I was at Diana DeGette's townhall yesterday, and it was interesting from the boring point of view.
No fingers were eaten in the making of the following video.
I know, how booooring. ;]
She wouldn't get all the way on the bus, unequivocally for the Public Option, but she did make a pretty good pitch. I'm personally not all the way satisfied with her responses.
I will say that the tone of the hall was generally pretty good. I sat next to a very conservative guy and talked to him for about 40 minutes before DeGette came out to speak.
He seemed to me representative of a lot of the conservative side there, who I'd say were about 1/3rd or so of the total group. He listened, he didn't shout, he took notes, and he was very respectful with me where our ideology diverged, and I returned the courtesy.
Two things had never crossed his mind:
- that the other Western Industrialized countries who all have some sort of universal coverage have lost less manufacturing jobs than we have, since that benefit is not part of the corporate payroll, and we should arm our companies similarly if we wish to be a net manufacturing exporter and
- he didn't know that the health insurers were exempt from anti-trust laws.
And in fact, I'm pretty sure he is the one that came away with a newer/updated viewpoint; and regardless of how incremental it was, it surely was a viewpoint that put him truly more to the center, than when he came in.
Why the above two ideas are not in the pitch from the Dems and dominating the news coverage mystifies me for the usual mundane and depressing reasons. Nonetheless, when a person of diverging ideology hears them, being honest with him/herself, finds that they are something to think about, rather than to shriek about.