Medical Mosh Pits

Understanding the clashes at the health care "town halls"

Jesse Walker | August 13, 2009

Clashes keep breaking out at the "town hall" meetings devoted to discussing health care reform. Usually the excitement amounts to some angry questions and heckling, but sometimes there's more. Six people were arrested at a demonstration outside a meeting in St. Louis. Violence erupted at a town hall in Tampa after opponents of ObamaCare were locked out of the building. A North Carolina congressman cancelled a meeting after receiving a death threat; the pro-market group FreedomWorks, which was involved in some of the protests, fielded a death threat of its own. Supporters of the president's health care reforms, who used to tout the support he'd received from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, are now accusing the very same companies of riling up "mob violence" to stop the plan.

As the charges and countercharges fly, here are three maxims to keep in mind:

1. It isn't Astroturf after the grassroots show up. When the San Francisco Chronicle asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi what she thought of the protests, she replied: "I think they're Astroturf." In other words, there isn't real grassroots dissatisfaction with the direction health care reform is taking. There's just a facsimile of discontent, a show ginned up by cynical political operatives.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations, a London-based body of PR professionals, defines Astroturfing as "the practice of falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support by means of orchestrated and disguised public relations activity"; the examples it offers include "posting comments on others' blogs or on message boards" and "submitting supposedly amateur videos to YouTube." The equivalent action at the "town hall" meetings would be if someone claimed to be something she's not. That has happened: Early in August, a woman asking a pointed question at Wisconsin meeting identified herself as "just a mom from a few blocks away" who was "not affiliated with any political party." She turned out to have a long history of Republican activism.
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