Alan Grayson Is That Much Of A Badass

Via the Rumpies, we learn that Florida Dem Alan Grayson is leading the primaries for the House district, as expected.  What's not expected:  he's leading the Republican primary.

The poll has Grayson leading the 13 Republicans -- among Republicans -- with 27.8 percent of the vote. The congressman who mocked the GOP health care plan by saying that it amounts to telling people not to get sick and if they do, to die quickly, received more support than all of the Republican candidates combined.

No GOP candidate scored above 3.7 percent; 57.7 percent said they were undecided. Grayson did particularly well with women, undercutting the notion that referring to a Washington lobbyist as a "K Street whore" would turn female voters away. (Grayson later apologized for the word choice.)

The poll was conducted on Feb. 26th. There were 324 respondents, all registered Republicans in Florida's eighth district. The poll was conducted by Middleton Market Research.

Naturally, the national GOP establishment dismissed the results -- "This is the most bogus thing I've ever seen in my life," said Andy Seré, Regional Press Secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Grayson told HuffPost that some of the support comes from Republicans who appreciate that he speaks his mind, while some is due to his far-superior name recognition. But the poll also found at least one area where Republican voters thought favorably of him.

In 2009, Grayson, who carries a copy of the Constitution with him, passed a resolution calling on schools to teach the document for one week in September each year.

Over half of the Republicans polled said that they were more likely to vote for Grayson because of the resolution. He has distributed tens of thousands of copies of the Constitution throughout the district, including one to each high school senior. This September, he said, he plans to go to high schools and teach the Constitution personally in the district. 

Well isn't that so very interesting.  The conventional Washington wisdom is that Grayson is a liberal nutjob who's going to be the first bounced out in the Republican takeover of the universe in November because he's too liberal and too crazy and blah blah bloogedy blah blah blah LIBERAL!

The reality is that people in both parties respect Grayson for speaking out and sticking to his principles, and those principles include knowing the Constitution and teaching others how important the document is.  Those principles also include a strongly populist progressive viewpoint.

Why more Dems won't follow Grayson's lead, I don't know.  Oh yes, they're too busy being owned by Washington lobbyists.