Swords, Wonderful Swords

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Guest post by Tommy Torquemada

If you have not yet experienced a “virtual” town meeting hosted by a local politician, just wait a few months.

These carefully choreographed and tightly controlled electronic events are being embraced by politicians, mostly Democrats, as a way to avoid actually dealing with their constituents face-to-face at traditional, real-life town meetings, where they might be exposed to inconvenient questions and impertinent criticisms. Of course, you will never hear these same politicians admit that this is why they like these events so much. They always describe telephone town meetings in glowing, positive terms, claiming that they give them the “ability to reach out to more people”, allow them to “hear the concerns and questions of the voters on important issues.”

The reality, not surprisingly, is just the opposite. These telephone town meetings are more typically an abomination that:

1. Allows the politician to screen out any critical or uncomfortable calls, and accept only easy or supportive questions.

2. Enables the politician to inflict his or her views and positions on vast numbers of voters, while giving the false appearance of listening to the questions and concerns of the electorate.

3. Provides the politician with non-verifiable claims for press releases. (”Representative Moonbat held one of his popular telephone town meetings last night, reaching over 35,000 voters in the 69th District. He answered questions from 25 callers, most of whom expressed concern over the lack of progress in health care reform, and supporting his efforts to help pass this critical legislation.”)

4. Allows the politician to stack the “meeting” with union members or other special interest groups. (These friendly callers can dial-in early and queue up the initial questions, before the politican robo-calls out to other voters in the district.)

5. Allows the politician to claim to be soliciting feedback, using biased, meaningless on-line polls with questions like “Which issue is most important to you? 1. Progressive health care legislation. 2. Effective cap and trade legislation. 3. Saving polar bears from global warming. (These polls can also be used to flag potentially unfriendly callers and allow the screeners to block them from getting through to the politician.)

What Can You Do?
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When a politician in your area announces one of these telephone town halls, register to take part in it. (Or if you get cold-called to participate in one, accept the call and stay on the line.)

IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE ASKING A QUESTION or trying to confront the politician, that’s okay. STAY ON THE LINE AND LISTEN TO HOW THE WHOLE THING PLAYS OUT. ANALYZE WHAT YOU ARE HEARING AND EVALUATE JUST HOW CONTROLLING AND DISHONEST YOUR “REPRESENTATIVE” IS. In most cases, you will probably be incredulous and horrified at just how creepy these events can be. Listen to the “moderator” and how she or he presents callers. Does the politician get any articulate, critical comments or questions? Or are they all softballs and expressions of support? How many supportive callers identify themselves (either explicitly or inferentially) as members of unions or other special interest groups? Does it sound like the calls are all stacked in the politician’s favor? Listen to any “poll” questions: are they honest, fact-finding questions to gauge the feelings of the callers, or are they phony, biased queries that don’t even give you the option of dissenting from the politician’s stands?

BEWARE: If you intend to try to ask a question (see below), your answers to these polls can identify you as “unfriendly” and ensure that you will NOT get past the screeners. Best to avoid the poll questions altogether.

At the end of the telephone town meeting, how do you feel? Are you disgusted by what you heard? Read the politician’s press releases in the following days regarding the telephone town meeting that you just listened to. Do the claims match your own experience? If you are concerned, write letters to the editor, and also consider writing to your local news media demanding that they investigate the fraud and false claims inherent in this latest assault on the voters. And talk to your detached, moderate friends who tend not to pay attention. They need to be made aware of these electronic forums and exposed to the dishonesty built into them.

IF YOU ARE UP FOR ASKING A QUESTION, you need to play the system.
Remember, if the politician is a moonbat, you will NOT get past the screeners by being honest and saying up front that you want to ask a difficult or uncomfortable question, so be prepared. You need to act like a moonbat and talk like a moonbat, no matter how alien it feels. The screeners are on the look-out for people trying to slip by them, so it’s not sufficient to have a single, prepared, diversionary question. Be prepared to answer follow-up screener questions, and answer them like a true believer. But don’t overact, and don’t allow sarcasm to slip into your voice. Your goal is to convince the screener that you want to ask the politician a friendly question like “Representative Moonbat, I’m very concerned about passing a truly progressive health care bill. Do you support a public option, and if so what are you doing to help ensure that any health care bill includes it?”

