At the Monday evening town hall, Claire’s staffer Michelle Sherod listened politely as the wingers sent their message about why they hate health care reform. They lined up at the mike and spoke cogently, sometimes wittily, one after another. As it turned out, they were there to complain about health care, not the energy bill. And did they ever complain. It was fascinating.
To give them as much benefit of the doubt as I can muster, I’d say they were … passionate. Unfortunately, for many of them passion is indistinguishable from rudeness. Basically, every time Sherod opened her mouth, regardless of what she had to say or how tactfully she expressed it, several people in the crowd of–I don’t know, 400?–shouted at her. (The organizers planned for 150 attendees, by the way, and had to move us to a larger area when the crowd overflowed the meeting room.)
In the clip below, with Carl Bearden of Americans for Prosperity (aka tea baggers) standing behind her, Sherod opens the meeting. That hissing you might be able to hear at the end of the clip was a noise we heard often–the more civil ones in the group trying to shush the rowdies.
The crowd was passionate to the point of high dudgeon. Though they deny it, it’s no stretch to think they’d have pounded on the doors and windows of Claire’s office, yelling so loud that the owner of the business on the second floor flipped them the bird.
They’re frustrated, because McCaskill and Michelle Sherod may “listen”, but Claire’s not their gal. And what good does it do to whine to Bond about it? He has little power on this issue. They need for her to oppose the bill, and they know she won’t. So they’re pissed.
And paranoid. Hoowee, were they paranoid. More on that in a later posting.
McCaskill seems to think that the people at this meeting actually voted for her in the first place.
She’ll take their opinions seriously and vote like the Faux Democrat she’s turned out to be and in 4 years, these people still won’t vote for her.
by calling their behavior passionate. But I did notice that quite a few of the progressives who attended left early. One of them tells me she was horrified by the mood and the behavior of the audience, and she said that a mutual friend of ours who stayed felt more and more intimidated as the evening went on. It was obvious that the woman who stayed and her friend were not standing up and cheering, so they were getting some hostile looks and wondered if they’d be safe as they walked to their car. Another acquaintance of mine who stayed and even spoke late in the meeting admitted that at one point she checked out where the nearest exits were.
I think all of these people, if they had been writing the posting above, would have used a harsher word than “passionate.” I had mixed feelings. Some of the people in that audience are intimidating and scary. Most, I think, are just the dupes of unscrupulous Republican “thinkers”. They’re not necessarily mean. They have been misled.
…to the ex-military man claiming that Sen. McCaskill owes him an apology (from Stltoday).