The Central Tabulator

Huffington Post

Mayhill Fowler

Posted July 16, 2008 | 10:20 AM (EST)

The John McCain town hall meeting is a fraud. Unlike other writers at HuffPost, I want John McCain to do well this summer, so it pains me to report this. “I believe the town hall meeting is the most important element of democracy,” Senator McCain said last week in Portsmouth, Ohio. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would hate to see one senator hand the election to another. It’s not good for Senator Obama, who already exudes enough confidence to power a wind turbine; it’s not good for us, because we profit from spirited debate. And isn’t that what a town hall meeting is supposed to be?

The town hall meeting yesterday in Albuquerque, New Mexico is typical in that the real action is not on the ground in the small conference room of Hotel Albuquerque but in the internet air war waged at the same time. There’s an old-fashioned quaintness to John McCain’s insistence on the centrality of the town hall meeting — even he doesn’t really believe in it, for he always shapes his meetings not to the locals and their concerns but to the action taking place in the campaign email and conference call skirmishes over the addled attention of the press that particular day. That’s McCain, for example, gives his Albuquerque supporters a speech on Afghanistan (much to the surprise of some, who had been hoping to hear about social issues and the economy) because that very day Obama delivers his major foreign policy speech, “A New Strategy for a New World,” at the same time in Washington, D.C. Obama is setting the pace elsewhere, far from New Mexico. The McCain Campaign is as usual playing catch-up in Albuquerque, for Obama has been warning about the need to win the war in Afghanistan at least as far back as his Pennsylvania speeches before that state’s primary. MORE