Pro- and anti-health care reform activists gather outside a town hall event in Reston, Va. (Photo by: David Weigel)

Related Photos: Reston Town Hall Attracts Protesters

RESTON, Va. — Gathering outside of the South Lakes High School in this well-heeled exurb of Washington, more than a hundred supporters and opponents of health care reform–or health insurance reform, as it was rebranded in blue-and-white signs passed out by Organizing for America–carried a sense of valedictory. The long and bitter month of “town hell” protests was wrapping up. Progressives who favor a Medicare-style “public option” had gotten their act together and shown up in force. Conservatives who had been turning out for weeks expressed shock, then bemusement, at the sudden arrival of their rivals.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“Pick up your pre-made signs!” said Mike McLaughlin, a retired foreign service veteran and opponent of health care reform, who stalked around the area in front of the school with a booming megaphone. “Pick up your astroturf!” Other conservatives grumbled to reporters that they hadn’t been let in, and some mocked liberals for holding signs provided by Health Care for America Now or by Organizing for America, instead of putting together their own placards.

This particular town hall meeting, led by Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and former DNC Chairman Howard Dean, was destined to get out of hand. The extra star power was combined with a proximity to the beltway press corps and to professional conservative activists. Randall Terry, the omnipresent anti-abortion rights protester, made his way into the town hall itself and screamed about “killing babies” before being unceremoniously dragged out. Mary Ellen Burke, an organizer for Americans for Prosperity, met and greeted protesters against health care reform, talking about other AFP campaigns and the upcoming September 12 march on Washington organized by FreedomWorks.

There were remnants of the conservative groups that had been criticized in August for ginning up anger at town halls; an AFP sign that said “Socialism Isn’t Cool,” a batch of leaflets for Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty handed out by volunteer Erik Holmgren. (”As you know, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value since the creation of the Federal Reserve?” Holmgren said. “You start to wonder if they’re driving down the dollar for a reason. Are they getting us ready to join a single North American currency?”)

But there was conservative unity against the liberal groups who had showed up to support Moran and Dean, and there were angry arguments about ACORN, “union thugs,” and chants that the conservatives thought were programmed. One of them tried to derail a pro-reform chant by adding editorial comments in between the breaks.

“Health care now!”

“You pay!”

“Health care now!”

“Free stuff!”

“Health care now!”

“Read the bill!”

Steve Brown, a physics teacher who held up a faded Bush/Cheney ‘04 sign, said that he’d been getting nothing but compliments and comments from people who missed the ex-president. “I’m worried psychologically for the country,” said Brown. He had a good health care plan, but he wasn’t sure that his job was secure. “They didn’t raise our salary this year, because there’s no money.” Brown’s suggestion to turn the economy around: “Cancel the stimulus bill, put the money toward paying the deficit.”

Many of the people outside the school had come knowing that they wouldn’t get into the meeting, wanting to see the spectacle and, in some cases, have substantive conversations about health care. “Where else are you going to find so many informed people like us?” said Bill Campeni, with a hint of sarcasm as an angry argument broke out nearby between people on whether it was offensive to compare President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

“I’ve met a couple people on the other side who made good points,” said Jim DiAngelo, who put up a cell phone to let his wife listen into the chants. “I also started the chant that made these people crazy.” That chant was “Sarah! Sarah!,” a reference to the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

DiAngelo turned and argued with a woman who said she supported health care reform because her mother couldn’t get coverage; DeAngelo told her to “be a woman, go shoot some wolves like Sarah.”

“Oh, she’s so tough,” the woman sneered. “She quit! She couldn’t take the pressure.”

DiAngelo turned red. “She’s not tough? She brought a child to term! A liberal woman would have told her to abort it! Yeah, you bet your ass she’s tough!”

