“How dare you? How dare you criticize those dear sweet insurance companies who’ve been shafting us royally?” say the teabaggers. “How dare you utter a syllable against them for quintupling their profits over a seven year period?”

Claire pointed out that the ten largest health care insurers made a profit of $2.4 billion in 2000 and $12.9 billion in 2007. Oh man, those stats made the wingers’ blood boil. Not against the greedy bloodsuckers driving some of us to bankruptcy and the rest of us to shopping Target instead of Macys.  No,no. They screamed at Claire. A man near me yelled, “Why do you get to decide what’s a fair profit margin?”

And when she said the average health insurance company CEO makes $10 million a year, they knew, knew that she was out to destroy their way of life. Not so, said Claire. “I’m not against capitalism.” That brought the roof down.

Claire stopped and looked at them for several seconds before saying, “I’m so disappointed.”

Take a look at how much sympathy that garnered her:

A warm crowd? Not so much.

Keep in mind,though, that the noise came only from the baggers. Not only did I fail to capture a single progressive–and there were many in the audience–screaming at the wingers or screaming at Claire for backing away from the public option, I also failed to capture any of the undecided-on-the-issue voters kicking up a fuss. They weren’t hollering their frustration with trying to make sense of this ungodly complicated, still evolving legislation that could make the difference for them someday between bankruptcy and still owning a home after they’ve had cancer treatment. So, no, I did not film the undecideds venting in any way, but they were there. I walked around for fifteen minutes before the event asking people about their views. Although I later learned that the  the other side of the gym was almost solid with the angries, still I found plenty of them on my side. And about the same number of pro-reform people. But what I found most was “I’m just here to get information. I don’t know what I think yet.”

They weren’t making any ruckus, and they probably got plenty of useful info. If they could hear Claire above the din.

Post-Dispatch:

U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill has been a prosecutor, a state legislator and Missouri’s chief fiscal watchdog.

But she drew on family to set the tone and win over a potentially antagonistic crowd at a health care forum Tuesday in Jefferson County.

(…)

After several rounds of initial boos and more than a few interruptions, the crowd seemed to warm to McCaskill’s mix of frank talk and tough love.

In the end, McCaskill presided over the two-hour forum mostly without incident – there was one arrest – and left to collegial applause.

The crowd who believe that “Obama is a Nazi who wants to kill your grandma and make you pay for abortions”; who booed Claire for pointing out that states with strong tort reform, like Missouri and Texas, still suffer from rising health care premiums; who jeered when she said that V.A. and Medicare recipients like their care (“It’s a broken system!”) did not, excuse me, “warm” to Claire McCaskill.

She sufficiently defused their fury to prevent a riot. That’s not Kumbaya. About halfway through the event, for example, the euthanasia nonsense came up, and Claire did a masterful job of describing a study done at the Mayo Clinic of people facing end of life issues. The Clinic very consciously made sure that patients and their families knew exactly what was taking place in their bodies and in their treatment. The study compared how satisfied those patients were to patients facing similar circumstances at UCLA and found, of course, that the Mayo Clinic patients were more satisfied. It also found that Mayo Clinic patients spent half as much on end of life care. The sort of explanation that the Mayo Clinic patients got is what the bill provides for. It reimburses doctors for the time spent conferring with patients.

The crowd took Claire’s description pretty calmly, though one man near me yelled, “Then why has Mayo come out against the bill?”

But that subject was a lead in for Claire to talk about fair treatment for seniors:

“One of the groups that’s most important to anybody to get elected, anybody, the most reliable, the most upstanding, the most sought after (inaudible) in America are our seniors. Do you think I would kick seniors in the knees? Really? I would not.”

The wingers went nutballs over that question. After the furor died down, Claire asserted that the public option will not turn into single payer. The teabaggers got hot about that statement, but getting hot is not the same thing as warming to her. Listen for yourself to their reactions on both points. (Please excuse the dizzying camerawork.)

To say that the crowd “warmed” to Claire is like saying that a kindergarten teacher calmed Bobby down. Yesterday, he hit five kids and broke ten toys. Today, he only hit three and broke five toys.

Treat yourself to Angry Black Bitch’s take on yesterday. She’d agree with me. “Warmed” to Claire? Their version of warming to a liberal is not to harm her physically. (And Claire isn’t even that liberal. She’s centrist.)

How do you handle several hundred grown up, angry children? Claire did it with sweet reason and the occasional–but only effective because she hardly ever resorted to it–Mom voice. As Clark pointed out, one of the best quotes of the day was her observation, early on, that “This can’t be about who’s the loudest,” spoken not angrily or condescendingly but with sweet reason.

Ten minutes later, as the right wing noise made speaking nigh impossible, she finally managed to get this argument in: “Do you see how many people want to speak? Do you want to be fair?”

But there was little she said that didn’t elicit jeers and yelling, usually from the same few loudmouths. Within thirty feet of me, there were half a dozen middle aged males who frequently screamed their displeasure.

Generally, Claire stuck to answering the questions, rather than trying to sell the crowd on universal health care. And it was interesting how those questions were selected. She asked those adamantly opposed to reform to raise their hands. Then she selected two women in the front row who had raised their hands to pick questions from two fish bowls for her to answer. In two hours, I don’t think I heard more than two or three questions that didn’t come from critics of reform. I don’t know whether the ladies were tossing aside the questions they didn’t like or whether the right wingers were more prolific question writers–because there were certainly plenty of liberals in the house.

Speaking of the liberals, they did occasional shushing, but they were much more subdued than those who attended the Carnahan event. It was almost as if they had decided en masse to give the wingers all the room they needed to show what kind of people they are. I spoke to a gentleman after the event and asked him whether he was pro-reform, anti-reform or undecided. He said that he was undecided, but that, given the behavior he had seen today, he leaned toward pro-reform.

To give you a sense of what Claire handled for two hours, watch her field a question about how unfair a public option would be to private insurers:

Did you catch that about the co-ops? I’m disgusted with her. The only thing I see that we can do about that is to visit her office in small groups to express our arguments against that. Certainly yelling at a town hall about it would do nothing but show that we’re fools.

She saw that behavior today. We need to get busy with a different tactic.