Organizing to beat Republicans, one freshman at a time

By Richard K. Barry

One of my favourite political stories of the year thus far has been about the letter that House GOP freshmen sent to President Obama encouraging him to reject "playing politics with key issues facing the country." This was code language for asking that the President not draw attention to the fact that Paul Ryan's budget plan will destroy Medicare as we know it -- that he not "use it" against Republicans in a partisan way.

The fact is that House Republicans voted almost unanimously last month in favour of the Ryan budget that would reform entitlement programs, including creating a voucher program for Medicare recipients to buy private insurance. As we know, all hell broke loose from there. Public opinion polls are showing that most Americans are not impressed with this approach to the point that Democrats may steal a special election in New York's 26th Congressional District at the end of the month, an otherwise strong Republican seat, mostly on the strength of voter concerns about this proposed 'restructuring' of Medicare.

In other words, House GOP freshmen, many of whom owe their seats to wild misrepresentations of Obama's own health care plan, are begging the president not to make partisan hay out of the precise and undisputed meaning of this unpopular Republican plan.

Are they out of their fucking minds?

I must say that I was pleased to see that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been targeting Republican members of Congress, who are back in their home districts this week, on this very point.

According to The New York Times, the Committee:

has 20 Republican-held Congressional districts in its sights this week, hitting voters with automated phone calls denouncing the House Republican plan to revamp the nation's Medicare program and arming those who want with signs to protest at town hall meetings across the country. 

A web site sponsored by the campaign committee lists town hall meetings scheduled to be held by Republicans, mostly freshman, during the week. The group encourages voters to show up -- as many did during the Easter recess -- to protest or ask pointed questions of the members about their plan for Medicare, which would convert the program into one that subsidizes future retirees in private insurance plans.

This is in fact my favourite kind of politics -- organizing people to show up and ask questions of the other side in a good-faith exercise intended to elicit only the truth. If forcing new Republican members of Congress to speak the truth to their own constituents on their plans for Medicare reform is what this new class thinks of as "playing politics," I am at a loss for words.

Good on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. More of this please.

(By the way, the picture above is of newly-elected Republican Representative Nan Hayworth from NY-19, the district where I was born and raised. Democrat John Hall lost the seat to Hayworth in November. I'd like to get it back.)

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

MPR: Bachmann's town hall meeting will be held on August 27, but it won't necessarily be what you'd call a "town hall meeting"

Here is the headline that MPR ran:

Minn. delegation's town hall meeting schedule
by Madeleine Baran, Minnesota Public Radio
August 14, 2009

But here is what MPR says Bachmann has actually announced:

6th District: U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R, will hold a forum on health care on Thurs. Aug. 27. Her office said it will release the time and location next week.

Pay very, very careful attention to the wording there. In a story announcing town hall meetings (and lack of same) by MN congressmen, this story does *not* announce a Bachmann town hall meeting--it announces a Bachmann "forum."

Regular readers who've been waiting for Bachmann to hold a town hall meeting know the difference between a Bachmann "town hall meeting" (practically extinct) and a Bachmann "forum." Question for MPR: will she be taking live questions from unscreened constituents? She didn't at the "forum" she held on global warming and climate change. But MPR billed *that* as "a town hall meeting." It's not if she doesn't open up the floor to questions from constituents.

How long can she get away with passing off one-way speeches and presentations as "town hall meetings?" As long as MPR lets her, I guess.

Look-- here in Michele Bachmann land, we can't escape this "town hall thuggery" thing.

I want to escape it--but I can't. Bachmann has announced that she is going to hold something like a live town hall meeting, for the first time in years. And the announcement comes at a time when conservative jackasses are hi-jacking town meetings, all around the country.

And that "goon squads disrupting live town halls thing" is not Bill's panicky imagination, it's a real national phenomenon that is being reported all over the country. Here are three links to articles that I collected since I posted a headline on this "town hall thuggery report," yesterday. All the links below are to respected local and national political observers, except for the last link to the guy on the Kos. (He's some just some guy on the Kos, but he links to other stuff about punks organizing to disrupt live town hall meetings.):



Religious right watch: Health care reform is against God’s design
Conservative Christian leaders urge flock to swarm town hall meetings and 'read them the riot act'
By Andy Birkey 8/7/09 9:36 AM

(Radio personality Jan Markell, Bachmann fan and "it's the end of the world as predicted in the Bible" expert is referenced.)

