What happens when you mix "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" with "Lethal Weapon"? You get the story debuting on Capitol Hill featuring the unlikely breakout performance by Rep. Alan Grayson, a first-term Central Florida congressman who is surprising all observers (as well as many of his constituents) by dramatizing the Republican health-reform-strangling gambit that has hamstrung Congress for most of the summer and fall.
Rep. Grayson's first shot fired at Repugs on the House floor over a week ago was number one with a bullet: He pulls off his easel chart cover and asks what is the Republican health care plan? "No. 1: Don't get sick," the first chart says. And if you do get sick? Grayson dramatically flips over the next two pages, which say: "No. 2: If you do get sick... No.3: Die quickly." Rep. Grayson goes on, in a little more than two minutes, to contrast the key features of the Democratic health-care approach. It was a made-for-cable-TV power play that has had reverberations that have rippled, one may argue, further than anything President Obama has said publicly on the subject to date. Here's the video:
Since his appearance, Rep. Grayson has pulled in better than a quarter of a million dollars in campaign contributions, appeared on CNN's "Situation Room" and numerous other cable networks, and turned up both light and heat on the do-nothing Right. But maybe more than that, Rep. Grayson has been surprisingly effective of fighting anti-health-care distortions with a few inconvenient facts, and in doing so has shown his fainting-violet colleagues in the Democratic Party what it takes to fight the obstructionist Repugs for what is right.
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