(Intrusive note from odum: There will be accompanying video of both the Rutland and Arlington events, but not until later this evening…)

Bernie Sanders gave a town meeting in Rutland this morning.  There were protesters there, but they were generally ignored.  Mostly they stayed in back, sometimes yelling, but fizzling quickly.  Very few people tried to engage them.

I took a lot of video and learned something important from the experience: my phone is completely worthless when it comes to taking video.  Quality is poor on every level: you can barely hear most of what’s said, and the visual quality is poor even by cell phone standards.  So I’m skipping the video and going right to summary.

So, basically– we had major overflow.  There was no space left inside the church, but there were lots of people outside.  Bernie made a point (see photo above) of coming out to tell us he wanted to make sure everyone could participate.  So he explained what would happen: brief panel, him talking briefly and then splitting everyone into two lines: one line generally supportive of the health care reform ideas and one generally opposed.

He gave both sides equal time.  He did this inside for a few questions, and then came outside to do the same.  We were outside, so I was a little more engaged with those questions, but the sessions inside and outside (we had a speaker system so we had a clear sense of everything going on inside) were very similar.  

Sanders is a master at handling strong disagreement with tact and civility: never backing down, but never letting anyone shout him down either.  A few times the (fairly small) crowd in back started to get nasty (trying to shout people over) and he just told them to cut it out, which they did.  Similarly, a few questioners tried to yell their questions and express the depth of their anger.  In every case, he thanked them for their questions, and when they wouldn’t allow him to respond, he just said “do you want me to answer your question?” and that generally worked.  

Basically, this was nothing like what we’ve seen at other rallies: civil, even if rancorous; very even-handed; each side got equal time.

There was a guy there with a bullhorn who didn’t use it until the rally was over, which was a bit of a surprise.

Towards the beginning, when Sanders was giving his opening speech, the group in the back started yelling, trying to shout over him saying they wanted us to get to questions.  It was a little silly: we were all outside; Sanders was inside, so it wasn’t like he’d hear them.  

There was a lot of media there, and they always mobbed the protesters with cameras whenever they started yelling.  My favorite exchange was, I think, between a protester who was yelling at the beginning about how she wouldn’t get to speak her mind and a man asking her, over and over again, “are you getting in line to ask your question?  Why aren’t you in line?”

There was a lot of heated conversation going on while everyone was waiting in line beforehand and very little in terms of Useful Idiotry.  Even the people who strongly opposed health care reform were mostly expressing their opinions respectfully and a lot of us were trying to engage one another in meaningful debate about it, which was pretty cool.

I don’t think anyone’s mind was changed.  The people who were opposed to reform were outnumbered significantly; less than 25% of the crowd, possibly even less than 20%.  They still got the opportunity to speak 50% of the time, which I think worked fine and gave Sanders the opportunity to dispel a few myths.  One man was insisting that his federal taxes had gone up since Obama took office, which is sort of odd given that his federal taxes haven’t been collected for the year since Obama started yet.  Sanders explained how he was wrong, and he was not mollified.  Another woman insisted on explaining the death panels that most sane people know is crap.  Sanders very politely explained it to simply not be true, and she wasn’t really mollified either.

But mostly, it was just people talking passionately about what they believe in and why, and Sanders talking about what he believes in and why.  It’s unlikely that anyone’s mind was changed, but I think the point of these town halls is not to change anyone’s mind.  It’s to give us all an opportunity for our voices to be heard.