The Gallup poll that came out Thursday has been widely described as indicating that the health care protests are “working.” This is based on the fact that 34% say the protests make them more sympathetic to the protestors’ viewpoints while only 21% say the protests make them less sympathetic.
But both Nate Silver and David Axelrod point out that this particular question really doesn’t prove much of anything – people who are already in agreement with the protesters views will naturally tend to express sympathy for demonstrations that support their views. As Silver says:

Polls of this nature, however, are notoriously slippery. If there were some protest in favor of a policy that I supported — like expanded stem-cell research — I’d probably tell a pollster that the protest had in fact made me more sympathetic to the cause, even though my mind on the issue was already 100 percent made up and was not going to be swayed. The real question, then, is how many minds are being changed on the issue. And it may not be all that many. Three relevant polls have come out on this subject in August: a Rasmussen poll found some further erosion in support for the bills pending before Congress, but a Gallup poll did not find any further decline in Obama’s approval on health care since mid-July. Nor did a CNN poll find any decline in support for the Democrats’ health package, although that poll is now about a week old.

Let’s face it, we’re all desperate to try to make use of any data that happen to come our way, but there really isn’t a lot one can deduce from this particular question.
The really interesting data in the poll comes when Gallup asks if the following behaviors during a town meeting are better described as “democracy in action” or “an abuse of democracy.”

• “making angry attacks on a health care bill and what it might do”
• “booing when members of congress make statements that the opponents disagree with”
• “Shouting down supporters when they speak in favor of a health care bill

On the first two questions Democrats and Republicans respond in predictably partisan ways – Dems calling them “abuse” while Republicans call them “democracy” Independents, however, lean strongly toward calling them “democracy in action” in the first case (55%-37%) and marginally in the second case (47%-42%).
From a fiercely partisan perspective, this might seem a disappointment, but realistically it’s entirely reasonable. I mean, come on, let’s be realistic – of course making angry attacks on a bill you disagree with is OK in a democracy, as is booing (within bounds).
But the absolutely critical fact shown in the Gallup poll is how the respondents viewed the third behavior, “Shouting down supporters when they speak in favor of a health care bill”.

59% of the American people said it was an “abuse of democracy” compared with only 33% who called it “democracy in action”
54% of independents called it an “abuse of democracy”, compared with only 38% who said it was “democracy in action”

And here’s the real eye-popper:

58% of REPUBLICANS called it an “abuse of democracy” compared to only 38% who called it “democracy in action”

In short, what this poll is showing is that the vast majority of the American people very strongly and profoundly disapprove of the “shout them down – intimidate them” type of tactics the Astroturf firms were circulating and recommending when the town halls started. In fact, it is already possible to see a subtle dialing down of the overtly” bully-boy” approach in the most recent town halls.
So for Dems the key strategic information here is that they should focus their criticism very specifically on the “shouting down” or “bullying” type of tactics and pin that strategy very specifically on the Astroturf firms.
Here’s an example of how this can be expressed:

“It is absolutely healthy and vital that ordinary Americans get the chance to express their views about health care reform – and to express those views as clearly and passionately as they wish. Staunch opponents of health care reform must be given the opportunity to make their voices heard as well as supporters.”
“But when “inside the beltway” Washington lobbying groups opposing health care reform start circulating instructions to “shout down” elected officials when they try to speak and to disrupt town hall meetings before people can express their views, that’s not OK. Those are tactics that have no place in a democracy.”
“The beltway lobbying firms should clearly and explicitly disavow these tactics and directly criticize the people who employ them – not only in a few face-saving press releases but in all of their communications with their supporters. If they don’t, the sincere grass-roots protesters should consider whether these are the kind of organizations with which they want to be associated.”.

Since the recession has dramatically reduced the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, you’d think that hostility to immigrants would have somewhat declined. And maybe it has, in terms of Americans generally.
But as Daphne Eviatar explains today in the Washington Independent, immigrants seem to be a preoccupation among town hall protesters against health care reform:

As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system. Angry questions about illegal immigrants getting health care at town hall meetings across the country have put many lawmakers on the defensive.
At his town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter had to assure protesters that illegal immigrants would not be covered. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has gone out of her way to make that point as well. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) faced similar shouted questions at his town hall forum on Wednesday, and repeatedly emphasized that illegal immigrants are not covered by the House bill. President Obama has also made the point, although it’s not clear that the anti-reform activists have heard it.

