Sherrod Brown: We’re not doing town halls

Ohio was a key battleground state for Barack Obama, and the Democratic takeover of its Senate seat in 2006 proved a harbinger of Obama’s eventual general-election victory. Senator Sherrod Brown doesn’t appear to remember who it was that put him in that office. Brown has decided not to hold town-hall forums to answer questions from his constituents, as Hourglass1941 discovered. Instead, Brown has opted for “roundtable discussions” with selected participants while shoving constituents to another building with a faulty videoconferencing connection. Guess who got the invitations?

Oh, sorry, not these people. No, it was the people you’d expect — to rescue Democratic politicians from their constituents:

What Brown held was not, according to his staffers, a town hall meeting, but instead a health care “roundtable.” Apparently that makes a difference. Apparently so that his office staff could lie, without really lying, to constituents who called to ask if he would be holding any town hall meetings. No, they said. No town hall meetings. They didn’t feel obligated to mention the “roundtable.”

Brown cleverly kept the roundtable under wraps until the last minute. At the 11th hour, Brown did an email blast to his supporters. Apparently, Obama email blasted his personal army, Organizing for America.

So, does Brown ever plan to meet with his constituents in the light of day?

This is not Sherrod Brown, but one of his polite and unflappable staffers instead, who probably deserves a raise. He keeps telling the videographer that he’s there to answer her question instead of Brown, but that’s the entire point. No one elected this nice young man to represent the state of Ohio in the US Senate. The voters elected Sherrod Brown, and Brown should be facing them instead of sending staffers with business cards into the hall while Brown closes the doors and convenes with Barack Obama’s OfA groupies.

Be sure to read the rest of the post, which explains the final assessment: “Sherrod Brown can’t run a roundtable, yet he wants to run our health care.”

Blowback