I went to Rep Sam Farr's 3 hour town hall meeting in Santa Cruz last night. As Santa Cruz has a well deserved reputation of being a very liberal town, one would think this meeting would be a cake walk. However, non locals forget that the small towns in the Santa Cruz Mountains and nearby areas are the homes to some libertarians and off the grid survivalists.
The meeting was composed of about 2/3s reform supporters and at most 1/3 virulently against.
Originally to be held in a church meeting hall, the event was quickly moved to the main church, which had a larger capacity and video/audio feeds to the meeting hall as an overflow room. Both rooms were packed. A newspaper article estimated the crowd at 800 people.
There was a good turnout of supporters including a decent turnout of OFA folks and folks with hand drawn signs supporting the public option and single payer.
There were LaRouche-ites with their typically outrageous signs of Obama with a Hitler mustache. I may have been more upset by this had I not read about other town halls.
In comparison, the Santa Cruz town hall was pretty civil.
After a welcome by a pastor of the church, the Mayor of Santa Cruz opened the meeting stating that Santa Cruz had a history of vigorous debate but that it was always respectful of everyone's right to speak. This was a good opening
Sam Farr gave a great description of HR 3200, (though I disagree with his framing of the public option by itself. that's another diary by itself). The phrase 'public option' was almost magical in the way that it elicited immediate and simultaneous booes and cheers whenever it was spoken by Rep Farr.
Rep Farr spoke for 30 minutes on the bill and then opened the meeting for questions, The aisles filled quickly with people and people in the overflow room could write down questions, which were also answered intermittently.
Although, cheering and booing from both sides took a bit of time from the questions
the disruption was kept to a minimum. Shouters from the audience were responded to by a loud "shh' from the crowd as a whole. This was very satisfying.
Sam Farr handled all the questions well, even the ones where the askers clearly had their facts wrong. He debunked the euthanasia myth and when one person recited part of the long tea party email that falsely quoted sec and sec of HR 3200, he referred them to his website, which had all that debunked as well.
I had to leave at the 1.5 hours mark, so I did not see the whole thing, but from what I saw, it was a generally good town hall meeting. I would strongly encourage people in the area to attend his upcoming town halls in Hollister, Salinas and King City as the balance may not be so favorable in those areas. Besides Salinas is a pretty town, and it's near picturesque Carmel.
http://www.farr.house.gov/...