Pajamas Government

The congressman is nearly in tears--his face crumpled and voice cracking. This was hardly the response that I anticipated when I asked freshman Democrat Alan Grayson a banal question about adjusting to life in his new job. "Personally, it's extremely difficult for me to be away from my family," he started. That's when he started to swell. As he came unglued, I cast a nervous glance at his aide. The least she could do was hustle him from this awkwardness. But she just fidgeted with her PDA, as if this wasn't his first outpouring.

For the record, this was the first of five times that he would choke up during our 70-minute interview.

The congressman from Disney World is something of a cult hero--a darling of the liberal blogosphere. A few years back, he was known for cruising around his Orlando district in a Cadillac with a bumper sticker that blared, "Bush Lied, People Died." And, as a member of Congress, he has taken a series of strong positions that have made him a tribune of The Huffington Post set and a YouTube sensation. He has voted against supplemental funds for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars--and hurled invectives at Ben Bernanke, when the Fed chair testified on the Hill. "Is it safe to say that nobody in 1913 contemplated that your small little group of people would decide to hand out half a trillion dollars to foreigners?" Grayson snarked to the central banker.

His brief tenure in Congress is a novel experiment. Other members of Congress have shared the liberal blogosphere's ideological predispositions. But Grayson is the first member to bring the blogosphere's in-your-face style to Capitol Hill. It has made for one of the more, well, interesting clashes of cultures in recent congressional history. 

The blogosphere is the medium of the outsider--the self-consciously rambunctious truth-teller holding the dissembling establishment to account. That's the very essence of Alan Grayson, the way he tells it. A kid from the Bronx, he raced through Harvard in three years, paying his way by literally cleaning toilets. Running a calling-card company and making a wise investment in the Indonesian franchise of KFC helped make him independently wealthy.

Yet he felt the pull of politics. And, with his Harvard law degree, he became a specialist in using the False Claims Act to represent whistleblowers suing companies suspected of defrauding the government. More than that, he became a specialist in suing contractors deployed in Iraq. He won a ruling against the security firm Custer Battles, which had overcharged the government, for a $10 million triumph (though squabbling over that number has continued in the courts). Vanity Fair profiled his efforts to redress what he then called "the crime of the century," and The Wall Street Journal described him as "waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq." (Another of his clients sued her employer, a defense contractor, that she alleged had failed to provide protection against bird poop in Iraq. "It was like snow. You could shovel it," the plaintiff told the St. Petersburg Times.)

His Iraq work, however, provided Grayson with ample leitmotifs for his 2008 run for Congress--his second try. His ads in some ways resembled a rap video: pulsing music, flashy editing, with Grayson standing next to a briefcase full of cash in an empty airplane hangar. Only Grayson wasn't bragging about all of his gouda--he was promising to jail the greedy war profiteers who stole it from the government. Blogger Howie Klein began posting the ad on his blog Down With Tyranny, as well as on Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. The video went viral. "Hell yeah, that's the kind of ad all Democrats should be running," one commenter posted to the YouTube thread. "Grayson freakin ROCKS!" said another.