Town Halls: Full of sound and fury, signifying… what?

posted at 4:48 pm on August 12, 2009 by Karl
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The political arguments over congressional town halls, anti-ObamaCare protests and HCAN/SEIU thuggery began as focused on the relative authenticity of the protests. Now, Juicebox Mafioso Matt Yglesias and Democratic Strategist Ed Kilgore take the step of questioning the point of town hall meetings (which is amusing in light of the lefty charge that raucous protests at these meetings is killing democracy, but I digress).

The immediate, non-theoretical answer is that the Democrats hoped to use town halls as one way of selling ObamaCare to an increasingly skeptical public and generate favorable media coverage. The anti-ObamaCare protests introduced an element of judo, turning the town halls into a story about how controversial ObamaCare remains, exposing how staged the pro-ObamaCare events have been, and causing skittish Democrats to avoid staging more of them.

Marc Ambinder would like to believe that ObamaCare critics have discredited themselves and that the media reported on the town hall meetings in ways damaging to Republicans. (On the Right, Charles Krauthammer and Andrew McCarthy took opposing views on this question.) Ambinder assumes that Blue Dogs will write off the protesters as partisans rather than swing voters. However, it is equally possible that Dick Armey has correctly identified Tea Partiers as Perot-esque populists not so easily pigeon-holed. Moreover, people this passionate in opposition are the sort who will continue their activism in the 2010 campaign cycle; a Member of Congress would prefer that they be mollified to the extent possible.

Ambinder is on even shakier ground when it comes to his media analysis, falling into the all too common trap of analyzing from the viewpoint of a political junkie. (As did Krauthammer.) The town hall meetings kept healthcare atop the news agenda last week, but the distribution of that news coverage is telling:

From August 3-9 health care accounted for only 5% of the newshole in newspapers, online and network news. But it dominated cable news (37%) and radio (33%), the two sectors that include the debate-oriented programming that hammers away on polarizing issues.

The economy and North Korea got far more coverage on network TV, which is still where Americans get the bulk of their news. A sliver of the population gets its news from cable TV; radio is a medium generally dominated by the Right.

Accordingly, it is far from clear that the media coverage was much help to the Democrats. Public support for ObamaCare fell to a new low in the Rasmussen poll, and has dropped 21 percent in four weeks in the Gallup poll. Gallup did not break out unaffiliated adults, but Rasmussen reported increased opposition from unaffiliated voters. The attention given to the town hall protests does not have seem to reversed ObamaCare’s downward slide.

That being said, it is also far from clear that the protests are a significant cause of ObamaCare’s slide, either. Peter Kirsanow makes a decent point:

Perhaps the behavior of some of the attendees will eventually reverse Obamacare’s eroding support. But that would be a peculiar dynamic. The drop in support is a result of more and more people focusing on the probabilities that the plan will decrease the quality and availability of care while blowing a titanic hole in the federal budget. Seeing video of a few energetic people shouting at congressmen is unlikely to cause the average voter to say, “Okay, that does it. Because of that loud guy I now support high taxes, mediocre health care, and an irreparable budget deficit.” Rather, it’s more likely that ordinary Americans who see a video of their fellow citizens confronting out-of-touch, spendthrift politicians will be reinforced in their suspicions that something is seriously wrong with the bill.

I would add that bad economic news was also driving down support for Pres. Obama and moreso his policies before the August recess, and that trend will likely continue as long as job losses continue to mount. This is not run to down anti-ObamaCare activism. As noted earlier, the protests affect the media narrative, have yet to become a liability in public opinion, and may help sway some members of Congress at the margin. But political junkies (myself included) should always be careful not to assume that everyone is obsessing over the protests the way we are, or drawing any particular conclusion from them. Most of the time, it is the bigger picture that matters.

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