Iphone photo of Congressman Issa speaking March 11th
So the spouse, a friend, and I all went to Darrell Issa’s townhall in Oceanside. We heard about it on Wednesday the 8th and tried to get tix, but we ended up on the waiting list.
Some background: Issa has held onto this coastal district, which consists of conservative parts of Orange County and a chunk of coastal North San Diego County, for 16 years. He’s been pretty comfortable. As the GOP has gotten less popular locally, a Dem named Colonel Doug Applegate made a credible run for office last year but lost due to overall national Dem unpopularity.
Issa is not enormously popular. His politics are well to the right of the average here. Locally, there has been a slow but steady Blue shift as the ordinary folks who grew up here and immigrants from Mexico and Central America make up a greater percentage of the population, as versus the military families and old white money.
This was the first event of this type I can remember, and I’ve been here five years. What we were witnessing was a person that wanted to keep his job. Which is, of course, fine.
The event was professionally and competently planned and executed. It was in a good space, not too large and not too small. Crowd control was excellent. Despite the fact that this was a hostile audience, we were treated fairly and with as much good humor as could be managed. There were plenty of staff, and they were respectful and seemed to understand how things should go.
The local #Indivisibles group had organized thoroughly. They had advised their members to stick to “yes or no” questions and to bring “agree” and “disagree” signs. The demonstration outside was rowdy, angry, civil, and fun, to varying degrees. Lots of different folks.
People!
People were out having a good time in pink pussy hats, while some veterans of the process were hanging out and chatting with other folks who seemed like they knew what they were doing. The Indivisibles had a clever cosplay thing going where two of their members wore Red Army costumes and held up a banner saying “Make Russia Great Again”.
Protestor gets some media time. Several news orgs were present.
The demonstration was definitely straight-up dominated and lead by the Indivisibles. They passed out talking points, led chants, and made up the center of the demo crowd. We were in line for the waiting list and eventually got in. :)
There was a drone hovering over the ocean with a fairly serious camera on it. I suspect it belonged to a local news organization. The small local police presence was engaged in crowd control and were generally relaxed and engaging.
There was zero Democratic Party or Democratic candidate presence. Nobody was looking to get email addresses, register voters, or even record the event. This is fairly standard for the local Party. A couple of countywide coordinators on staff could solve this problem, of course.
After we got inside, we got a lottery ticket to ask questions. They were pretty serious about getting a bunch of folks through the process. The crowd inside was openly straight-up hostile. They were willing to applaud when Issa departed from Republican orthodoxy, such as when he noted that the San Diego economy’s vibrancy very much comes from its status as a border town through which much trade passes, then mentioned bilateral actions that he was part of, including building up Tijuana’s sewer system to improve San Diego beaches and the local ports to handle more traffic.
lone Trump supporter showing the colors.
Issa himself was fairly knowledgeable, speaking intellingently on several issues. He was more comfortable with some areas than others. There was definitely a sense that there were two Issas — one of them was a reasonably smart guy who had bothered to understand the issues. The second was a prickly white jerk who was easy to rile and was obsessed with maintaining his status. When there was conflict, the privileged white guy won. Republicans are Republican.
About half of the questions were related to health care, and about half were everything else. The health care questions came from folks who had been benefited by the ACA, either the preexisting condition clauses or the Medicaid expansion. Issa was very much in favor of keeping preexisting condition clauses, but he was obsessed with “responsibility” — he is very excited about pawning off more of the cost of Medicaid expansion onto the States and clearly is excited about the idea of denying coverage to the “undeserving”.
Issa was clear that he supported keeping much of the ACA intact. This is a massive departure from previous Republican orthodoxy, and the internal GOP fractures on what to keep and what to throw out from the ACA will probably doom that effort this year. Nobody asked him how many times he voted to repeal the ACA during the past seven years. Issa rejected #SinglePayerNow, trotting out tired talking points about how one cannot get access to procedures in Britain or Canada.
Other questions were about accepting refugees (Issa is the descendant of refugees from what is now Lebanon; he dodged and weaved as best he could), Trump’s mental fitness for office (Issa filibustered this one; it was the first time I felt sorry for him), DACA and ICE enforcement (Issa is down with ever-increasing enforcement), and Building the Wall (Issa is pro-wall). One Freudian slip; Congressman Issa tried to justify the existence of the current system of two barbed-wire chainlink fences by likening it to keeping a dog safely in the backyard. This did not go over well, but the crowd was pretty white, so they didn’t go as apeshit as the comment deserved.
Overall, it was interesting. Issa struck me as a reasonably functional human who was utterly owned by his privilege and fury at anyone challenging Patriarchy or white supremacy. He let the crowd get to him several times when this topic was touched upon. It was clear that he was rattled by the depth of the opposition to #Trumpcare and that this was something he planned to take back to DC. He also was rattled by the protestors’ naked hostility toward him, which challenged his self-image of being a reasonable person.
I’m glad I went. I understand a little better how some Republicans get elected, and of course I’m never gonna even consider voting for him, but I appreciate that he is doing his job of listening to his constitutents, now that he’s had someone scare some sense into him.
