The Walden Crowd: Angry, Orderly, and Organized.

The hardest thing to notice is what did not happen.   After all, there is nothing to see.

My morning paper

I saw a different Walden Town Hall event than the one described in the Mail Tribune.

Sometimes the biggest things are the hardest to notice.   Observe for a moment that we did not have another shooting war in Europe in the second half of the 20th Century.   Notice that smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases have not killed twenty, forty, or eighty percent of us.   Notice we avoided a nuclear war, so far.  Had they happened they would have been the biggest things to happen, but we tend to take for granted what did not happen, so don't pay attention to the biggest things.

The Mail Tribune article described things that happened.   They did not describe the big things and the big things are what did not happen.  What did not happen was that the meeting was not disorderly under the circumstances of there being strong opposition to Walden personally and to the positions of his party and there being a thousand people together in a gymnasium eager to let him know they were unhappy.   We have seen televised Town Halls where there was widespread disruption and sustained chanting.  It did not happen.

Tribune photo:  focused on the exception.

I observed from the crowd responses that a great many people in the audience were firmly motivated on one side or the other, with a significant majority in opposition to Walden's policies on health care in particular.   The vast majority of people cheered, booed, and many held up signs of "Agree" or "Disagree".  The mood was not somber nor was this courtroom demeanor, but it was familiar: it felt like a sporting event with a home team crowd and a visiting team crowd with a few additional people who were just there to watch the game.  

What did not happen were fights, shoving, or disruptions of the game.

Agree signs, disagree signs.

There was un-civil behavior by a few people.  Some loud shout-outs of opposition to Walden. The man in the green shirt was real, and it was accurate for the Mail Tribune to show what the camera saw, a man in green, standing and shouting.  He dominates the photo.   What I noticed was the twenty or thirty people surrounding him, sitting in their seats, holding red signs of disagreement.  

We did not see chaos.  We saw a Duck game.

I'll stand where I want when I want.

A man who identified himself as "John Mitchell" walked from a front row seat on the other side of the gym among a few other pro-Walden supporters to cross the floor to stand conspicuously on the steps mid-stairway in front of a group of Indivisible supporters, blocking the view of a couple dozen people.  Asked to sit down he grinned, told the group he didn't want to, waved, then stood defiantely mid stairs.  There was grumbling around him.  "Hey, sit down."  What did not happen was a physical confrontation.  They waited him out.  He got bored and moved away.  No news to report.

The Tribune photographed something which indeed happened, Walden behind a lectern, where he was, briefly, during the Pledge of Allegiance.   The photo shows him from the side, waist up, wearing a blue blazer.    The photo is real--but wrong.

The photo suggests a strong man in a defensive posture, but the real story, and certainly the one intended to be communicated by Walden,  is 180 degrees opposite.   

The gym setting could have been set up with seats in the middle, allowing Walden to be in a theater-seating arrangement at one end of the crowd, a wall behind him, a lectern in front of him.   It is a position of power for a presenter.   He would face his audience, he has a wall behind him, he can have a lectern between himself and the audience, and he can have staff on his flanks.  It would not have looked "wrong" and indeed it would have looked "normal", a presenter addressing his audience.   That was the setup in a Wyden Town Hall, in front of a very friendly audience, and it is the near-universal system for Trump rallies, except that Trump sometimes arranges for there to be a backdrop of friendly faces immediately behind him.   The photo the Tribune used suggested that setup--Walden behind a lectern.

Tribune photo 180 degrees wrong

Walden did not do that, for 99% of the meeting.  

Walden took the most exposed, the most vulnerable, the most open, the most accessible possible way of addressing the crowd, short of stripping naked.  He moved away from the lectern and stood with a hand microphone out in the middle of the bare auditorium floor, he approached the questioner, he listened with apparent empathy to the usually-hostile question, he nodded as he listened, he acknowledged the disapproval of the audience, and he acted as if he welcomed being surrounded on all sides by concerned, patriotic Americans who were yelling at him in disapproval. 

