Grayson on Gibbs: Playing the insider hand

Florida Democratic Representative Alan Grayson was on MSNBC recently discussing Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' now-famous rant against the Democratic base. Here Grayson calls for Gibbs to be fired, and gets press for his "Bozo the Spokesman" remark. But that's not why I'm presenting this video.

Watch Grayson carefully. He's asked point-blank to rat out members of the administration as complicit, and dodges each time, bringing it back to Gibbs and the Republicans. That's really important.

Watch first, then my take:



You and I are Dem outsiders; it's our job to kick unresponsive Dem butt, and frankly we've been doing that.

But if, as I've asserted elsewhere, our best hope is to take the Democratic party the way the pre-raptured and post-money freaks have taken the Republican party — then we will need insiders who won't dismantle the whole thing at once, but pick it apart thread by thread.

To put it bluntly, you can't kill the horse you hope to ride.

You have to tame it, via the efforts of people exactly like Grayson. So far, at least, Grayson has not violated my sense of his integrity, so I trust his calculus. And he doesn't violate that sense here; what he does do is play his current hand carefully and well.

It's a fine line, I admit, but we need people who are walking it. And good on him for that. I'd like to vote for him for president some day, sooner rather than later.

Ratting out the unworthy, that's our job, and we're glad to do it. Being in position to replace them, that's the job of people like Alan Grayson, Howard Dean, and Elizabeth Warren.

GP

(Yes I know, net neutrality; let's see how that one plays out, vis-à-vis Grayson. A man can be wrong without being corrupted.)