Perhaps this is an indication that anger about levels of immigration, and about benefits obtained by immigrants, has become a semi-permanent feature of the conservative political landscape, complicating Republican efforts to improve their performance among Latino voters, among others.
Or maybe it’s yet another indication that the town hall protesters aren’t terribly representative of conservatives, much less the population as a whole.

Political junkies naturally like to project current trends in public opinion as far into the future as they can, joined by hacks and spinmeisters when the trends seem positive for their cause. So it’s no surprise that Republicans are already debating how big a win they’ll have in 2010. And more than ten weeks before the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia, you’d think the GOP had already banked victories in both states.
If only to confound those who think every political sparrow that falls to the ground is about national politics, it’s interesting ro report that a new poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps shows often-left-for-dead Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey beginning to significantly close the gap with Republican nominee Chris Christie. As voters get closer to an actual decision between candidates instead of a resolution on how they feel about life under the Corzine administration, Christie’s lead has dropped to five percentage points in a three-way race involving independent candidate Chris Daggett, and six points in a two-way race. Christie’s negatives are definitely moving up, which also augers a tightening race.
I’m not predicting that Corzine will win, but it is important to remember that late, counter-intuitive trends in political campaigns happen all the time, and those who count their electoral chickens before they hatch may be eating crow on when voters weigh in.

Last week I challenged a particularly nasty commentary by David Paul Kuhn that alleged that Democrats were even nuttier than the Republicans who believe the ‘birther” narrative because many Dems believe that George W Bush had “advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks”. Here’s what I said:

There are two different ways that a survey respondent could interpret the Rasmussen question about Bush’s possible “advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks” – one of which is entirely rational and, in fact, undeniably true.
Gee whiz, come on. Doesn’t everyone still remember the warnings Bush received about the potential use of airplanes as terrorist weapons in the summer of 2001 – warnings Condi Rice admitted did not get followed up? Don’t we all remember the CIA memos saying that “something big” was in the works in September? Don’t we all remember the 9/11 Commission and Richard Clarkes’ dramatic statement that “We failed the American people”
These were not hallucinations or the product of fevered, paranoid Democratic brains. They were component elements of the undeniable fact that there were indeed significant advance warnings that a terrorist attack was in the works for the fall of 2001 – a fact that was the central subject of the 9/11 commission hearings, 10 or 15 books and hundreds of articles.
One would have to throw out every single academic study of the past 30 or 40 years about the effects of question wording on survey response not to recognize that, for many survey respondents who remembered the 9/11 Commission Report and other media coverage, the phrase “advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks” could be cognitively processed as meaning:
“The Bush administration had substantial advance knowledge from U.S. intelligence sources that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was being predicted as imminent in the fall of 2001”
Rather than interpreting the question as saying:
“The Bush Administration had specific and detailed advance knowledge about a particular group of 19 Saudi Arabian terrorists armed with box cutters and trained to fly commercial jet aircraft who planned to hijack four U.S. airliners at 9:45 in the morning on September 11th 2001 and attempt to crash two of them into the New York World Trade Center”

This week, in his blog, Brendan Nyhan offers essentially the same criticism of the Rasmussen question. As he says:

The problem, as Media Matters points out, is that the wording of the Rasmussen poll (“Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?”) almost surely conflates people who believe Bush intentionally allowed an attack to occur with those who think the administration was negligent in its attention to the potential threat from Al Qaeda. Even National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg conceded this point in a column published soon after the poll was released.

But then he goes on to say the following:

Another, lesser-known poll used less ambiguous wording and found similar results. A July 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll asked the following question:

There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East….

In short, using a more appropriate comparison poll, the primary conclusion stands — both party’s bases are disturbingly receptive to wild conspiracy theories.

Nyhan is clearly right that this question is better than the previous one. But – when viewed in light of the academic literature about how ordinary respondents actually cognitively process poll questions – the fact is that it is still insufficient to support his conclusion.

