After Downing Street — Your Representative Is Only a Modem Away

By David Nather, CQ [who pretends there is no public push for impeachment without citing a shred of evidence, even while reporting on the public push for impeachment]

The town hall meeting in the Philadelphia suburbs was advertised as an opportunity to talk with Rep. Joe Sestak about the Iraq War. But when the freshman Democrat and former Navy vice admiral stood up in the lecture hall on the Swarthmore College campus Aug. 16, the first half hour of questioners demanded to know why Congress would not impeach President Bush. And Vice President Dick Cheney, for that matter.

Sestak didn’t try to please the crowd. Impeachment would fail, he told the audience of roughly 200 people, and “we will have spent a year and a half on nothing.” They didn’t buy his reasoning. “Republicans would not have given that answer. . . . They stand up for what they believe,” one woman said.

From that, one might conclude that Sestak was facing a groundswell of public demand for Bush’s impeachment. But he wasn’t, and he knew it. A local group, Delaware County Wage Peace and Justice, had warned him in advance that it planned to raise the subject. Sestak already had talked about the Iraq War at a previous town hall meeting, and the group told him its members wanted to talk about impeachment this time.

The meeting was a classic example of how hard it is for members of Congress — or any politicians, for that matter — to accurately gauge public opinion. National polls may not reflect the feelings of a particular state or district. Traditional town hall meetings such as Sestak’s, dozens of which were held in congressional districts across the country once again this August recess, are sometimes stacked by activist groups on a favorite issue or attended by the same 20 people each time. Phone calls, letters and e-mails can be generated in bulk by special interests.

So what can lawmakers do when many of the usual methods of measuring public opinion are broken? One answer that is quickly gaining popularity among members of Congress from both parties is to use Internet technology to call thousands of constituents and have a massive conference call with people they might never hear from otherwise.

These “telephone town halls” are a relatively recent development, since the technology to call so many people at once, as opposed to advertising a call-in number and hoping people will use it, has become widespread in only the past two years. Think of it as a radio talk show where the host calls the listeners, or as a twist on “robocalls,” the automated election-year messages on which the technology is based. In this case, however, there is a live person on the line, and the listener has a chance to talk back.

The calls allow constituents to vent about hot-button subjects such as immigration; grill lawmakers about local issues such as traffic congestion or property taxes; share personal stories of struggles with medical bills or unemployment; or simply ask what Congress plans to do about such issues as college costs or veterans’ health care.

The technology allows lawmakers a bit more control over the discussion than they might have in a traditional town hall. A computer monitor displays how many callers are waiting to speak and summarizes the topics of their questions, so the politician can decide whether to spend time on the hottest topic of the moment or mix up the issues to get more of a variety.

“Because they’re random and they reach more people, I think they give you a better feel for the district and they give more people a chance to ask questions,” said Republican Rep. Dan Lungren of central California, who was one of the first members of Congress to try the calls. “You can get a better feel for the intensity of an issue, and you can get an early alarm about issues that may not get written up a lot in the press but are becoming more important in your district.”

Indeed, some lawmakers look for patterns of questions and pick up on emerging problems that they might have missed through other methods.

Rep. J. Randy Forbes, a Republican from southeastern Virginia, noticed that several senior citizens who participated in his telephone town hall meetings reported their private medical insurance policies had been canceled after they missed one premium payment, and they weren’t allowed to reinstate the coverage even if they’d had it for most of their lives.

Forbes said his staff has solved their problems case by case, but he also is trying to persuade insurance companies to change their policies, and he says he may propose legislation if the negotiations don’t work. “That’s something we never would have picked up in a letter, and we certainly wouldn’t have heard about it in a town hall meeting,” he said.

“˜Completely Different Universe’

The lawmakers who have tried the technology, which is catching on in the House but not yet in the Senate, think it’s a useful source of information to double-check what they find out through the more traditional methods of gauging public opinion: letters and e-mail, talking to people in grocery stores, and appearances at Rotary clubs and other community events.

They say the technology has the potential to offer a less-skewed picture of their constituencies’ views, thanks to the sheer number of constituents they can reach — often thousands in one phone call — and the fact that they’re more likely to reach people who are interested in politics but don’t have the time or ability to participate in the same way that activists do.

“It’s a completely different universe of people than you would get otherwise,” said Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who at one point during a telephone town hall meeting in August had 3,000 New Yorkers on the line. “The primary objective is to engage people who have largely checked out.”

Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, whose district in western Tennessee is almost 200 miles long, spent nearly an hour fielding questions about immigration in a conference call the week after Labor Day and said the calls reach enough people to give her a credible picture of what issues are rising in importance for her constituents. “It tells you what is resonating, what people are concerned about,” she said.

The calls get broad audiences because they’re capable of reaching thousands of households, even allowing for hang-ups and answering machines. When House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland conducted a telephone town hall on May 1, his vendor dialed nearly 40,000 phone numbers. Only about 5,500 of the households, or 14 percent, answered the phone; roughly 2,000 agreed to take part in the call, and an average of 700 callers stayed on the line throughout the course of the discussion. But that’s far more than most lawmakers say they could ever get to attend an in-person town hall.

