Grayson was either; they just have a talent for snark that they applied that way. Like Jon Stewart but mean.

  9. He had his time and place during the Bush years, and I’ve always enjoyed his insults tovthe GOP, but his act has gotten stale and his personal life is a mess.

  10. I confess some guilty pleasure watching him insult the opposition, but fundamentally his game is resentment, just like the rabid right. That’s a game for them; the left isn’t motivated so much by fear and resentment, so it doesn’t help us to copy those tactics.

  11. Alan Grayson.

    Guilty until proven innocent.

    Nice.

    Mainstream media style, right here on Booman Trib.

    No surprise.

    Who’s your ideal candidate?

    Representative Gelding, I presume?

    Finally!!!

    An acceptable candidate for Maude Frickert!!!

    And another PermaGov Dino for Florida.

    Wonderful.

    AG

    P.S., The article that you link is AWFUL!!! Not a single attribution. Not a one except for a link to Politico, which at least had the courtesy to quote Grayson directly.

    “What’s the deal here? You publish whatever colorful lies people toss your way, for their own obvious political purposes?” Grayson asked via text message.

    He may as well have forwarded that text to Booman. If the target of this kind of empty foofaraw was a Booman-style neoliib, Booman would be all over it as rotten, partisan journalism.

    But NOOOooooo…

    Nice.

    Disgusting.

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