Town Hallers are Mad at Both Parties
Here’s what the townhalls are not:
This is not a rebellion of white men against a black president with whom, as Chris Matthews would charge, they “will never be comfortable.” Arlen Specter was castigated at his latest town hall meeting, and he is not a black man. Neither is HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelious or Maryland Senator Ben Cardin. Yet they too have faced angry crowds.
Nor is this a well-organized campaign by insurance company operatives. If some mastermind were organizing these protests, they’d screen out the lunatics who insist on bringing automatic weapons to political events.
So what is going on?
Perhaps Americans feel they are being hustled. One president and 535 members of Congress are overhauling 17% of the nation’s GDP and forever changing government’s place in our lives. Surely such a momentous decision deserves more attention than it has received in the span of my kids’ summer vacation. Haste does not make for good governance – especially haste that seems driven by desperate awareness that the Democrats’ poll numbers are deflating day by day.
Which takes us to a deeper story. In every way we can measure, we have seen rising frustration with government that seems simultaneously intrusive and remote, overbearing and incompetent. Elected leaders can collectively run up multi-trillion dollar deficits, waste money in ways that would make a businessman shriek – actually go out of business – and then look you in the eye and say “don’t you trust me?”
The latest Rasmussen poll (August 7) shows that only 14% of Americans give Congress good or excellent marks and that 56% believe they are doing a poor job. Arlen Specter recently offered that [the protesters] “are not representative of America.” Yet with just 36% public support in his state now, his collapsing poll numbers show differently. He should have taken his cue from Republican Chuck Grassley: "It seems to me that people are expressing, not just on health care, but people are just very scared about the direction the country is taking.”
Republicans must remember that it is they who drove the country from surplus to deficit – and that it was a Republican who presided over the economic collapse of 2008. "You work for us!" one angry protester shouted as the crowd applauded wildly. Yet what they have seen instead is a group of self-interested, mendacious, professional politicians who often seem to work for shadowy interests. Before Republicans start assigning the committee chairs for 2011, they need to remind themselves: 1) the mid-term elections are still a long way off; 2) it isn’t just about healthcare, or the Democrats. It’s about all of them.