Supporters of cult political figure Lyndon LaRouche stayed away from the action and largely outside of the town hall itself, setting up a booth decorated with the signs comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler that have become notorious since one of LaRouche followers was berated by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) at a town hall meeting. LaRouche’s compound in Leesburg, Va. is only 19 miles northwest of Reston; the people handing out literature and engaging in loping, confusing conversations about the British monarchy and its role in health care reform said they’d been with “Lyn” for years. But they were largely ignored by conservatives who didn’t want to be associated with them and liberals who reeled at their imagery. The LaRouche conspiracies about a “Nazi” health care system were shared by some protesters–one sign gave Obama “Joker” face paint and warned of a “National Socialist” health plan–but they had other things on their mind.

“It’s really a stretch, the Hitler business there,” said Kim Langley, who had printed out the “Obama Joker” poster that surged in popularity after being promoted on The Drudge Report, and went on at length about moves Obama was taking that made him worry about the future of his country.

“I’m a student of revolution. I was a special forces officer, right? My job in some cases, back in the day, in the 1970s, when I was in the special forces, was basically to create unrest, to create overthrow of the government. Our job was to help guerrillas, insurgents, overthrow bad governments. My particular group was oriented toward central and South America.”

Langley wasn’t ready to go much further with his analogy. “There’s certain key milestones that I would consider… if he was to start to infringe the right of free speech, with newspapers and things like that…” Langley trailed off. “It hasn’t peaked yet to where I’m really scared.”

As the school emptied out, the activists who remained, more than a hundred of them, crowded around the door and formed cheering sections. Health care reform supporters smiled and shook their signs at the crowd, and got a mix of cheers and boos. Reform opponents did the same thing, with the same reaction. Some of the people leaving the event simply expressed confusion at how a surging, angry crowd had assembled outside of a town hall meeting.

“We’re going toward a one party system,” said Ron Kirby, holding a giant Gadsen flag that he’d gotten at the state GOP convention earlier this year. “Pretty soon, you know, you’ll have to be a Democrat to get a job.”

Before this, there was…

Before that…

And before that…

Responding to a throwaway question from Progressive Strategies co-founder Mike Lux (”I’m Bobby Birther … are you going to serve on these death panels?”), Dean said he’d “actually respond to the question seriously” and told the audience of progressive bloggers and activists, “The truth is, those meetings aren’t about health care.”

He continued: “Look carefully at the people who are shouting their congresspeople down. They don’t look anything like the generation that elected Barack Obama.”

But Dean said those meetings are a sign that the right-wingers recognize the strong prospects for health care reform. “They’re desperate,” he said. “They’re just making things up.”

One of the participants at the meeting asked the president to take a lower profile regarding the public differences between his administration and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the United States’ demand that Israel freeze all settlement construction activity in the West Bank. “This situation is not helpful,” he told the president, who rejected the request, saying that during the eight years of the Bush administration, such disagreements were never made public but that such an approach was not helpful in advancing the peace process.

No word yet on whether the swelling has gone down in the face and posterior of whomever made that point to Obama.

I’m also reliably informed that Obama conspicuously used the term “even-handed” to describe his approach to securing Mideast peace. Now, to anyone not steeped in the noxious brew known as the American debate over Israel, that term is a complete no-brainer. Who could be against being even-handed, after all? Well, for one, Abe Foxman, who’s made the term out to indicate some bias against Israel. Foxman raised a fit in 2003 when Howard Dean, then the 2003 frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said his Mideast policies would be “even-handed,” something that eventual nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) was happy to exploit. And when Obama tapped George Mitchell to become his Arab-Israeli peace envoy, Foxman complained that Mitchell, a former Senate Majority Leader who worked tirelessly on British-Irish-Northern Irish peace, was “meticulously even-handed.” Yes, in the meshuggeneh parallel universe inhabited only by American Jewish anxiety over Israel — it’s actually not so bad; uncensored episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are in constant syndication — being “meticulously even-handed” is a bad thing. Obama, however, lives in the real world.

