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A few months ago, I attended a roundtable discussion with West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller on healthcare reform. Horror stories were exchanged, heads shaken in disbelief.
It occurred to me--about the time a gentleman with a guardianship issue hijacked the discussion for nearly twenty minutes before being coaxed out of the room by Rockefeller staffers--that Jay Rockefeller, of THE Rockefeller clan (a name, to quote the narrator of "Bartleby, the Scrivener," that "rings like unto bullion") could have been anywhere else, or like many of his class, comfortably insulated from this kind of whistle stop, greasy spoon ambush. Rockefeller, in the middle of a statewide "listening tour" on healthcare reform, probably starts many a day like this.
Mike Castle can sympathise. The Delaware Republican recently completed a series of Town Hall meetings, and answered harsh criticisms of his vote on cap-and-trade.
The YouTube video shows a representative exchange with a woman in the audience: reviving the Obama birth certificate controversy, she waves her own birth certificate, exhorts the crowd to follow her lead in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and generally sidetracks the discussion.
Note that the crowd boos when Castle says, "he [Obama] is a citizen," and pleads with questioners to keep their focus.
Bad food, state fairs, angry mobs, spontaneous jingoism. The life of a politician is a labor of love.