By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: August 8, 2009
WASHINGTON — As a freshman Democrat, Representative Frank Kratovil Jr. figured he would spend the August recess reconnecting with the folks back home. Perhaps he should have known this would be easier said than done when an opponent of health care reform hanged him in effigy outside his district office on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
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Dawn Majors/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated Press
HEARD In Mehlville, Mo., last week.
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Beyond Beltway, Health Debate Turns Hostile (August 8, 2009)
Undaunted, Mr. Kratovil tried last week to hold “Congress on Your Corner” sessions intended, he said, to help voters with “casework matters” — Social Security benefits and the like. On Tuesday, 200 angry conservatives confronted him over health care in an elementary school cafeteria. On Thursday, liberals struck back: President Obama’s political organization sent a mass e-mailing urging supporters to turn out for a Kratovil event at a library, to “make sure your support for health insurance reform is seen and heard.”
Mr. Kratovil’s experience was part of a phenomenon that swept the country last week, with increasingly ugly scenes of partisan screaming matches, scuffles, threats and even arrests. The traditional town hall meeting, a staple of Congressional constituent relations, had been hijacked, overrun by sophisticated social-networking campaigns — those on the right protesting so loudly as to shut down public discourse and those on the left springing into action to shut down the shutdowns.
The result was a series of made-for-YouTube moments, with video clips played endlessly on the Internet and cable television, the logical extreme, perhaps, of an era when Joe the Plumber is really named Sam. Along the way, another kind of Joe — Joe Six-Pack, the average Joe — seemed to disappear, pushed into the background by crowds bearing scripted talking points and signs.
“We’re living in the era of the viral town meeting,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who once worked as a Senate aide. “I remember back in the ’70s getting identically worded telegrams in the thousands. What’s happened now is the technology of protest has metastasized, and it threatens to overwhelm the relationship between members of Congress and their constituents.”
Citizen gatherings, of course, are as old as the republic itself, but as a form of constituent relations town hall meetings are relatively new. In the 19th century, lawmakers spent more time at home, mingling with voters at block parties, barbecues and parades. Organized complaints came in the form of petitions; by the 1950s, there were mass letter-writing campaigns. In recent decades, with lawmakers shuttling between Washington and their districts, squeezing constituent meetings into weekends and short breaks, town halls emerged as a convenient one-stop-shopping for lawmakers to hear citizens’ concerns. Presidents used them too; in 1978, Jimmy Carter tried to sell voters on the Panama Canal treaty by phoning town hall meetings.
Now, though, the complaining constituent is not always who he seems to be. In Wisconsin last week, Representative Steve Kagen, a Democrat, was challenged on health care by a woman who declared herself politically unaffiliated; the local television station later discovered that she was a former Republican Party official who had worked for Mr. Kagen’s opponent in his Congressional race.
Nor can members of Congress be certain that their questioners are truly constituents. Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, said that given the current uproar over health care, someone suggested she check addresses at her town hall meetings.
“I’m not going to get into that,” she said. “It creates a real sour atmosphere at the door.”
And lawmakers are learning the hard way to watch their tongues. At one of his constituent sessions last week, Representative Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican who opposes President Obama’s health plan, remarked that some of his colleagues “almost got lynched” at their town halls. His sympathetic audience laughed and clapped; Mr. Akin replied, “I assume you’re not approving lynchings,” and made a choking gesture. The clip quickly turned up on YouTube, and now the chagrined congressman faces accusations that he was making lynch-mob jokes about Democrats.
“I was recognizing the atmosphere as opposed to condoning it,” he said in an interview on Friday. Given the “aggressive atmosphere,” he said, he is turning to the telephone conference as a way to take questions from constituents. “We’re adjusting our format to the situation,” he said.
In some respects, last week’s town halls — fueled on the right by antitax groups backed partly by industry, and on the left by unions — are the logical outgrowth of decades of American political activism. Community organizing is nothing new; President Obama made an early career of it. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the anti-abortion movement, the rise of the religious right — all grew out of grassroots campaigns conducted by methodical organizers.
Accusations of phony grassroots campaigns — “Astroturf,” in Washington argot — also are not new. When Richard Viguerie, the conservative strategist, pioneered the use of direct mail to raise money in the 1970s, he quickly came under attack for creating “the impression of a mass uprising when there were organizers behind it,” said Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University.
But last week’s “town brawls,” as the news media dubbed them, do seem to represent a shift. Instead of each side’s holding rallies and protests, the activism seemed directed personally at lawmakers, with the aim of overwhelming them. Mr. Kratovil, the Maryland Democrat, opposes the health care legislation moving through the House. But he was unable to get his point across, he said. “They simply want to yell when you talk.”
Some might call it democracy in action, but there is a risk. If the pattern continues, lawmakers could grow suspicious, refusing to believe that their encounters with voters are genuine.
“When a politician can’t tell what’s grassroots and what’s Astro, that’s dangerous,” Mr. Zelizer said. “In the long term, that could undermine the potential of grassroots mobilizers to change things. At a certain point, it’s crying wolf. No one is going to believe it’s real.”
Then again, just because someone has been recruited to an event does not mean his sentiments are not real. Dr. William Crowley, a retired neurologist in Austin, Tex., who participates in antitax “Tea Party Patriot” protests, turned out to see his local Democratic congressman, Representative Lloyd Doggett, after being tipped off by a fellow activist. The meeting turned ugly — Mr. Doggett left early and protesters blocked his car — but Dr. Crowley insisted he was nobody’s tool.
“Sean Hannity didn’t tell me to go; Glenn Beck didn’t tell me to go; Rush didn’t tell me to go” he said, referring to the conservative commentators.
And what of the Average Joe, who might want to talk to his elected representative about the kind of mundane matters that do not inspire protesters to yell and scream and get arrested? Mr. Kratovil, the Maryland Democrat, said he feared that such voters would no longer turn out for public meetings. He is making plans to hold office hours to meet them quietly, one on one.
“I think everybody across the country is trying to figure out how to deal with this,” he said last week, “and we’re not there yet.”
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