The trade off, though, is a loss of personal contact. “I don’t feel it’s the same,” Sestak said. “I like the fact that I’m getting out to a place where people can come and see me.”

Even political scientists, who have criticized public officials for being too distant from the public and too reliant on the views of wealthy contributors, and political activists say the usefulness of the telephone town hall only goes so far. Electronic meetings are “still an unrepresentative sample of politically interested people who participate, but probably more representative of the active electorate than the more usual sources” of information, said Morris P. Fiorina, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University.

Democratic pollster Jeremy Rosner, who finished his doctoral dissertation this spring on how members of Congress measure public opinion on national security issues, said telephone town halls can be a useful tool to reach more people — as long as members don’t use them as an excuse to avoid eye contact with their constituents. “You’re just sitting in your office, so you don’t have the randomness of running into someone in the hall,” he said. “The smarter members realize that, and they’re taking steps to make sure the new technologies don’t cut down on their contact with people face-to-face.”

Going “˜Ballistic’

The issues at the top of national opinion polls dominate telephone town meetings as well. Listening to the pulse of calls that both Democrats and Republicans receive on immigration — almost always hostile to illegal immigrants, rarely focused on the debate about giving them a path to citizenship — makes it easy to understand why legislation to revamp federal policy stalled this year.

Blackburn, for example, touched a nerve among her reliably Republican constituents when she opened her conference call by describing a bill she planned to introduce that would crack down on illegal immigrants with criminal records. The rest of the session was dominated by constituent frustration about the current system: jobs lost to illegal workers, troubles in the schools and Congress’ inability to agree on solutions.

“It just makes me absolutely ballistic,” one woman said, when she calls a government agency and has to press “1” for English. “Are these Mexicans not going to be happy until we rewrite our Constitution in Spanish?”

Blackburn listened sympathetically to each call, then told the audience that her legislation was one answer to most of their problems.

Weiner’s telephone audience was more liberal — not surprising given the reliably Democratic nature of the parts of Brooklyn and Queens he represents. Callers asked about corporations that allegedly profit from the Iraq War and about the lower cost of prescription drugs in Canada. But even he faced demands for Congress to do more to deport illegal immigrants. One caller noted that an illegal immigrant from Peru was one of those charged last month in the execution-style slaying of three college students in Newark.

The other national issue that tends to dominate the calls, not surprisingly, is the war. Unlike immigration, though, there is no clear pattern to the kinds of questions lawmakers get, so they draw different conclusions.

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who represents most of San Jose, a Democratic bastion, said the war was the top issue in her August telephone town hall meeting and most of the callers wanted a total withdrawal of U.S. troops. But Lungren, who represents solidly Republican Sacramento suburbs, said he found that “the temperature on the war was much higher six months ago,” suggesting that “people are taking note of some of the changes on the battlefield, and now they just want to know, what do we do now?”

But Republican David Dreier, who holds monthly telephone town hall meetings for his constituents in the northeastern Los Angeles suburbs, said no one participating in the last session, held the same night as the Blackburn call, brought up either Iraq or immigration.

Often, callers focus on issues that affect them more directly. In May, for example, Hoyer fielded questions about Washington-area traffic congestion and related topics, such as encouraging employers to offer telecommuting as a partial solution. Iraq never even came up. Republican Frank R. Wolf, who represents Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs, says that while Iraq and immigration tend to dominate his telephone town halls, congestion ranks a close third.

One of Blackburn’s exchanges was a vivid illustration of how random constituent concerns can appear. A caller complained that a 1986 law requiring emergency rooms to treat those in dire need, even if they lack medical insurance, has transformed the ER where she works into “a walk-in clinic” for the poor. She even cited the law’s formal name: the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. Revisiting the law is far from the front burner in Congress right now, but Blackburn promised to take a look at the issue from her seat on the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

Growing Competition

So far, few senators have tried the telephone town halls, and there hasn’t been a big push from the leadership of either party to do so, possibly because anyone who represents an entire state would have too many calls to make. One senator who has tried, Republican Lindsey Graham, addressed that problem by holding sessions for different sections of South Carolina.

Since 2005, the telephone town halls have been an increasingly competitive business for the vendors who offer them, including Tele Town Hall of Washington, iConstituent of Los Angeles and The Franking Group of Salt Lake City. Each charges from $2,500 to $3,000, on average, to stage a town hall, depending on the number of calls made.

Rosner, the Democratic pollster, said lawmakers he interviewed for his dissertation who had the best sense of their constituents’ views were the ones who used a variety of techniques — not just traditional or telephone town halls, but random conversations at grocery stores, talks with well-connected people such as city council members or even barbers, and casual strolls through their own neighborhoods.

And that’s how most lawmakers see the telephone town halls: as one more barometer of public opinion, a promising method for reaching people who are often tuned out of politics. “It’s a wonderful supplement,” said Blackburn. “It’s another tool in the toolbox.”

This story originally appeared in CQ Weekly.

After Downing Street Post