A few impressions on a telephone town meeting

The following report was submitted by Around Annandale contributor Jack Winston:

Earlier this month, Rep. Gerry Connolly held his fifth Telephone Town Meeting of the year. The traditional Congressional Town Hall, typically held in a town hall or school auditorium, allows members of Congress to meet constituents in person and discuss issues of importance with them. Sadly, these meetings have recently attracted vocal single-issue partisans who hijack the proceedings for the benefit of a sound bite on the 24-hour news feed.

A new alternative is the telephonic town meeting, which has been embraced by Rep. Connolly. This is how it works:

The meeting was announced on Connolly’s official website. People who sign up to participate are informed when they’ll be called to join the meeting. In my case it was 7 p.m. on Dec. 2. At the appointed hour, the phone rang and I was placed in the meeting. Connelly’s aide, George Burke, opened the meeting by explaining the format for the one-hour session. It would start with opening remarks by the congressman, followed by questions and answers and closing remarks. If we intended to ask a question we were told to press “*3.” A screener would then queue us up for the question and answer portion of the meeting.

Connolly talked about how the 11th district is benefiting from federal stimulus funds: $640 million spent in the district; 348 federal contracts funded (two-thirds of Virginia’s total); 442 teacher jobs saved in Fairfax County; $77 million for the early start of the Dulles rail project with money to complete the Fairfax County Parkway. He said we suffered the lowest job loss in the recession and now have the lowest unemployment rate at 4.7 percent.

Connolly explained why he supports the House-passed health care reform bill and said he is in favor of President Obama’s plan for Afghanistan. He said he broke with the Democratic Party by voting against the secondary release of TARP funds. He felt that unspent TARP money should be applied to drawing down the deficit. His opening remarks concluded after 15 minutes and then the meeting was open to questions.

Almost all of the questions were directed toward health care. The questioners were well-versed on the issues and asked pointed, well-formulated questions. Connolly did an excellent job responding to specifics and advancing his positions. It wasn’t entirely a love-fest though; some of the questions were obviously coming from folks who disapproved of one of the congressman’s positions. But it was all polite and decorous.

By the time Connolly concluded the meeting with his brief closing remarks, I felt I understood his positions on health care, the stimulus, and Afghanistan.

I also felt something was missing. It took a while for me to put my finger on it, but then it hit me. I was alone in my home office. The meeting had occurred completely in the vacuum of cyberspace. It was me and the disembodied voices over the speaker phone. I never saw the congressman, had no idea of the number of people in attendance, and did not see the expressions of the questioners. Were they blowing kisses or were they angry? I could only conjecture.

My impression of the telephone town hall is that it is a very effective mechanism for presenting information and allowing for some limited questioning from the public. But it more closely resembles a written position paper, albeit with the audio medium replacing the printed word, than it does a true town hall meeting. It most certainly should not be considered a replacement.