Town Halls and Who Goes

Howard Dean and the DNC are all excited about Fox News Channel Shepard Smith's admission after last night's New York "town hall" that tickets to the event had been distributed by the McCain campaign, the New York Mayor's office and some independent groups. For the DNC outrage factory this was, um, outrageous. [Note to media bias hunters: The RNC outrage factory is just as outrageously outraged, but about other stuff.] Here is Dean in a statement:

If Senator McCain likes to brag so much about running a transparent campaign, why is he copying the Bush campaign model by stacking this event with his prescreened supporters? If that is John McCain's idea of straight talk, the American people are in for a long and disappointing campaign season.

But Dean's animated response (there was more) raises a question. Who goes to McCain town halls? For most events so far this campaign, anyone who shows up can attend. As often as not, there is plenty of extra room in the hall/high school gym/church basement. Tickets are not required, though as of about a month ago, you will be screened by the secret service. Predictably, most of the people who show up are McCain supporters, and many of them find out about the event from the campaign. But there are plenty of detractors too who show up with critical (or crazy) questions, or as happened at a rally in California a few weeks ago, pink shirts and the screaming oration unique to Code Pink protesters. (Disruptive protesters are escorted from the hall.) McCain's aides like to say that their boss's best moments come in front of emotional and even hostile crowds, as long as they are willing to listen to what he has to say. (At the town hall today in New Jersey, there was a young woman who had written "Obama" across her chest in pen, with a peace sign.)

Last night was different. The McCain campaign did not precisely preselect the crowd, or screen the questions, but the invite list was controlled, and the general public was not invited. This was explained by campaign operatives as a function of having an event that sat a couple hundred in a city of 8 million people. But it also raises the question of how the crowds in joint McCain/Obama town hall crowds could be selected. The most likely explanation is that they will be chosen by a third-party group, like a polling firm, looking for either a broad cross section or a group of undecideds or independents.

Which raises another question: Will those joint town halls even happen? Obama responded today to McCain's proposal of 10 weekly joint appearances, with a counter proposals of one new town hall on the Fourth of July (when people don't exactly watch TV for politics) and a forum in August. The McCain people believe that this shows that Obama was never serious about actually joining in the town halls, despite Obama's initial stated enthusiasm. I would say that it just shows that Obama recognizes there is little for the Democrat to gain from meeting McCain on his own turf.