"What's important," said Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL-16) at today's health reform town hall meeting in Elizabeth, Ill., "is that people be heard."
"People," in this case, not including your diarist. When I was called on and began to reel off ShadowSD's town hall talking points, Manzullo cut me off and went to another questioner.
It was a tough crowd for a Kossack. Though the attendees were soft-spoken and courteous -- there were none of the sign-waving histrionics that have characterized some other town halls -- they were intensely conservative. Before the meeting began, I overheard several people expressing their shared enthusiasm for Glenn Beck's book Common Sense. I also overheard one person saying that as he got older, he had to watch the earlier Channel 18 news because he couldn't stay awake past 9:30 PM; another attendee replied, "You're supposed to watch Fox News!" The first speaker assured the second that it was OK -- Channel 18 was also Fox, just not the all-news channel. The second speaker, whom I'll just refer to in shorthand by the pseudonym "Annie," also expressed great disdain for "sheep" (among whom she clearly did not count herself), along with her conviction that ACORN was going to bus in a load of protesters to disrupt the town hall meeting. If the left-wing cavalry ever showed up, they were even quieter than the locals. As far as I could tell, I was the only liberal in the audience, though there was at least one other attendee who hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid (more on him later).
The basement of the Jo-Carroll Energy Co-op, where the meeting took place.
As for Manzullo, you could tell where he was coming from by the table of reading material he helpfully provided by the door . . .
. . . and by the charts he set up at the front of the room.
Although you can see some empty seats in the picture above, the room filled up. In fact, Manzullo said there had been so much interest in the town hall meeting -- which was supposed to run from 8 to 9:30 AM -- that he'd split the meeting into two, one from 8 to 9 and one from 9 to 10.
Rep. Manzullo and "Annie."
Manzullo kicked off the meeting in faux-reasonable mode. "To say we don't need reform ignores the number of people who are uninsured," he said. And he led with positive (though, in my opinion, inadequate and ill-aimed) reform proposals, such as association health plans and purchasing pools, health savings accounts, tax credits to help low-income households buy insurance, medical malpractice liability reform, and a health care spending deduction for small businesses. I'll give him credit for this last one, since according to him, corporations receive this credit already, and I'll take his word for it until someone points out otherwise. However, his general approach seems to consist of diverting money from the general revenue fund to the private health insurer.
Then he went into full-on Buzz Windrip mode, playing the folksy know-nothing role to the hilt. He pulled out a stack of papers, saying that it was the text of the bill, that he'd had the chance to study only about 40 percent of it, and that "I've never seen a bill so complicated in my entire life" (I wonder whether he's ever seen a defense or transportation appropriations bill?). "Throw it away!" shouted an attendee, to general laughter.
Buzz Windrip Don Manzullo and the Fat Stack.
Manzullo played the crowd like a barrel organ, tossing out red-meat phrases like "53 new federal bureaucracies" and "death tax." But the most appalling aspect of his performance was its sheer anti-intellectuality. Gesturing to the convoluted org chart, he said, "I'm not even gonna attempt to go through this thing." Why do people oppose health care reform? "What they're upset about is the ambiguity of this bill." What kind of reform measures to support? "I'd start with throwing out the whole bill." What about end-of-life counseling? "Is this mandatory? We don't know." Will the House bill cut federal funding for Catholic hospitals? The law "could be interpreted that way." Is abortion coverage mandated? "All you can say is that two amendments [that would have banned all funding of abortion] were defeated in committee." (That last is a particularly intelligence-insulting piece of spurious logic, and I can't help but think that it must have been worded carefully. Because of course, the fact that abortion funding isn't banned outright doesn't in any way mean that abortion funding is mandated. You can say something else, Congressman. Perhaps you just don't want to.)
Many people were given the chance to speak and ask questions, some of which did rise above the level of "How do we expose this thing?" But the thing I found most interesting was the response when I got up to speak.
At first, people were nodding in agreement with me.
After wishing Manzullo and everyone else in the room happiness, health, and freedom from pain and sorrow, I went into ShadowSD's first talking point: that even if you pay your premium on time and in full every month, you're as likely to be dropped by your insurer as you are to be covered. And I saw people nodding, and heard "Mm-hmm!" from none other than "Annie" herself (who had announced a couple of times that she suffers from a chronic condition). The sympathetic murmurs continued as I went on to mention how insurance companies overrule doctors' decisions.
When I continued by noting the $1.4 million per day being spent by the insurance company to defeat reform by getting "people of good conscience fighting with each other," Manzullo jumped in. Why that phrase triggered the hook, I have no idea. (Maybe it was a slow response to "scaring people with fairy tales about euthanasia.") In any event, he indicated in no uncertain terms that my moment on the floor was over, and he called on the next person to speak. The funny thing was, as soon as he did this, the faces in the room went suddenly from soft to hard. "You scare me," one man told me coldly.
And the rest of the town hall went on as a meeting of the mutual opinion reinforcement society -- with the exception of one tall man, who spoke quietly and seemed slightly nervous, who cited a couple of CBO figures and asked simply, "How can we be competitive in the world market while spending $2.5 trillion a year on health care?" In reply, Manzullo gave him a polite non-answer.
The laughable irony is that barely two minutes after cutting me off, Manzullo characterized some group (it was something like "Urban Council," but I didn't recognize it, and I didn't write it down) as a "liberal group that's against people exercising their Constitutional rights" and declaimed, "What's important is that people be heard." Funny -- the only person prevented from exercising his Constitutional rights at Manzullo's town hall meeting was me. I guess I'm not "people," since it evidently was not important that I be heard.
Prevented from distributing facts wholesale, I seized a couple of opportunities to sell them retail: After one woman asked how the government could spend so much money on a public option when we're in such an economic crisis, I quickly wrote on my notepad, "All independent studies, including Congressional Budget Office, project gov't savings of $150 billion to $265 billion w/public option. House bill would produce $6 billion budget surplus," tore off the note and handed it to her. I didn't look to see how she'd react to it. And on the way out, feeling cheeky, I sidled up to the "You scare me" guy and said, "I don't mean to scare you. I'm really quite harmless." He actually blushed a little and said what he was really afraid of, which, not surprisingly, was the idea that "the government will send someone" to talk about how to end his life.
"That's not what it is at all," I said firmly. "That provision was inserted by a pro-life Republican, and all it means is that if you choose to have that discussion with your doctor, your insurer has to pay for it. Because some insurers weren't."
He seemed to want to believe me -- but just this morning, he said, a guy had been on (where else?) Fox News and told him that the threat was real. At which point, because we were part of a crowd blocking the door, we had to separate. The esprit d'escalier came to me in the car a couple of minutes later: "You could take his word for it -- but as Ronald Reagan once said, 'Trust . . . but verify.'"
Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt, LLP, won this battle. Hope folks are having more luck elsewhere.