Political Communication and Reform  

The town hall meetings that have been organized regarding healthcare are like a stack of gold bars in your leaky life raft.  You want them, but they do no good in your situation.

I worry that the Town Hall meeting is getting a bad rap due to all the flare-ups of unreasonable behavior that we have seen at some of these meetings.  It would be unfortunate if the pathways towards better democracy that were related to town hall meetings were truncated.   Hopefully, people will not view the Town Hall meeting, and any relative, as anti-democratic and/or encouraging incivility.

We’ve taken the town out of the town hall meeting.  Usually we think of a town hall meeting as one in which the whole town attends.  However, this becomes impossible once the town becomes a whole state or nation.  Moreover, these meetings have become media events disguised as real democracy.  The funny thing is that Town Hall’s organized by the Democrats have often backfired.  But in any case, both parties stack the deck and use the town hall to further their predetermined agenda.

The simple answer to the problematic town halls and a better deliberative model is two-fold.  Firstly, the attendees should be a random sample of the local population.  Secondly, the meeting itself should be run by the same folks who run the elections, or a suitable non-profit.  The meetings would hopefully get picked up by local public radio.  I think with these simple fixes, the quality of democracy at town hall meetings would improve.

This would make the whole process much more informative for those in attendance, and just as importantly, those that listen in.