Obama's Health Care Town Hall Meetings of 2009

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 Ma

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