The Blog of Larry Tagg

Don’t get me wrong—I’m for health care reform. But calling people who shout out things at town hall meetings “un-American,” as top Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer did recently in an op-ed column in the USA Today, is just plain clueless.

I’ve seen the videos. Some of those town hall meetings on health care reform are loud and chaotic. But I’m a classroom teacher, and I know this: a loud, chaotic meeting says more about the leader than it says about the people attending.

Take House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s YouTubed town meeting in upstate New York as an example. First of all, there aren’t an unmanageable number of people there. Maybe thirty or forty—about the same size as the high school classes I teach. And right away I noticed that, when Representative Hoyer started, everybody was pretty quiet. “What’s his beef?” I wondered. But then he started into a speech, full of high-sounding nothings, the kind he’s used to giving on the House floor, where nobody is expected to listen. Representative Hoyer doesn’t yet realize this is not the House floor, and that these people are listening, listening for something important. When they hear high-sounding nothings, these people object—chances are, they’ve given up something else to be here. Representative Hoyer ignores them, and continues to scale the heights of abstraction, like he would in the House. He attempts to make a point about the Erie Canal, and a lady in the front row says, “The Erie Canal?” just like I’d expect a good student to do if I mentioned the Erie Canal out of nowhere. He bulls through it, and starts telling them that he wants to “make a great country greater.” But the people who are there are to talk about health care reform, and now they’re starting to stand up and yell, the same as the kids in my classroom would do the minute they knew I was wasting their time. Pretty soon, sure enough, Representative Hoyer has a loud, chaotic meeting on his hands.

Poor Steny. He hasn’t ever really been this close to real mixed lot of constituents trying to have a moderated discussion of a real issue before. He wants to give another House floor speech. He’s surprised when people don’t want to listen. He’s surprised when the people don’t act like the representatives on the floor of the House.

Representative Hoyer was surprised that the lesson in democracy was not for the people, but for him.

The reason the people at the House Majority Leader’s town hall meeting become unruly was because they had no leadership. Every classroom teacher knows that, to have a voice that people will respect, you have to have a clear message. This is the Democrats’ present problem, the one that goes all the way to the top. If President Obama had at any time been able to elucidate a clear program, House Majority Leader Hoyer wouldn’t have had to get in front of his constituents and improvise. Does anyone know what the reformed health care plan is? I’m guessing that Representative Hoyer doesn’t know what the reformed health care plan is, nor President Obama, nor House Speaker Pelosi—because there isn’t one, at least not one that anyone can explain in a way that everyone can understand. The next time they fan out for their town hall meetings, the top Democrats need to have what every successful teacher has before he or she starts any class: a lesson plan.

And Representative Hoyer wants to demonstrate that he, along with House Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, can provide leadership for the free world, he must start by demonstrating that he can provide leadership for thirty or forty people. Besides being able to communicate a clear plan, he might need to spend a few minutes letting each person tell why they’re there and what their concerns are. Maybe he could choose a venue that wasn’t so huge and cavernous, for one thing. And then he could give up his microphone, and come out from behind his lectern, and take a chair with those people, and really have a discussion. Then they wouldn’t have to shout over his House speech.

Unfortunately, Representative Hoyer reacted out of arrogance, by hunkering down with Ms. Pelosi and typing out a message of contempt for the people who came to his town hall meeting, calling them “un-American.” They didn’t look “un-American” to me. They didn’t look to me like bought-and-paid-for hecklers, as Mr. Hoyer and Ms. Pelosi imply in their article. Their fear looks real. They look like some of my friends, angry and scared about the future. They look to me like people awash in the kind of anger that swirls in hard times when there is no clear voice from leadership.