Read more…

Andrea Fuller reports at The New York Times blog, ‘The Caucus’ on “tele-town halls,” a creative alternative to allowing town hall meetings on health insurance reform to devolve into shouting matches with shrill reactionaries. Fuller explains:

The conference-call style of town halls is nothing new, nor has its use been restricted to Democrats. But for some lawmakers back in their districts this month to talk about health care, the tele-town hall is shaping up as a refreshing option to forums that make possible confrontations with protesters….
…Thousands of participants can join tele-town halls. Representatives provide call-in numbers and access codes to their constituents through robo-calls, Web sites and newsletters. Members of Congress say the phone sessions are a more convenient way to reach constituents, especially elderly and disabled constituents who might not attend an in-person event.
“You can talk to thousands of people all over the state all at once in a format that allows everyone to be heard,” said Jon Summers, a spokesman for the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. “What we’ve seen with other town halls is the dialogue that people are used to isn’t being allowed to occur.”

Fuller reports that Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) has scheduled two tele-town hall meetings for August. Shuler aide Douglas Abrahms said he expects the tele-town halls to “catch on quickly.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who conducted a tele-town hall meeting in July with 30,000 participants (OK, mostly listeners), is setting up another one. “You can talk to thousands of people all over the state all at once in a format that allows everyone to be heard,” explains Reid aide Jon Summers.
The tele-town hall meeting strategy allows progressives to manage the environment in a way that encourages civil discussion of concerns, instead of discordant yelling contests. Predictably, the Republicans are attacking the tele-town halls as anti-democratic, primarily because there is no way to disrupt them. But tele-town hall advocates could respond that the comparison between the live and tele-town hall meetings as educational forums is like the difference between ‘shock jock’ radio and NPR.
Some Democratic members of congress may be able to handle the live town hall meetings to their advantage, assuming they can have some control over the environment, by demonstrating their maturity and sobriety in comparison to the screaming GOP shills. And it may be that the astroturfers’ protests will peak too soon, or even better, start to turn off increasing numbers of people. For many Dems, however, the tele-town hall meeting approach is a creative alternative to the Republicans’ obstruction campaign.

A big part of the fight against health reform right now involves the identification of specific provisions in the House bill that are then distorted, taken out of context, or otherwise twisted to create the impression of some scary or monstrous outrage. That’s how language authorizing the payment of providers requested by patients to advise on end-of-life treatment options turned into “death panels.”
So now, via Todd Gitlin at TPM, we read a column by Mike Huckabee’s bosom buddy Chuck Norris identifying another scary provision:

It’s outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading “home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children.” The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

This voluntary program becomes, in Norris’ account, a lurid “home intrusion and indoctrination” program intended to usurp parental rights, impose “progressive-secular religiously neutered” values, and probably even “encourage abortions.”
What it actually sounds like to me is the sort of prenatal and neonatal “welcome wagon” services already offered in many states, often in conjunction with private non-profit and religious organizations.
Still, put all that aside for a moment and consider this: when Norris or Sarah Palin or anyone else cherry-picks some provision in one health care reform bill and then demonizes it, do they ever make the rather obvious suggestion that said provision simply be modified or eliminated during the very long process that would lead to a bill on the president’s desk? I mean, really: the House hasn’t even passed a bill yet. The Senate Finance Committee hasn’t drafted a bill yet, and it certainly isn’t using the House committees’ bill as any sort of template. The Senate allows virtually unlimited amendment of bills. And then even after House and Senate floor action, there’s a conference committee that can and will make changes.
But no: these cherry-pickers simply demand rejection of “Obama’s plan” or the “Democrat plan;” Norris urges his readers to “write or call your representative today and protest his voting Obamacare into law.” Sure, he, like every other opponent of health reform, claims Congress is “rushing” these bills, and says we need a “truly bipartisan group that is allowed an ample amount of time to work on a compromise health care law that wouldn’t raise taxes (for anyone), regulate personal medical choices, ration health care or restrict American citizens.” But that’s another way of saying he opposes anything vaguely approaching universal health coverage. And that’s his right. But please, Chuck, kickbox this suggestion that “Obamacare” is some sort of monolithic plan full of secret agendas that is being rammed through Congress on an up-or-down vote. That is, in point of fact, a lie, which is a term I rarely apply to people’s political expressions.
There’s plenty of opportunity to change health reform provisions, and those who are shrieking about this or that provision need to stop disguising their fundamental opposition to health reform as concern about the details.

