Bill Kauffman: John McCain’s town hall meetings are parodies of democracy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
The forensic centrepiece of recent presidential campaigns has been the “debates”, though they are not so much debates as soporific exchanges of focus-group-tested pander lines and carefully scripted ad-libs. “Minor” candidates are excluded: no sense in permitting such gadflies as Independent Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr to buzz the viewers.

John McCain, an ineloquent man who bests Barack Obama in only one elocutionary category – the wise-guy quip – has proposed to reanimate the deadened debates by substituting a series of 10 “town hall meetings” at which the candidates would quibble with each other and take questions, doubtless vetted for conventionality, from audience members. The Obama camp countered with a full house: three debates, two town halls. McCain, not budging yet, went ahead last week and appeared, sans Obama, at the first of his 10 town hall meetings, this one in the non-town of New York City.

The town hall meeting places a premium on facile answers and plays into McCain’s strength: his chaffing style based on a lifetime of locker-room banter. It gives him an image of a witty regular guy. A popular email making the rounds compares Obama, who is depicted as an earnest yuppie lawyer married to a humourless affirmative-action-case wife, to McCain, who is presented as a war hero married to a blonde bimbo beer heiress. The choice, to most men with a pulse, is clear.

Framed thus, McCain wins in a landslide. And his town hall meeting, too, has a surface attractiveness. The press sure eats it up, playing it as a charming artefact of pre-modern Americana, an outgrowth of flinty self-governing New England. There is but one problem: it is nothing of the sort. The town hall meeting that is a staple of the McCain campaign and may well partially replace this fall’s debates is instead ersatz and hollow, a grotesque parody of a venerable institution, the New England town meeting.
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