The Town Hall Mob

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 6, 2009
( EXCERPT... (A Norman Rockwell painting...)That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform...)


All Heckfire Breaks Out at Republican Town Hall Meeting
by Muskegon Critic
Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 10:12:27 AM PDT

(This one indicates that people are trying to organize Democrats and progressives around the country to "deal with" the Republican "we'll shout the liberals down at town hall meetings(and hopefully trigger a few fights and police incidents!" strategy.

The author also links to some stuff about how some Republican politicians won't *hold* town hall meetings! (Ring a bell? Michele was on the cutting edge of that.) And about how GOP town halls get poisoned with pre-screened questioned designed to make the GOP politician look good. (Again: ring a bell? This stuff rings more bells than Quasimodo.)

A commenter whom I respect wrote in to say that the best response to Bachmann nonsense at some future town hall is "laughter." I respectfully disagree. We've always responded to her wacko pronouncements with "laughter," and will continue to do so--but the news reports indicate that that may not be the highest and most useful response to the kind of town meeting response that conservatives are now organizing.

I'm posting all this stuff about organized disruption of town hall meeting by conservatives--so that people wishing to attend can come up with a better strategy in response than just trying to "laugh at" the antics of Bachmann and her supporters on the extreme right.

People are going to bring video cameras to the alleged Bachmann town hall meeting. That's a good thing. What will they record? I don't expect any disruptions to start from Bachmann's liberal constituents. But we know that conservative lobbies opposed to health care reform are organizing these goon squads to drown out opposition views at town halls. We also know that this is something Bachmann wants to do--stop health care reform, and suppress opposition views.

At Last! Michele Bachmann to Hold an In Person Town Meeting

Did Michael Brodkorb shame her into it?

MN Progressive Project:

Breaking News: Bachmann Town Hall Scheduled for August 27th!
by: TwoPuttTommy
Thu Aug 06, 2009 at 12:29:32 PM CDT

Breaking news! I just got off the phone with Rep. Michele Bachmann's Woodbury office; the Town Hall is scheduled for August 27th!

I was told while the location and place were not confirmed, the date is, and to keep checking Bachmann's website for details, or call the office - which is 651-731-5400.

Hat-tip to both Mark Brunswick at the Strib and Dusty Trice.

Stay tuned!

From the Strib:

While Ellison and McCollum have already held health care town meetings, each member of the Minnesota delegation plans to make health care a topic of discussion over the recess. But only one member, Sixth District Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has committed to holding a traditional town hall meeting. McCollum said she expects to have more later this month.

Dusty Trice reports on Bachmann's offices giving conflicting information:

People are getting conflicting information from Congresswoman Bachmann’s office. Some have been told to call the DC office, some are being told that they aren’t aware of any upcoming town hall forums and some are being told that there is a forum tentatively set for August 27th? Keep calling 202-225-2331 or 651-731-5400 or 320-253-5931 until you get a solid answer.

I happen to disagree with Bill Prendergast's proposal for an online town meeting. Nothing replaces the face to face interaction - and online meetings can be manipulated in the same way that teletown halls can. Since Michele Bachmann is evidently planning on a town meeting on August 27, I encourage readers to put this on your calendar, and go - even if you have to take time off work in order to do so.

The town hall meetings thing

Michele says that she's going to hold a town hall meeting, some day.

I mean, you know, she's hinting that she's going to hold a *real* town hall meeting, where she shows up live and takes unscreened questions from unscreened consitutents.

That's news (if it's true; you never know with Michele.) It's news because she hasn't done anything like a real town hall meeting in years. Her most famous live town hall meeting in her district (nicknamed "Bathroomgate") was a public relations disaster for Michele. She ended it early when she started to get critical questions from constituents and called the police in to investigate participants.

And ever since then, she's been extremely reluctant to appear before any constituents who might have questions about her judgment, priorities, and performance for her district since taking office. Sure, Minnesota has reported some Bachmann events as "town hall meetings"--but they weren't. (No live answers to live questions to Bachmann, at those events. Plenty of events where Bachmann says she will not be taking any questions. Instead of questions and answers for Bachmann, we get Bachmann or her guests "spouting and speech making"--a one way, non-dialogue between the representative and her constituents.)