Paul Waldman’s recent post “Health Care’s Public Perception Malady” at The American Prospect addresses a topic of growing concern among advocates of health care reform. Waldman’s post is mostly a lament about public attitudes towards government, and senior citizen attitudes toward government-provided health care, in particular. Waldman notes a major public opinion poll indicating seniors’ hostility to government and he adds:

A conservative might argue that the elderly’s antagonism toward government comes from their experience with it. But both Medicare and Social Security are hugely popular among their recipients. Think about the cognitive dissonance involved: I’m very happy with my Medicare coverage, and I couldn’t live without my Social Security, but don’t get that damn government too involved in health care!
Forty-four years after its passage, the success of Medicare — just to review, a big-government program that has provided health care to tens of millions of seniors who would not have otherwise had it, does so more efficiently than private insurance, has seen costs grow at a slower rate than private insurance, and is smashingly popular with its recipients — has not seemed to fundamentally alter the public’s receptiveness to anti-government arguments. Ditto for Social Security. Ditto for the Veterans Administration, which is the only truly socialized health-care system in America, and one that is considered by many health-care experts to provide the best health care in the country.
How do we account for this? It’s true that some people are just idiots and will believe almost anything they’re told. But more than that, it shows the enduring power of ideological rhetoric. When something is repeated often enough, and with enough conviction, lots of people will end up believing it, no matter the facts.

Waldman leaves it there, with the unstated implication that the wisest strategy might be to organize around this constituency. Indeed, the battle for support of skeptical seniors for health care reform has produced few gains in recent years. Of course, seniors demonstrate the most impressive voter turnout rates of any demographic group. Politicians know it, and so seniors wield disprioportionate clout in legislative reform debates.
No doubt there are ways of asking seniors health care policy questions, which will elicit less fearful responses. But Waldman’s point is hard to deny. Still, the only known cure for misinformation is education. Many seniors are well-informed about reform proposals, but it appears that many are not. But if there is any hope whatsoever, of making at least some inroads into the opposition of seniors, the support of their organizations is critical.
So what does AARP, the nation’s largest senior citizen’s organization (40 million members) counsel these days, as the battle for health security for America is being joined? The AARP web page debunking fear-mongering mythology about health insurance reform does an excellent job of exposing the myths about ‘death boards,’ ‘socialzed medicine’ ‘rationed care,’ patients’ decision authority, etc.
But any organization with 40 million members is going to have diverse views among its members, as one L.A. Times article, “Many seniors aren’t sure healthcare system needs repair” featured on its web pages makes clear. Unfortunately, the AARP mythology-debunking commitment, commendable that it is, doesn’t extend to mobilizing its members to speak out at town hall forums. The organization’s statement responding to President Obama’s recent town hall meeting is pretty much standard bipartisan boilerplate, skillfully avoiding statements of support for the more contentious measures. It’s a shame.
Certainly we can hope that the AARP will more aggressively address the fear-mongering in the days ahead, including use of direct mail, phone calls and perhaps public service ads, as well as web pages. When the Democratic health care reform bill is fully-fleshed out, very few organizations can do more than the AARP to secure it’s enactment. Regardless of what AARP or any Senior organization does, however, America needs to hear more from informed, articulate seniors favoring Democratic health reform proposals.

As yesterday’s staff post reflected, the experience of organized and angry crowds of health reform opponents during summer recess “town hall” meetings is raising some legitimate questions about the value of such events. If participants don’t represent the actual views of people in a given district, what’s the point in giving them opportunities to vent their spleen and gain media attention?
Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect notes today that this is not an unprecedented problem. He cites the widespread protests by seniors against the passage of “catastrophic health coverage” by in 1988 Congress as precedent; the led to the repeal of that legislation just a year later:

The bill had put most of the cost on a small group of wealthy seniors, and after passage, a a direct-mail organization stoked backlash over the funding structure, convincing many seniors they would pay the same $800 surtax as the wealthiest. It is remembered today mostly for the televised scene of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, then chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and, like Dingell, a baron whose authority had gone unquestioned, besieged by angry seniors blocking his car as he tried to exit a similar town meeting.

