What’s it like to Attend a Town Hall Where The Majority Is Actually on Your Side?
The Scene:
Early Sunday morning, I pedaled down to beautiful Montara, California, the site of Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s Health Care Town Hall.
I was armed with a change of clothes, a bicycle pump, and – from Feinstein 1200 member “Ed” – an excellent question for Congresswoman Speier.
Ed’s question, which addressed how the lack of access to primary care has resulted in outrageously expensive emergency room care, managed to express many of the concerns I’d received from the Feinstein 1200 about the short-term thinking inherent in our current system.
The Town Hall was set up at the Farallone View Elementary School playground - a huge space. I’d arrived an hour before the town hall started, but the seats were already filling up with health care reform supporters wearing OFA stickers. It was a remarkable turnout estimated at 700 people, with quite a few “Feinstein 1200’ers” in the crowd.
The audience had the nervous high spirits reminiscent of high school basketball games. Police presence was kept at a minimum at the request of Speier’s office, which was both fiscally responsible (no overtime!), and appropriate, given the crowd.
The Ratios:
There have been some reports online that the audience for this Jackie Speier event was “95% pro-health care reform.” But SEIU organizer Doug Jones more realistically estimated it as 75%. Regardless of the specific percentage, the audience was overwhelmingly in support of health care reform. And that, as Jones remarked, provided excellent crowd control all by itself. (As well as the kind of media images we’ve been missing. Fortunately, C-SPAN was there.)
Our Question:
I caught D., one of the Feinstein 1200 who is part of the Silicon Valley Action Network, and ran Ed’s question by him. D. thought that Ed’s question might be misinterpreted or warped by HCR opponents, who have been quick to turn any discussion of emergency care into a trope about “illegal immigrants in the E.R.” Given that C-SPAN was there, D. helped me to build on the question, adding a point about the Congressional Budget Office’s failure to adequately assess the savings that would accrue from the public option, which neatly complemented Ed's point.
The Play-by-Play:
To begin the Town Hall, the local boy scouts led the Pledge of Allegiance, after which Speier’s office introduced a group of schoolchildren who grow organic vegetables. These adorable displays of wholesomeness set the tone. Who could assail Congresswoman Speier as some kind of “socialist” after this display of tow-headed children, American flag, and home-grown string beans?
And yet they tried. Health care reform opponents, while in the minority, were strategically spread throughout the seats, and not just in the back, as their signs would suggest.
And to be in the front, I learned, is to have your question addressed. Due to the canny placement of the opposition near the front, there was an over-representation of their questions. But Jackie Speier used this to her advantage, smartly dispelling some of the more ludicrous ideas. I did not hear any questions regarding “death panels” although others did, and there were some equally ironic concerns about “government meddling in Medicare.”
As Jackie Speier neatly pointed out to a constituent who requested the definition of single payer: “What is single payer? Single payer is Medicare.”
Paid Operatives?
I have previously disagreed with the contention that the tea party people are paid operatives, and have believed most of them to believe what they say, however misguided. But seeing actual scripts held by some of the opponents, and the rote huffiness with which their words were delivered, challenged my previous view.
Microphone Tricks:
It turns out not to be that easy to get called on during a town hall; I did a fair amount of jockeying to get to the microphone before the meeting ended. You should be able to see the question, and the rest of the Town Hall, on C-SPAN on Wednesday.
The question was received well, despite my ridiculous stammer, because it managed to tie together so many of your points into one statement.
(Per my not-ready-for-prime-time delivery, it may amuse you to turn the sound off and dub in Andy Kaufman's Latka Gravas from "Taxi", bearing in mind the fact that Kaufman's original act only got booked because the audience felt empathy for such a hapless performer.)
The gist of it was:
“We are concerned that the CBO (the Congressional Budget Office) has failed to consider the enormous savings that would accrue from the public option. These savings need to be considered. Please, when you return to Washington, please tell the CBO to look at the overall costs and savings associated with this.”
Then I got back to Ed’s point: The failure to provide basic primary care, I said, had resulted in enormous costs for the state through emergency care. And it was holding back our economic recovery in more than a few ways.
Bringing in another Feinstein 1200’er’s voice, I added: Small businesses, which are the real engine of the U.S. economy, are unable to innovate when they are stuck with the burden of providing health insurance to employees.
I closed with the examples of Germany and France, both of which are already recovering from the economic downturn, in part thanks to the fact that their businesses are free to be businesses, rather than health care insurance providers.
The realistic response from Jackie was that the CBO wasn’t going to be too impressed with criticism from a junior Congressperson. Well, if Jackie can’t do it, we should create the groundswell of criticism about the CBO’s short-sightedness.
Why Keep Pushing the Fiscal Conservatism line? (Beside the Fact that We're Up to Our Necks In Debt?)
Making the fiscally conservative, pro-small business argument for health care reform may be our best weapon, as it hits them in the most sensitive area. Instead of being defensive, it’s patriotically pro-business. It’s even stronger when we can link it to the competition we face from all the other developed nations that already provide basic health care for all citizens. (Don’t ask me why the moral arguments don’t work for the opposition, they just don’t.)
Best Question. Ever.
I thought the most salient question from the audience was a woman who asked: “What can we do to help you to win this, Jackie?” I’ll give you Jackie’s answer in the next newsletter, but it’s one I think we should be pondering first ourselves. What is our role as citizens? Did we think we were just going to send these people to Washington and they would magically make the problems go away without our active participation?
If we’re not in the streets applying pressure and/or support for our representatives, we can’t complain when the GOP wins in 2010.
Jackie's Message To You/The Follow-Up:
On Monday, I spoke with Mike Larsen, Congresswoman Speier’s Communications Director, to follow up on some questions one of our members had from the Friday meeting. To clarify one of the simpler points: Jackie Speier was among those who signed the letter urging Speaker Pelosi that any bill passed should contain the public option.
But she did not “pledge” to vote against any bill that didn’t include the public option.
I told Mike Larsen that, regardless of the language used, I felt that Jackie Speier was strongly supporting the public option, and her fierce handling of the town hall had essentially confirmed that for me.
“But what,” I asked, “does Jackie have to say to those of us who don’t feel that way - who might understandably feel like giving up without a hard-set promise?”
Mike Larsen: “The message is: it’s not over yet. Keep fighting.”
Why should you keep fighting on faith? As my friend the oncology nurse asked me, “I want to know why I’m engaged in this battle – it’s not because I’m a nurse, it’s something deeper.”
I know how she feels. In the decades that our generation shunned activism and entered the corporate workforce, I still kept under my work calendar a picture torn from a magazine. It was the iconic photograph of a civil rights worker being attacked by two police dogs in Birmingham. You know the picture. His body is limp after the fire hoses were turned on him, but the expression on his face is resolute.
I kept the picture all those years, because I didn’t understand what motivated that man’s courage, and I never will. But if he could withstand that, with no discernible victory in sight, how can we give up on this so easily?
Thank you for not giving up,
Eva
