Organized armies converge on healthcare town halls

What is different is that the competing groups are not just wielding clout with lawmakers behind closed doors. This month, the fight over healthcare reform has been out in the open.

Polls may show opinion shifting against the healthcare reform proposals moving through Congress, but the public meetings have given giving a more human, and often angry face to the issue.

National umbrella groups are taking the lead in urging supporters to attend. The business-backed Americans for Prosperity, for example, is sponsoring two bus tours around the country on healthcare, and it provides a list of national town hall events for its activists.

“We’re finding a very strong emotion against this bill,” says Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. "We are constantly e-mailing and phoning our activists and urging them to turn out.”

Likewise, dates and times for congressional town halls on healthcare are also available on the Health Care for America Now website

Yet many of the town hall attendees bristle at the suggestion that they are AstroTurf – manufactured grass-roots rather than the real thing.

“We’re not AstroTurf. We’re not manufactured puppets of any sort,” says Barb Miller, a Tea Party activist who drove to the Cardin rally in Hagerstown from West Virginia after learning about the event from e-mail. “We are truly grass-roots Americans who are just concerned about the way our nation is headed.”

Jeff Merson, a meat cutter from nearby Mount Airy, Md., echoes her sentiments, saying: "There’s too much waste and the money isn’t going where it’s supposed to."

“Both sides are now in the game, liberal and conservative orgs,” says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University in New Jersey. “It’s not left or right Astroturf.”

Stung by excesses reported at some town hall meetings, however, organizers on both sides of the issue are urging those attending events to be respectful and civil. Some say they’re beginning to see progress.

“Obviously, the appealing media story is the screaming, yelling, and the distractions, but at the same time there are a lot of constructive meetings going on around the country,” says Jacki Schechner, Health Care for America Now’s national spokesman.

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