Schmitt goes on to cite some of the refinements in “astroturfing” since 1989, and concludes that alternatives to the traditional “town meeting” would be helpful to foster genuine representative-constituent communications and public engagement.

At times of big, transformational change, citizens must have a way into the policy-making process, but it can’t be one that’s dominated by the loudest, most disruptive, or best-funded voices. Technology means that people can acquire the text of legislation for themselves, can research members’ voting records, can organize themselves to be heard in a hundred new ways. But it doesn’t make it any easier for a member of Congress to figure out what they think, whether their views are based on misinformation or deeply held beliefs, or how intense their views are.

There are, as Schmitt mentions, some good models out there for more deliberative interaction between the public and its representantives, and better ways to assess genuine public opinion while improving knowledge of substantive issues. Supressing angry voices isn’t right, but neither is listening to no one else.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The conservative attacks on health care reform and Barack Obama’s economic plan seem to have reached a fever pitch this week. Their obsession with the topics has been matched only by the inanity of most of their critiques. Why are the conservative talking points on these issues grounded in such weak arguments? Is there something else at play here?
This reaction seemed strangely familiar as I read Matthew Yglesias’s recent post about the Christian Right’s obsession with gay marriage. As a matter of course, your average Christian Right crusader against gay marriage acts as though the issue vitally affects non-gay people: It cheapens “real” marriage and threatens the “traditional family,” they argue. Others claim that it enshrines relativistic morals and violates the religious rights of Christians. What unites most of these arguments is that they claim not to be about denying gay people their rights, but protecting non-gay people.
None of these arguments are particularly strong. And not coincidentally, if you spend much time around regular conservative folk (rather than pundits or spokesmen) who oppose gay marriage, they won’t be making them. Rather, you hear various forms of personal and Biblical condemnation of homosexuality, usually combined with outrage that these people demand legal protection for their unsavory behavior. You don’t hear this in public in part because dehumanizing gay people isn’t as generally acceptable as it used to be. But it’s still there, under the surface, and may be one of the reasons why critics of gay marriage keep fighting against gay marriage despite the ludicrous nature of their public arguments.
This may actually help explain many of the absurd conservative attacks on Obama’s economic and health care agenda. We’re painfully accustomed to hearing that Obama is herding Americans into socialism, is destroying the private-sector economy, and is determined to create a health care system that combines the bureaucracy of Great Britain with the ethics of Nazi Germany. Do the people repeating and encouraging this sort of talk really believe it?
Maybe, but there may also be something a little more direct going on in the conservative psychology. There was an interesting vignette at one of the infamous town hall meetings last week in which a disabled woman on crutches who had lost her health insurance was accosted by another woman who shouted, “I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!” amidst jeering applause from other health reform opponents. That was no more than a crude expression of what some conservative elite spokesmen have explicitly said, such as ABC’s John Stossel, who describes Obama’s plan as “a form of expensive, taxpayer-funded welfare.”
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it echoes what we heard repeatedly among angry grassroots conservatives during the 2008 campaign, particularly after the financial collapse: Irresponsible people (many of whom happen to be minorities) have wrecked the economy by taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford, and were subsequently trying to elect Obama to get themselves more welfare at the expense of good, productive people who didn’t live beyond their means. Indeed, long after welfare reform supposedly took this conservative wedge issue off the table, anger about “welfare”–as applied to mortgage relief, progressive taxes, and now health reform–has made quite a comeback. One of the most potent things about the 1980s-vintage attacks on “welfare” was that they endowed some pretty ugly emotions with self-righteousness, and even a sense of victimization, for people who felt they were being punished for being productive. It seems clear that many of Obama’s right-wing critics are motivated as much by moral judgments about the beneficiaries of his polices as by their alleged impact on the economy or the health care system.
But in the same way that it’s no longer acceptable to publicly hate on gay people, it is not terribly respectable to publicly hate the poor, to consider minorities inherently inferior, or to express indifference towards the sufferings of fellow citizens. And so instead of the woman screaming “Why should I pay for your health care?” we get a host of specious public-spirited arguments about the destruction that health care reform will inflict on us all, be they elderly Medicare beneficiaries or the middle-class mother of a disabled child.
Conservatives are hardly unique in reacting selfishly or self-righteously to political issues, or dressing up personal prejudices with public policy arguments; we all do that from time to time, and to one extent or another. But whether we are talking about gay marriage, government-backed mortgages, or health care reform, there may well be a strongly dynamic relationship right now between privately held feelings of strong disdain for the purported beneficiaries of Obama’s agenda, and some of the wilder arguments being made publicly to attack it.

