U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess’ “town hall meeting” on health care reform Saturday morning probably will not be uploaded to YouTube or featured on the shows of the TV ranters, right or left. Nobody got arrested; nobody got shoved; nobody got shouted down.

There was some lusty booing, and here and there a crackpot shout wafted from the crowd. None of that contributed anything meaningful to the discussion, but we couldn’t see that it blunted the conversation appreciably. For the most part, not even the midmorning heat outside the Center for the Visual Arts could stir the 1,500 or so participants to unruly behavior. Call us “ruly.”

There are several obvious reasons for this:

First — and we are not sure why this true, only that it is — Denton people don’t seem to be very good at shouting their neighbors down and denying them the right to be heard. Lord knows we have our dingbats, and they will demand their time in the sun (and at the microphone), but most of us are willing to hear them out, whether they’re coming from Birther Country or far left field. Liberal proponents of a health care reform bill were able to make their cases at Saturday’s meeting, and though some were greeted with boos, as we noted earlier, they were not shouted down before they could present their arguments. That may be a pretty sad commentary on the current state of civil discourse in this country, but there you are.

Second, Rep. Burgess, R-Lewisville, is a faithful Republican in Republican country. There was no reason for the highly organized “grass-roots” campaign against Democratic efforts at health care reform to pack the house against him. He’s against the health care plans now being floated by the Democrats, and in Denton, he’s preaching to the choir.

Third, though Burgess is a staunch party-line man, he almost always manages to avoid the steamy rhetoric favored by too many Washington denizens, both Republicans and Democrats. Burgess is a policy wonk — we mean that in the nicest possible way — and his arguments are usually devoid of inflammatory statements such as the loony reference to “death panels” made by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin via the Internet late last week.

Not that Burgess goes out of his way to condemn such outlandish rhetoric. He mentioned the Republican claims about “end-of-life” orders obliquely, saying that the existing bill’s “vague language” made the issue ripe for discussion. That could accurately be said of just about any bill introduced in Congress on just about any subject, but it’s obviously true, if simplistic, and was a pretty skillful way to finesse the subject.

Last and certainly not least, Saturday’s “town hall meeting” was organized and executed pretty much to perfection, something that can’t be said for some of those other meetings that ended up in shouting and shoving.

Organizers had arranged for parking on the Square and shuttle buses to bring people east on Hickory Street to the Center for the Visual Arts.

Denton police officers were on hand, but it was obvious that their mission was crowd assistance, not crowd control. One woman of our acquaintance got a little woozy in the sunny standing-room section, and before she could summon help, a friendly officer had noted her discomfiture, whisked her into the air-conditioned center, sat her down and placed a bottle of cold water into her hand.

That’s first-rate police work, though not of the kind that will get you on the cable news shows.


To view the original article click here.