Elizabeth Warren, Alan Grayson-- Fierce Advocates For Ordinary Working Families

This morning when I woke up the top story on Salon was Digby's Put Alan Grayson On Benghazi Panel! Why He's Dems' Best Option To Expose This Clown Show. "With the latest Benghazi! ™ extravaganza about to begin," she wrote, "the Democrats are faced with a dilemma. Should they boycott the silly hearings, thus leaving the Republicans to put on their pageant unimpeded, or should they join in with a full panel and add legitimacy to the process? The problem seems to be that whether they like it or not, these hearings are going to be covered. And if the press reaction so far tells us anything, they are looking for a show." For more and more serious people on the left, the solution is to just appoint one member-- Alan Grayson. Trusted Pelosi mouthpiece Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) brought it up at a caucus meeting last week. I can imagine Steny Hoyer must have come close to a coronary.

But, as Digby wrote, "people don’t realize that Alan Grayson isn’t just another lawyer/congressman. He’s an experienced litigator who fought whistle-blower fraud cases aimed at military contractors. The Wall Street Journal characterized him in 2006 as “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” And he was very successful at it. As a politician Grayson is usually seen as a pugnacious fighter always at the ready with a pithy put-down on cable news shows. His floor speeches are often fiery indictments of his political opponents and the power elite."

But that’s not why the Democrats should tap him for the job. As notable as all those characteristics are, they are not where Grayson’s true talent lies. He is a master at the task of committee questioning. During his first term as a member of the Financial Services Committee he practically had bankers whimpering on the hot seat and he took on everyone from Ben Bernanke to Timothy Geithner, eliciting important information. Unlike the vaunted prosecutor the GOP has tapped to lead the inquiry, Trey Gowdy (who specializes in browbeating and histrionic questioning), Grayson is never rude and he isn’t dismissive or insulting. He is serious, composed and extremely well prepared. And when he has the floor he is completely in control.

And yes, choosing him would please the Democratic base and infuriate the Republicans. That should be a feature, not a bug. The Republicans want a show. Grayson will definitely give them one-- but it won’t be the kind of show they’re looking for. He’ll elicit the kinds of responses from the Democratic witnesses that are needed to make their case and he’ll skewer the conservative scandal-mongers with the facts.

As E.J. Dionne pointed out in yesterday's Washington Post there's another wildly popular Democrat-- popular, like Grayson, with real people, not necessarily with institutional special interests-- who has many of the same attributes Digby assigned to Grayson: former Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren. And both are under pressure from the progressive base to not allow corporatist Establishment Democrat, Hillary Clinton (surrounded by the very worst the Democratic Party has to offer), skip into the presidential nomination without an intense intellectual battle of ideas. Grayson very well may run if Warren holds fast to her decision not to. Like Grayson, Warren is a successful attorney with a mind like a steel trap. And like him. she stands up to the status quo that conservatives on both sides of the aisle live by.

photo: Tim Pierce

From the time she first came to public attention, Warren has been challenging conservative presumptions embedded so deeply in our discourse that we barely notice them. Where others equivocate, she fights back with common sense.

Since the Reagan era, Democrats have been so determined to show how pro-market and pro-business they are that they’ve shied away from pointing out that markets could not exist without government, that the well-off depend on the state to keep their wealth secure and that participants in the economy rely on government to keep the marketplace on the level and to temper the business cycle’s gyrations.

Warren doesn’t back away from any of these facts. In her new book, “A Fighting Chance,” she recalls the answer she gave to a voter during a living-room gathering in Andover, Mass., that quickly went viral. She was in the early days of her Senate campaign, in the fall of 2011, and had been asked about the deficit. Characteristically, she pushed the boundaries beyond a narrow fiscal discussion to explain how government helped create wealth.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” she said. “Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” It was all part of “the underlying social contract,” she said, a phrase politicians don’t typically use.

And like Warren, a short speech of Grayson's captured the imaginations of millions of progressives across the country. His was on the floor of the House: "The Republicans’ health care plan for America: 'Don’t get sick.' That’s right-- 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! That’s what the Republicans have in mind for you, America. That’s the Republicans’ health care plan. But I think that the Republicans understand that that plan isn’t always going to work-- it’s not a foolproof plan. So the Republicans have a backup plan, in case you do get sick. If you get sick in America, this is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: 'Die quickly.' That’s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick."

Blue America has a pretty new, pretty special page dedicated to not settling for the lesser of two evils. It's called Why Settle? and its dedicated to finding a great president, not one that's better than Chris Christie, Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz. I think you know who you'll find on it. Want to help?