What an absolute blunder the Democrats are making on this — especially in this day and age of the alternative media.

Tell you what. The Dem reps and senators come to these meetings determined to preach and propagandize. They completely misjudge their audience. When many in the “congregation” show themselves unwilling to put up with patronizing sermons and platitudes, these politicians completely ignore the wisdom given by an old seminary instructor to his pastorate students on the issue of sermons: “If you do not strike oil in twenty minutes, stop boring.”

What to do to calm things down? Stop the sermonizing. Announce that you are going to stop speaking and you are going to start listening to the opinions of all those in the room who wish to speak, whether for or against the proposal. You will have these opinions recorded and you will listen to them once again after the session and consider them all carefully. Then you do that. You open the doors and the floor and ask everyone to say their piece forcefully but calmly and politely and you ask the rest of the attendees not to interrupt or demonstrate for or against a speaker. You yourself try to avoid any argumentative clashes with the speakers. You can always address what you consider to be misinformation afterwards through press releases or media interviews.

What you do is show everyone in that “congregation” that you fully understand the way American democracy is supposed to work. It is that darned simple. What you do not do is have burly thugs shut dissenters out of the room and then go on preaching to those already in your corner. In so doing, what an awful picture you create for this nation: American citizens standing before a closed door, loudly demanding their right to be heard by governmental authority. It does sound a bit like 1776.

Wolverine is exactly right. What’s wrong here is the Dems are not stepping back and taking the opportunity to turn down the heat. Most of these members of Congress are preaching the Obama line on the issue instead of opening the conversation up for ideas. The people attending these town halls don’t seem to be getting riled until they are kept out of the room by force or when the congressman starts off with a series of statements that are right out of the Obama propaganda sheet on the issue. If they just sat back and listened to opinions and then maybe share their thoughts instead of preaching, this would go a whole lot better.

It’s not very smart for the Dems to keep pushing on this as they have. There are ALOT of people who are very concerned about the power this will put in the hands of the feds, and there doesn’t seem to be the same level of passion on the pro side of this. I haven’t seen any videos of large numbers of healthcare supporters going to Republican representatives clamoring for more federal gov’t involvement in healthcare.

Sorry, Lovisa. No sale. Look more closely at the people standing in front of those closed doors. Yes, they are angry and opposed to a policy they believe will be rammed down their throats. But the anger is greatly intensified when the doors are closed in their faces by big, burly union guys.

These people have been brought up to believe that their right to speak out is precious and guaranteed by our system of governance and the blood which was shed to preserve it. And you shut the doors in their faces? I suspect you have studied European history at length. Slamming doors in the faces of the people was tried often during the years leading up to 1848 and you know the result. The lesson is that the Dutch and the British were smart enough to try other methods — the Dutch quickly and the British belatedly — and they did not have to have military troops fight the people in the streets of their own capital cities. 1848 was one of the great lessons in history.

As a member of government, you can stem a great deal of anger by being inclusionary and not exclusionary and looking and sounding like you mean it. You stop preaching and start listening. It can have a calming effect, especially in this country and with this particular part of the population, which is in a goodly part elderly and not much given to such activism. Do not believe all this bullcrap about “astroturfing.”

Closing the doors and running away is not the answer in my book. You have to come out of hiding at some point. And your avoidance of the people will just get them angrier and angrier. You have to run eventually for re-election, and you can’t do that very well when you isolate yourself from a big sector of the public. Large mistake.