And Bachmann promotes her pre-screened question telephone sessions as town hall meetings--but they aren't. Bachmann staffers screen the incoming calls so they can decide which questions can be asked.

Here's a possible solution: conduct the "town hall meetings" via the internet, with *all* questions (and comments) to the politician involved appearing on the screen--as they are asked, in real time.

Yes, even the comments of people who want to heckle the politician should be posted. The people who would read the session--like most of the people who attend live town hall sessions--will be able to distinguish serious questions from heckling designed to disrupt the session.

That's very important, that last part. A small group of hecklers can stop a live town hall cold--and it turns out that political players on the right are actually trying to do exactly that, all over the country--organizing small mobs of hecklers to go into town hall meetings and stop them via disruption. (The Nazis used to do the same thing to electoral opponents, in the days before the Reich. The point is to stop the discussion, drown out the opposition so they won't be heard, and discourage citizens from coming to future political events. That's one method to use, if your dream is to end democracy.)

You think I'm kidding about the "sponsored heckling mob" stuff? Here's an excerpt from an article by New York Daily News columnist Errol Lewis:

Political thuggery is always sickening. What makes the current round especially abhorrent is the fact that some of the mob behavior appears to be the work of corporate lobbying groups that are spending an estimated $1.4 million a day to block (health care) reform.

One such group, FreedomWorks, is chaired by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey and has a corporate board that includes billionaire Steve Forbes, who was a GOP candidate for President.

Bob MacGuffie, a Connecticut-based activist with FreedomWorks, wrote a memo detailing the best ways to disrupt health care town hall meetings.

"Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half," the memo reads. Other pointers include: "Be Disruptive Early And Often." "Try To Rattle Him, Not Have An Intelligent Debate . . . stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions."

Tactics like that also work to stop *the people in the audience* from asking questions and getting answers. So it is easy to predict a similar "astroturf mob" showing up at some future live question and answer session by Bachmann--"supporting her" by drowning out other citizens and heckling other citizens who want to ask questions. If that's captured live on camera for YouTube--these hecklers and their sponsors feel no shame, that's a record of their success in stopping the political dialogue and turning it into a shouting match. And if the police are called in when a confrontation between citizens and hecklers "gets out of hand"--that's an excuse for Bachmann not to hold any more live town hall meetings, and that's her ideal as an unaccountable elected official.

The "live on-line town hall" format is a possible solution. It would enable all constituents to be heard because there could be no "shouting down or drowning out." The politicians could answer the questions they want to answer, and simply ignore those they don't want to answer. (That last part will appeal to Bachmann.) A session would be limited to a pre-announced time period: the politician would agree to answer live on line for say, two hours. The politician signs his or her name to every answer they give, so that it becomes their answer of record.

One question or comment allowed per participant, per session. The length of a question limited to say--two hundred words, enough to raise an issue or news development and attach a question at the end.

All questions and comments to be directed to the politician. No answers or responses are required to heckling--but keep the heckling up as part of the record of the session. People need to see what elected officials have to deal with, these days.

All people wishing to ask questions or make comments have to sign in and supply their verifiable name and address, so that constituents get first priority with their elected official. One question per constiuent, per session. All questions submitted during the two hour time period, whether answered or unanswered, appear in the record of the thread. Keep the record of the session up on line (the questions asked and answered and ignored-and the politician's answers) up on line, so constituents and other interested parties can review the answers and non-answers.

I know that there are problems with this format, too. For example, Bachmann supporters could write friendly "astroturf" questions in advance of the on line session and wall paper the session with them. But at least then we'd have tangible and permanent evidence that *that* is how Bachmann conducts "a town hall meeting."

And--astroturf or not--all questions would appear, even if Bachmann wouldn't answer them. Deleting unfriendly questions from an on-line live town hall would raise serious freedom of speech concerns and perhaps appropriate legal action directed at politicians and staff members who delete constituent questions. Participants would know if their submitted questions were being deleted (not just ignored.)

An American politician's policy of avoiding or suppressing tough questions is disgraceful and yes: un-American. Politicians and citizens are not supposed to simply sit and there and take this. If cranks and big money interests organize like stormtroopers or KKK members--to stop the long and honorable tradition of live questions and answers at town hall meetings--the rest of us aren't supposed to cave in to that. Abandoning the hundreds-of-years-old democratic tradition of town hall meetings to political thuggery, is not an option.