President Obama urged members of congress, governors, and some of his cabinet members to conduct town hall meetings during the summer of 2009 in an effort to grow populist support for his health care agenda. The town hall format, permitting citizens to ask questions directly to the speakers, ostensibly exemplifies participatory democracy. But this summer, dialogue erupted into disaster when anti-fascist protesters raised the roof of convention centers and meeting halls nationwide in what amounted to a fatal blow to the president’s plan.
In the midst of the town hall blitz, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) laughed to a reporter that the health-care reform bill pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it. “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference (Gabriel and Magleby).
At the Arlen Specter/Kathleen Sebelius town hall, the crowd exploded at Sebelius’s dismissive and shifty response to one man’s question: “When congressmen scoff at the notion of reading legislation because they are not competent to understand it, how can we be confident those congressmen are competent to reengineer the entire health care system.” Sebelius: “I am not a member of congress, have never been. That’s just a fact…” Specter: “My practice, when ya have a bill, and we have a lot of them, over a thousand pages, is to take my staff, and we divide up the bill, we have to make judgments very fast.” At this notion, the crowd roared, demanding to know “Why!? WHY!?” (Sebelius, Specter).
The town hall in Tampa Florida was swamped with over 1,500 attendees, most of whom were against the president’s proposed reform. When the undersized room at the County Children’s Board building became overfill...