Forum took pulse of health care debate

We sure know how to throw a good town meeting in Sandpoint!

If you weren’t in attendance Monday night at Community Hall, you missed a classic exercise in democracy as well the closest thing we’ll see to a public sauna in our lifetime.

Just to catch you up, Rep. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, has been crossing the state during the congressional recess to get the public’s pulse on proposed health care legislation.

He asked me to emcee the event and I didn’t have the good sense to come up with a good excuse to be watching the Mariners onTV instead.

Besides, some of these town hall events have turned out to be great theater. I have watched enough TV and checked out YouTube to know I had to be there. Besides, I thought I might actually learn something.

I have been amazed about how some seemingly normal people turn into a hate-filled, venom-spewing lunatics once they are handed a microphone at a public forum.

My thought is that a “normal” town hall meeting is too boring for TV coverage. For example, if someone would have called KXLY-TV early yesterday and told them they were going to wear a chicken suit with two AK-47s strapped to their side to the meeting, any bets the TV folks would have been there?

Never have so many people spoken so loudly about something they don’t know enough about than during this health care debate. Various interests have scared old people into thinking they will be facing firing squads if they get a case of the sniffles. Doctors are afraid they will be put out of business and insurance companies and trial lawyers are fearful they won’t be making enough money when the gravy train that is our health care system right now comes to a halt.

I thought I may as well have a front-row seat to whatever was going to happen. I brought my camera just in case.

People were lined up in front of the building for about an hour before the event started. As I walked up, I noticed Bob Linscott carrying a No Obama Care sign. I also saw a few pro Obama signs. It was a good omen that people with competing signs could stay in line without whacking each other.

As the crowd filtered in, each person signed in and was assigned a raffle ticket. The Minnick folks asked me if it was OK to employ the raffle ticket plan so that random people would have a chance to ask questions.

They also suggested that I ask audience members to come up to the front of the hall and stand next to Rep. Minnick to ask their question. This way Minnick staffers wouldn’t have to wrestle a microphone away from speaker who might be in the middle of a pack.

This “separating the sheep from the flock” technique worked in Boise last week and they were sure it work here.

I wasn’t worried about the folks who attended Monday night. Most everyone there really wanted to hear Minnick’s opinion. To his credit, our congressman was disarming, was honest and politely disagreed with some audience members without being disagreeable.

There were no boos. There were a few loud voices and best of all, there were no YouTube moments. In fact, the amount of applause I heard Monday night was amazing considering the topics and temperature.

In my opinion, we all passed an important test in community, participatory democracy Monday.

The congressman answered more than 20 questions from the audience and Daily Bee readers and each answer showed me that Rep. Minnick is really listening and learning from his constituents.

It took courage for Rep. Minnick to come to Sandpoint and answer questions. It took courage for audience members to stand up and ask the hard questions.

Monday was a good day to be an American in Sandpoint.

• David Keyes is publisher of the Daily Bee.