People in Northeast Philadelphia often get phone calls from elected officials inviting them to so-called "telephone town hall meetings." Congressman Brendan Boyle held the most recent one yesterday. State Senator John Sabatina and State Representative Martina White have held them, too. During an expensive campaign this spring against Sabatina, Kevin Boyle, who is Brendan's brother and also a State Representative, even invited people from outside his own district to his telephone town hall meeting.
These fake town halls are no substitute for face-to-face meetings with assembled audiences of voters at which officials field questions and explain and defend their policies. At an in-person, public meeting, it quickly becomes clear whether a politician's handlers are trying to filter out tough questions, and whether they've tried to stack the meeting with stooges and shills who will sing their praises and throw them softball questions. No wonder Boyle, Sabatina, and White don't hold them.
On the phone, things are different. It's impossible to know for sure who is asking a question, and hard to identify connections between the politicians and the participants. It's more likely that all or part of a telephone call can be staged, worked out in advance to make the politician look good, or to exclude hard questions. Important physical cues that people always examine in order to tell if another person is lying or equivocating are impossible to see over the phone.
In addition, when politicians elsewhere hold real town hall-style meetings, they take place on evenings or weekends, at times when ordinary people can actually attend them. But the fake telephone meetings are often scheduled when the only working people likely to be on the line are those who work for the politician. For instance, Brendan Boyle's recent meeting was held at 10:00 AM on Thursday-- not a very convenient time for workers, unless they happened to be on Boyle's payroll.
Elected officials who rely on telephone meetings to interact with their constituents behave in a cowardly fashion. They know that their districts are full of people with tough questions for them, people who have good reason to think their representatives at every level of government don't care about them, but only do the bidding of donors and bribe payers. For the politicians, the point of telephone meetings is to pretend to satisfy widely held expectations that they be willing to explain themselves, while keeping serious questions from ever being asked.
