One of my readers attended a town hall meeting held this weekend by Rep. John Adler, a Democrat in New Jersey’s third district. Some highlights…

All of the big points came up; keeping current insurance, government rationing, public funded abortions, covering illegal immigrants, etc. and he danced around all them pretty well. Of course we can keep our current insurance, believe the section that says we can, not the one that says we can’t. He doesn’t think the rationing/euthanasia will fly pointing out that he’s not sure we understand this yet as many places already offer end of life counseling and the motives for these sections is pure, he’s not for public funded abortions, immigrants should not be covered, etc. So I guess we’ll see….
He got beat up a bit on Cap and Trade, which he of course supported (even our Republicans supported that) and his premise there was that we send too much money to dangerous countries that hate us. This brought out some “Drill here, Drill Now.” He said he supported more domestic drilling but not the NJ coast, which drew quite a loud round of booing. (The current plan is to line the coast with windmills anyway.) He didn’t feel drilling was safe enough to warrant the risk to the coastline. People pointed out frustration that cap and trade will cause all energy costs to rise and consumers would pay the bulk of that, hurt business, etc. He seemed genuine when he said he was for building more nuclear plants. He got a fair amount of chuckles when mentioning wind and solar though and moved to the next question.

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One amusing exchange came when he said “this is the worst economy since the great depression, but none of us were alive then”. An elderly woman in the front pointed out that she was indeed alive at that time as was her 94 y/o husband. He tried to change it up and said “well none of us remembered”, and she responded that she was 8 and she did remember. So he changed it to “well none of us were adults then”. This back and forth continued for a while and it was clear this woman was not backing down. It was one of the things that clearly challenged his reserve, at least briefly. He was borderline hostile toward her later in his remarks, claiming the woman said she was an adult at 8. If he was trying to make it light, it fell flat. The two did eventually hug it out.
What I came away with was that these guys are very skilled at what they do. Not sure why that wouldn’t have been obvious to me, but I have never been to this type of event before and I usually avoid campaign stops as well. The crowd was clearly there to give the guy a hard time, and they did from start to finish, but he knew pretty much how to handle it. The message he wanted to give, and I suspect it’s a common one, is that he would not vote the bill in its current form. Ambiguous to say the least, but he took his lumps and I’m sure will only be more practiced as these meetings continue. He was asked why he was not a “Blue Dog”. He said they were primarily southern and drank whiskey. He says he is part of a group called New Dems – part conservative part liberal, I forget the exact slogan. Anyway he took the opportunity to show his east coast elitist bias by taking some shots at southerners in general, although he stopped short of some of the making outright redneck jokes.