Matthew Ygelsias has a ‘Think Progress‘ post, “What’s the Point of These Health Care Town Halls?,” which can be read as a continuation of the topic Ed raised earlier today in his TDS post “Should Town Hall Meetings Matter?”
Yglesias riffs on Michael Crowley’s post commending Sen. Claire McCaskill’s handling of a town hall meeting earlier today. Yglesias agrees with Crowley about McCaskill:

She was pitch-perfect: polite and responsive without being a pushover, armed with clear and compelling facts (emphasis on things any health reform bill will *not* do) and firm when necessary. She shamed one of the loudest hecklers by reminding him that “we have good manners in Missouri,” but without losing her own temper. I know the mid-day MSNBC audience is small, but I feel like almost any open-minded person who saw this performance would come away trusting McCaskill over the protesters.

Sounds like it might make a good training video on how to handle the GOP goon squads that have been showing up at some of these forums, but Yglesias provides no link. Looking at the big picture, Yglesias wonders whether the town hall meetings are worth the trouble:

…Watching McCaskill on TV what I mostly thought of was that I don’t understand why members of congress are holding these town halls. There’s been so much focus on the spectacle of the whole thing that nobody’s really stepped back and explained what the purpose of these events are other than to give us pundits something to chat about. Obviously this is not a good way of acquiring statistically valid information about your constituents’ opinions. And it doesn’t seem like a mode of endeavor likely to increase the popularity of the politician holding the town hall. The upside is extremely limited, and you’re mostly just exposing yourself to the chance that something could go wrong.

Yglesias gets an earful of answers in the comments. Nothing earth-shaking, but some thoughtful insights, such as ‘Dan’s take:

The point is to establish anti-Washington credentials. Remember when McCain was begging for Obama to do a series of town halls together last summer? Something about the format seems to jive well with the angry-white-guy populist shtick.

Adds ‘Henry B.’:

I think the reason for doing them is primarily custom and secondarily the need to generate favorable local media coverage. If you’re a member of Congress and you do a couple town-halls and don’t screw up too badly, you can count on some nice pictures on the front of the local papers. It gives people back home proof that you’re making an effort to stay in touch with your constituents.
There is, of course, an unusually large downside risk this year, and I think that’s why a lot of members of Congress have canceled their town-halls this year. Obviously the members who are going forward with their town-halls are getting more attention, but I work on the Hill and have heard of several members who aren’t doing any town-halls.

‘Ted’ shares Ygelsias’s view:

Everyone’s making good points about the value of town halls in the past. But if these things are going to be regularly astroturfed, I agree with MY that it’s hard to see the upside right now, for individual candidates.
I’m not sure what the overall effect has been on health care reform. Ambinder is saying that the right has blown it by letting their crazies run with the ball. But I haven’t seen a whole lot of effective messaging from our side, either. The net effect may be that people are convinced that the teabaggers are nuts, but remain confused & apprehensive about health policy.

A commenter named ‘Midland” explains:

…Most politicians get their start talking to people one on one and get to the top doing the same. That’s why so many of them seem so inarticulate on television: they didn’t get to where they are going to acting school, they got there by talking to a whole lot of people in small groups. About politics, about themselves, about things they believed in, for good or ill.
The saddest thing about this latest blast of meanness from the right is that town halls, for most of the last two decades, have been a refuge of intelligent, adult political debate. No matter how stupid, bombastic, trivial, or dishonest the network coverage, a politician in a honest town hall meeting usually got sincere questions from thoughtful citizens. It was always a welome contrast to the Beltway gasbags.

‘Njorl’ suggests an interesting idea:

…The Democrats best strategy would have been to hold simultaneous town halls all over the country. You’d get fewer shipped-in crazies that way.

The bottom line, simple as it sounds, may be that, with major electronic media so unwilling to give fair coverage to the case FOR Democratic health care reform proposals, proponents simply have to take every messaging opportunity available.