My attitude toward this is let’s get something. Let’s get the ball rolling. Let’s not have an argument between two poles. Let’s pick a middle course. Of course, the right wing and the insurance companies are already attacking the middle course. If there’s no public option we shouldn’t do anything. The last thing you want to do is pour a trillion dollars into something we already know doesn’t work right.

Also of note, Dean, a physician and a longtime advocate of a single-payer system, appears to have abandoned that approach due to political realities — much to the dismay of the left-leaning Colorado audience.

You can read Wendy’s write-up here.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Bloomberg today that “it’s absolutely essential that we come out of this year with a substantial health-care reform,” and “the best prospect for that to happen is to do it under reconciliation” — the process by which legislation would only need 51 votes to pass, rather than the 60 votes ordinarily required to end debate — she was obliquely referring to what is fast emerging as the central issue in health care reform: the so-called “public plan.”

President Obama laid out  the idea in his “Open for Questions” online town hall Thursday.

If you’ve got a preexisting condition you’re not going to be excluded but you’re going to be able to obtain health insurance.  And if you can’t obtain it through a private plan then there is going to a public plan that is available in some way to give you insurance, or insurers are obligated to provide you with insurance in some way.

 Now that’s a principle.

It’s a principle that opponents of the strongest health care reform plans hate. While supportive of the general idea of expanding coverage, leaders of the  insurance and pharmaceutical industries stepped up their attacks on the public plan concept this week. It’s also why Howard Dean’s Democracy for America launched its health care reform campaign yesterday with the demand that the inclusion of a public plan in any upcoming health care legislation must be “non-negotiable.”

For Obama and sympathetic left-liberal policy wonks, the question is what form the public plan should take in order to insure congressional approval. Ezra Klein of the American Prospect sketched three options, while Harold Pollack, University of Chicago researcher and blogger for The New Republic, identified the central political reality:

“Among the many components of candidate Obama’s proposed healthcare plan, the public plan is the one most likely to be thrown under the bus in negotiations seeking a final bill.”

The public jockeying over the idea of packaging health care reform in a budget resolution that doesn’t require 60 votes for Senate consideration is the opening phase of these negotiations. With Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) opposed to a public plan, any reform package that includes it is unlikely to get 60 votes — but it might get 51. To put it another way, if Obama forgoes the reconciliation process in pursuing health care, the public plan is much more likely to go under the bus.

Sentiment in favor of a Dean promotion is pretty much universal on the right: Dean is viewed as a bumbler who’d wreck relations between the White House and Congress and doom health care reform. It’s a little curious, considering that in 2005, Republicans mocked Dean’s election as Democratic National Committee chair and proceeded to drop election after election to the Democrats. But it’s true that Democrats don’t think as highly of Dean as a manager of delicate White House-Congress relations, and that he’s not really on the HHS shortlist.

After praising Dean’s “outstanding work,” Obama highlighted Kaine’s “progressive philosophy” that allowed him to build “a model of good and responsible government in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Kaine, who in February 2007 became one of the first prominent supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign, initially rejected Obama’s efforts to convince to take the helm of the party, but today he told the president-elect, “You are a very persuasive individual.”

He laid out three goals for his tenure as DNC chair: to “promote this president’s agenda,” to “carry the proud banner of this proud party” and to “engage Americans in new ways in politics.”

But he acknowledged the challenges of following in Dean’s footsteps. Under Dean’s four-year watch, the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and then made further gains in 2008 while also winning the presidency.

“I’ve got huge shoes to fill,” he admitted.

For the first time at a post-election press conference, Obama did not take questions from reporters.

Kaine must be officially elected by the DNC, but with Obama’s endorsement, it’s a foregone conclusion.

Dean saw the glass as about 9/10 full.

“Clearly we would prefer to do better in the Appalachian regions, but to win in Florida, to win in North Carolina and to win in the West is huge,” he said. “The next state on my list is Texas.”

Oh, right, those maps I promised you:

2008 vs. 2004

2008 vs. 2000