The real story: exposed in the arena

Walden looked strong, brave, accessible, reasonable.    It was political judo.  Readers of this blog who strongly disapprove of Walden may resist acknowledging anything good about Greg Walden's performance.   That would be a mistake.  It is foolish to ignore the strengths of an opponent.

The big story at Walden's Town Hall was that he came to Jackson County and with apparent good will and openness heard from the people who oppose him, and that he said he generally agreed with their concerns.  

Literally and metaphorically, he came out from behind the lectern.

The result is that Walden inoculated himself from the charge that he was an out-of-touch big shot from Washington, DC.   Walden let himself be vulnerable and he absorbed and accepted the criticism.   In a metaphor of a tennis player practicing by hitting against a wall, he was not a hard wall against which to practice, with balls rebounding sharply back; instead he was a deep soft pillow into which the hits absorb, lose their energy, and fall harmless.    In the metaphor of judo, the strength of the opponent's move is not resisted directly; instead, it is bent into a circle so that the opponent's power exhausts himself without damage.  Walden was a soft pillow.  Walden used adept judo.

Vulnerable.  Accessable.

Democrats, progressives, and the generalized opponents of Walden want an opponent they can define so they can oppose with clarity.  Walden adeptly made that harder by appearing to agree with nearly every concern brought to his attention.

Did Walden just re-assure his re-election?   No.   He almost certainly helped himself but he--and many other red-state Republican House members--are still vulnerable.  In showing himself to be accessible and empathetic with the health care goals of his opponents he revealed that he understands where the center of political gravity is in this state. 

Voters like getting stuff, and he knows it.

Seniors like their Medicare.  Hospitals like not being driven into bankruptcy.   Citizens with pre-existing conditions of some kind like having access to health care.  The working poor like being eligible for expanded Medicaid.   Walden did not brag about his thrift; he called attention two times to his bringing $320 million dollars to Oregon to help fund their Medicaid expansion.  Greg Walden is not campaigning as a kill-Obamacare Republican.   He defends the key elements of Obamacare even as he and his party are working to destroy the elements of Obamacare that make them possible.  They are the dog that barked and caught up with the bus.  Now they are in power, conspicuously so, and can do what they want with the bus.

Keep the benefits but not the way to pay for them.

His political vulnerability is that the politics of health care has turned against him.  His GOP base thinks it hates Obamacare--so he must oppose it--but a great many of them need what Obamacare offers, and his political allies--the ones he helped get elected to Congress--are out to kill it.   Worse, a great many of them, especially in the Freedom Caucus, joyfully express their desire to kill it and their philosophical opposition to it.   Walden cannot pretend this is an accident or mistake.  Too many of his allies are proud of killing the parts of Obamacare that Walden's constituents need and like.

Walden's problem is that he is stuck being a Republican in an environment of hard-edge political trash talk by Republican budget hawks and people who oppose Medicaid generally and Medicaid expansion especially. 

If Republicans take up health care "repeal and replace" again--which appears to be underway, then Walden will be shown to have failed his District.  He will either be weak--rolled by the big boys--or he will be a traitor who sold out the working poor in order to be loyal to the Republican caucus.   The courage he showed in letting himself be vulnerable on the gym floor will not matter.   What non-affiliated voters will see is a man who was more loyal to the Republican brand than he was to the people of his District.   

Still, there is big hope for Walden.  After all, it is a Republican-majority district. 

Surely he is too nice a guy to betray us.

But health care killed a Democratic majority when they had one in 2009 and it can do its same black magic with a Republican majority in 2018.   

Walden and Trump promised us universal, inexpensive, simple and really terrific health care. That sounded pretty good to voters.  But voters will not get it because they promise something impossible.   Walden knows it.  Democrats in the District know it.  

Can Democrats communicate that that "nice guy" Walden promised them a pipe dream and helped elect a Congress that wants to put hundreds of thousands of his constituents at risk of bankruptcy?   That is their task.

Walden's task is to make people believe that a guy as nice as Walden wouldn't really do something as mean as that.