I got back from Sam Farr's town hall in Hollister, San Benito County a short time ago, and I can report that it was pretty tame, but not completely devoid of crazies, shouting, or invective hyperbole.
Some background: San Benito County, of which Hollister is the county seat and has always been its center of population, turned blue in the 1990s, when people priced out of Silicon Valley began moving there in droves. Sam Farr was elected in 1993 in a special election after Leon Panetta, who had represented CA's 16th congressional district (which became the 17th and came to include San Benito County after the 1990 redistricting) for the previous decade and change, was appointed to the OMB by President Clinton. Gore and Kerry won in 2000 and 2004, respectively, by healthy margins, and Obama won the county by a 2:1 margin.
Still, the county has historically been a rural, farming community, and indeed, rural it remains. Hollister, where three-fifths of the county lives, is at the north end of the county; south of Hollister the county remains extremely rural (and quite beautiful; the county includes Pinnacles National Monument). By my estimation, the division of people supporting a public option and meaningful health care reform and the crazies was about 60-40. There were a number of crazies, though, and they were quite vocal.
Early in the meeting, a gentleman at the back decided he was going to shout at pretty much everything that Congressman Farr said, and each time was shushed by a sizable chunk of the audience. After his fourth of fifth outburst, my mother and I turned and shouted for him to shut the hell up, after which he was largely quiet.
The major problem was that a solid majority of people who got up to speak were the crazies, by a margin of about 2:1. And crazy they were. I heard all about the death panels, meaningless platitudes about "tyranny" and "freedom," and about how Obama is the anti-Christ. There was a woman who read aloud what she claimed was a page from the bill mandating coverage for non-citizens, and Farr asked her which pages they supposedly were, and when he referenced them in his copy of the bill, found that page contained standard discrimination clauses, and nothing at all (of course) about coverage for non-citizens. The crazies, of course, shouted at anyone who expressed support for a public option, and at one point I thought I might be removed after telling a fellow, who called an OB-GYN who was urging single payer a "socialist," to "shut the fuck up," and drew dozens of nasty looks.
There were no altercations, though, and few signs calling Obama a socialist or Nazi or the like. Honestly, I got something of an adrenaline rush out of the experience, and am still riding the afterglow of it. I look forward to other town halls by Congress critters in my area. I hope they can all be as comparatively civil as Farr's was. We just have to make sure that we are standing up and making our voices heard at the meetings. Stand up and advocate strongly for a public option to balance out the nutjobs.