Town Hall Eyewitness
Please find following my eyewitness account of a town hall meeting last summer. The frustration I witnessed there is part and parcel of the Tea Party Movement. Here are my commonsense conservative views on the people called Tea Partiers.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have been active in conservative politics in Tennessee pretty heavily for the last 10 years. While I saw some familiar faces in the crowd, most of them were either new faces or people I had seen around town but never at a political event, much less a protest. Contrary to what you may have heard, many of them were Democrats, and most of them were older -say 40 and above. These are people who had never really called a congressman before. As they became more and more concerned about the issues I mention here, they called their congressman. Many for the first time. They were shocked at the reception they received. They really thought they would get to speak with the congressman. They really thought they would get an answer. Of course, they got the totally normal double speak and evasion. They called people they knew vaguely locally, like a mayor or county executive. They called their neighbors and urged them to call the congressman. They checked back with them and found out all these people received the same run around they got.