Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) held a town hall meeting on health care in his district last night — and seemed to be doing his best to avoid controversy.
Grayson stuck to policy specifics — though at one point he was confronted by a man who tried to turn Grayson’s “die quickly” attack on the Republicans right back at him. “I’d like to know if he’s aware that it was actually Richard Lamm, Democratic Governor of Colorado, in 1984, who said it’s your duty to die if you get sick,” the man said. “And I think that that’s a hypocritical statement of yours, to tar other people with something that the Democrats said.”
“You have mischaracterized what I said, you’ve mischaracterized what Gov. Lamm said,” Grayson replied. “Our time is limited tonight, and I’m not gonna debate politics, I’m gonna debate health care. So we’re gonna go on to the next question.” He then proceeded to talk about the need for a public option to create health care competition:
The real fireworks actually came from outside — with a Tea Party demonstration. As Mother Jones reports:
The rest of the Teabaggers (every protester I spoke to said he was a member of or otherwise affiliated with the “Tea Party Patriots”) mostly had gripes that had little to do with Grayson’s comments or the actual state of political debate in Washington. Instead, they railed against the usual bogeymen: a government takeover of health care (not happening), Barack Obama (plotting socialist overthrow), and the Federal Reserve (a target they share with Grayson, who has cosponsored a bill to audit the Fed). None of the protesters I spoke with was particularly well informed. Jones didn’t appear to know that Grayson wanted to audit the Fed, even as he was telling me that the economic meltdown was the Fed’s fault. Hoyt, who brought a cardboard cutout of Grayson to the rally, couldn’t say why the cutout had a “Congressman from ACORN” button on its suit pocket.
