He famously warned Republicans “want you to die quickly.” Now Alan Grayson is leaving Congress. And he isn’t going quietly. By Lloyd Grove
Two blue plastic dumpsters, filling up with trash, ornament the reception area of Alan Grayson’s Capitol Hill office. His seven-member Washington staff has been told that their cramped warren on the sixth floor of the Longworth House Office Building must be vacated by the end of the month. Ditto the 10 staffers who toil back home.
“I have nothing to complain about,” Grayson told me cheerfully. He’s a whip-smart Harvard-trained lawyer who made millions in contract litigation and the telecommunications business, and gained rapid fame and countless cable-television bookings for his combative partisanship and razor tongue. “Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly," he memorably summarized the Republican health-care plan.
This freshman Democratic congressman got to serve only a single term before the voters of Florida’s 8th District, a historically Republican-voting enclave that includes Disney World, decided they’d had enough. He lost to GOP candidate Daniel Webster by 19 points in one of the nastier races of the 2010 midterm election, in which Grayson ran a harsh television commercial likening his opponent to a member of the Taliban.
There was also the personal toll. While he was raising hell in Washington, his wife and kids stayed back home in Orlando. “In my case, it’s a really difficult job,” Grayson said. “I’m the only member of Congress with five children in school,” he added, noting that their ages are 5 to 15. “It’s a struggle for us just to get everybody’s homework done.”
And yet the 52-year-old Grayson said he’s ready for more.
“It’s a great job. I’m glad I had it,” he told me just off the House floor as he cast some of his final votes as a sitting member of Congress. “Maybe one day I’ll have it again.”
Grayson said that while he fought the good fight—and even suggested a few weeks before the election that he was actually winning—victory was impossible. Not only for him but for more than 60 fellow House Democrats who were knocked out of their seats in a political tidal wave.
But they didn’t lose for the reasons advanced by the Beltway conventional wisdom—that the Dems were too ideologically liberal for the dyspeptically conservative mood of the country. Quite the contrary, in Grayson’s reading: They were not liberal enough. .
“It’s a great job. I’m glad I had it,” he told me just off the House floor as he cast some of his final votes as a sitting member of Congress. “Maybe one day I’ll have it again.”
“The Democrats didn’t vote,” said Grayson, who was the first Democrat elected from his district in 34 years. “We didn’t lose the independents. It’s simply that Democrats did not show up at the polls and Republicans did.”
Why was that?
“I don’t think that mainstream Democrats, particularly the key constituencies of the party, believe that the leadership of the party did enough for them in the past two years,” Grayson told me. “The Employee Free Choice Act never came to a vote in the Senate. Labor unions felt that was unfair to them. The environmentalists were annoyed with the president for proposing offshore drilling three weeks before the oil-spill disaster in the Gulf. The Latinos had been wanting to see a vote on the Dream Act [which allows illegal-immigrant high-school grads to obtain permanent residency under certain conditions] for two years and they haven’t gotten one yet. And people like me, who are antiwar, are not happy with the fact that we still have two wars after two years—that there are still 50,000 American troops in Iraq.”
What’s more, “We still have ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and the president appealed a court decision that would have required him to eliminate it, and got the court to stay it,” Grayson added. “So that certainly affected the gay vote…. So when you put it all together, key Democratic constituencies were enervated by the lack of progress on their particular issues.”
Given all the above, “There’s no way that I would have kept my seat if I had done anything differently,” Grayson argued. “It’s a classic no-win situation.... The people who caved in to the Republicans lost their seats anyway. That certainly wasn’t a route to safety this year.”
Grayson said he has no regrets about his bombastic ways.
“I don’t think I was severe. I told it like it is,” he said. As for his notorious “Die Quickly” speech on the House floor, “I was mocking the Republicans for not having a health-care plan. To this day, when you ask Republicans, What would you do to give health coverage to 40 million Americans who don’t have health-care coverage?, I never got a straight answer.”
He scoffed: “Does anybody seriously believe that tort reform is going to somehow magically give 40 millions Americans who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick the chance to see a doctor when they’re sick?”
A rhetorical question, no doubt.
In the meantime, Grayson is following Dylan Thomas’ advice by raging against the dying of the light. One way or another, he intends to have a voice in the nation’s political discourse.
“I seem to have lot of chances to do that already, even though the election is over,” he said. “I’ve been on national TV, I think, five or six times in the past two weeks.”
Maybe he’d be interested in a commentary gig on cable?
“As I understand it, we’re not even supposed to be talking to people about that until the job is over, which is January 2nd,” Grayson answered, like a man who has been considering the possibility. “I think that’s how the rules are written… They’ve already told us that there will be votes in December.”
Or maybe, like another notorious politician who served only two years in office, Grayson can star in his own reality show?
“Sure,” he agreed. “ Alan Grayson’s Florida!”
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.