For good or ill, good ol’ Doc Hastings will be forgoing the honor of hosting a Town Hall Meetings — full of raucousness those things are — opting instead to discuss in speeches before Chamber of Commerce units — where he will be speaking out against that “single payer” plan that is, I would say, probably backed by the majority of Obama voters — and is not in the offing. 

This is too bad.  The volitile Town Hall environment could use a sedative, and those that are on edge viewing this debate in Existential Terms need a setting to doze off.

Actually I had been wondering something about Doc Hastings.  Has he wandered anywhere from the pedestrian “Bureaucratic Maze” suggestion  (’tis why Socialism and Libertarianism are always easier, I suppose) to the more lively “Death Panel” parcel, now en vouge?  The answer seems to be no.  On the other hand, this is something that inflicted better souls.

  Johnny Isakson — Republican Senator of Georgia, for instance.  A real yahoo I had not thought of as a yahoo before this last week.   To be fair, the only real reason I’ve pegged him as “reasonable conservative” is that his 2004 Republican primary race (to replace Zell Miller, and with a Democrat who was then occupying the district most famous for Cynthia McKinney, tountamount to a general election), pitted him against a couple of loons.  So, Isakson chimed in on the “End of Life Counselling”, and his role in the past in championing it.  And then, when that became inconvenient in arguring the reasonableness and generally bipartisan nature of that particular policy, he had to pull it back in.  I guess with him we’re just in a state where he cannot allow a part of his portfolio to provide Obama with with bi-partisan cover for an item suddenly politicized.

  Then there is Chuck Grassley.  He represents a sadder example, frankly, sucking himself into the Demagougic Whirl.  It is not enough that he fits the generically understood obstructionist role in Max Baucus’s committee in that arena of wheel-dealing.  (Can we just blow that one up?)  Perhaps the fact is that the space in the role of “Obstruction” has just shifted places.

Enter Arlen Specter, the Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat who has a bit of a “trust” issue with his Pennsylvania primary voters (and, for that matter, general election voters).
  He is the one who hosted what I think can now be thought of as the sort Example number One of the Disrupted Town Hall meeting.  I do not know how that one played politically for him — he didn’t really come out looking well in handling it (unlike, for instance, Claire McCaskill of Missouri).  Polls show him now losing to his 2004 Republican primary opponent, the otherwise basically unelectable man of CATO, Pat Toomey — we’ll see how much he can twitter back some trust to someone somewhere.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Doc Hastings and the 4th Congressional District of Wash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.