If you make it past the screeners, and if the politician actually takes your question, ease into it. If possible, prepare ahead of time, and be very familiar with the politician’s record and past votes. Make sure that you start with a comment related to your screened question, and begin your comment in a friendly fashion, because if they sense that you are setting up for a critical comment, they can and will cut you off before you finish your statement. For example:

[Moderator: "Our next caller is Bob, who has a concern about meaningful health care reform."]

“Hi Representative Moonbat.”

“Hi, Bob”

“I just want say Thank You very much for having this town meeting. I think it’s a great idea.”

“Thank you, Bob, I enjoy having this opportunity to speak directly to everybody in the 69th District”

“Representative Moonbat, I know that you are working very hard to help pass progressive health care reform, and I know that you also have a very strong record in related areas, such as trying to protect our children by introducing strong gun control measures and getting assault weapons off the street…”

“Well, I try Bob, but I wish some of my conservative friends would be a little more helpful on that one, heh heh heh.”

“Right, and I know you’ve tried to protect our civil liberties by opposing the Patriot Act, and since you also voted to continue funding ACORN and to vote against illegal immigration controls and against several National Security bills, I was wondering what other measures you were planning to support in order to weaken this nation and destroy the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Of course, this is just an example and you should tailor your own comments to your personal concerns and to your own politician. At this point, you will probably be cut off, but there is a chance that the politician may actually come back with a retort, so be prepared. Nothing will undercut the credibility of your comment faster than being caught off guard and following up with nothing more than an Obamaesque “Uh…uh…Well, uh…”

If you are articulate and convincing, you can use the telephone town hall forum to your advantage and let thousands of people on the phone hear a valid criticism of the politician, probably voicing concerns that they themselves had been feeling.

Further reading
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Although these telephone town meetings have been around for several years, they have only started to become popular in the past couple of years, and many politicians embraced them during the August 2009 recess to avoid confrontational meetings with their constituents regarding health care. Therefore, not a lot of critical reporting has been done, with some notable exceptions listed below. Otherwise, you need to do your own research:

1. Politco’s Erika Lovely wrote a great article on this topic last month:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27404.html

2. Politco also provides a very interesting screenshot of a tele-townhall control panel (in this case, Broadnet Teleforum). It’s worth taking the time to bring up the PDF and carefully examining the displayed information and the controls:

http://www.politico.com/static/PPM43_080219_teleconfscreen.html

The Broadnet Teleforum web site is at:

http://www.broadnetconnects.com/Teleforum.html

This screenshot was provided as part of an earlier (Feb. 2008) Politico article on the subject, written by Josephine Hearn:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8586_Page2.html

3. Another business that is offering tele-townhall services is OrangePoint Communications (http://www.orangepoint.net/town_hall_teleconference.html). It’s unclear if they have their own software, or if they are just a Service Provider making use of somebody else’s product like Broadnet Teleforum.

4. It is enlightening to Google politicians’ press releases describing their use of these electronic forums:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=”telephone+town+hall”+”press+release”

Notice the uniformity of the phrases about reaching out to thousands of voters, getting feedback, and how the on-line polls showed overwhelming support for the politician’s positions.

These telephone townhalls have already, stealthily, worked their way into the political landscape. Most people don’t seem to be aware of them, or how they threaten the feedback traditionally provided by face-to-face meetings with politicians. If you are as concerned about these issues as I am, I urge you to educate yourself about them, pass on what you learn to your family and friends, and learn how to navigate through the system the next time one is offered in your community, so that your politician will be exposed to those opinions that he or she would prefer to ignore.