Fun at the Town Hall Meeting

I think that if you are looking for drama, suspense and maybe even a little action, you can’t go wrong by heading to your local town hall meeting where a congressman or senator will be discussing the virtues and or evils, depending on your political persuasion, of health care reform this summer.


Now I’m not talking about the type of telephone town hall meeting that Bob Andrews, congressman for the district I live in is having where everyone is picked in advance and the questions are screened and the answers are formulated well in advance of the entire thing. I'm talking about the kind of town meeting that Arlen Specter, senior senator for PA does. The ones where old white people come orchestrated with their white paper in hand and their carefully scripted questions ready to shout and scream that there will be a special place in Hell for the President and all the socialist, elite, Kenyan lackeys that follow him.

Of course Sen. Specter’s meetings might not be a good example since I think he may be experiencing a backlash for changing his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and, in the eyes of some, may be seen as a traitor to their cause. But there are other politicians that have experienced that same kind of virulent outburst that will bring a member of the House almost to tears as they try to explain that the government has no intention of creating a single payer health care system. They will shake at the knees and look peevishly at security as they tell their constituents that the government will not create death panels in order to kill off old people and save money. Naturally this kind of town hall meeting doesn’t happen when the President is having one himself. I would think that the secret service would put an end to that kind of behavior even before they took the offenders outside and beat them to a pulp.

However, I’m starting to wonder if these protest meetings are really about stopping health care reform or more about having President Obama, as that one congressman said, face his Waterloo. When people are showing up at meetings with posters ridiculing a man who has been in office less than a year and comparing him to Hitler or the Joker, I have to wonder if the disruptions are really about saving the welfare of the nation and its citizens, or about correcting a perceived mistake that was done at the last election? Is this the meaning of what being post-racial is all about?

Regardless, last year I thought that it was the most thrilling political year that I had ever experienced. This year, tops last year in spades and it’s just August. I wonder what will happen next year. Will the revolution be televised this time?

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