The Second-strangestCampaign of the Season

And it’s taking place in Florida, of course.

- Jason Zengerle

Before i even got into the race, one of Murphy’s donors and I had lunch together and he told me, ‘If you run, they will destroy you.’ I asked, ‘Who’s they?’ And he said, ‘Harry Reid and the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee].’ They’re certainly doing their best.”

Alan Grayson, the Florida representative and liberal firebrand hoping to win Marco Rubio’s U.S. Senate seat, was attempting to explain the recent avalanche of explaining he’s had to do as he runs in the Democratic primary against his congressional colleague Patrick Murphy, the preferred candidate of the Democratic Establishment. About, for instance, the $16 million Cayman Islands hedge fund that he’s been operating as a sideline to his congressional duties (which Grayson insists is a “family investment partnership” registered in the offshore tax haven only because “the securities lawyers told us we had to do it that way”). Or about the 2015 annulment of his 25-year marriage to Lolita Grayson, the mother of his five children, who, it turned out, was not yet divorced from her first husband when she wed Grayson in 1990. (“I’ll sum it up for you,” Grayson told an Orlando television station in the midst of his nasty court battle with Lolita. “Gold diggers gotta dig.”)

Grayson, who is 58, is a large slab of a man with a giant head that wouldn’t look out of place on Easter Island and a mincing, splayfooted gait that resembles that of a penguin. Throw in his customary wardrobe of garish cowboy boots and novelty neckties that feature everything from Monopoly money to rainbow peace signs, and he doesn’t call to mind a congressman so much as the villain in a Batman movie. He’s the only member of Congress whose desk is decorated with a plaque that reads: i have flying monkeys and i’m not afraid to use them!