It would have been easy to scoff at the fact that the president of the United States sat down last week to field questions delivered via a social network that limits all messages to 140 characters or less. But the "Twitter town hall" was much more substantive than you might have expected. The questions President Barack Obama answered (which were selected by Twitter executives from the thousands that came in) mostly concerned the economy, but also covered such topics as energy, education, taxes, and our various wars. In other words, it turned out largely as Obama intended, and no one should have been surprised.
It might seem counter-intuitive, given how little Americans (on average) know about politics, and how many of us believe ridiculous things - that aliens are abducting people, or that whether you'll meet an old friend today is determined by the position of the zodiac. But town halls have been with us since before we were an independent nation. That, of course, is part of the appeal: by conducting something like the Twitter town hall, we are updating a hallowed tradition of American democracy to the electronic age.
The original town halls weren't just about debate and discussion, they were also about governing. In eighteenth-century New England, town halls were the means by which key decisions in municipal life were made, where people could debate immediate problems face-to-face and arrive at a course of action. As political scientist Jane Mansbridge described in Beyond Adversary Democracy, her 1980 study of contemporary town hall meetings in a small Vermont village, town meetings were lauded by early observers as the very height of popular democratic participation. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and enjoy it." Thomas Jefferson wrote that town meetings "have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation."
But none were as effusive in their praise as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said in 1835, "It is the consequence of this institution that not a school-house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam, hath been set up, or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider, at leisure, the wisdom and error of their judgments."
As wonderful as that sounds, Mansbridge argued that town meetings were not without their weaknesses, both in their past and their present. For instance, in colonial America town meetings were usually restricted to property-owning men. In contemporary meetings, once attendance exceeds about 200, a microphone is required, which transforms how the participants act (comments are more rehearsed, there is less back-and-forth, etc.). Many of the inequalities that characterize political power more broadly - of race, class, and age - are mirrored in participation in the town meetings that still go on in New England. And although they still exist in some towns, the idea of government by a consensus-based, face-to-face discussion didn't spread past New England as the country expanded.
But even if the town meeting as a perfect embodiment of participatory democracy is somewhat mythical, the idea still holds power for us. What we now call town halls are media events, where instead of interacting directly with each other, we watch other people interact with the powerful. The difference is that instead of the professional journalists who usually act as our representatives, it is (supposedly) people just like us who are part of the conversation.
Our current impulse to have political leaders field questions from ordinary people dates back most directly to 1992, when the traditional presidential debate format (a panel of reporters interviewing the candidates) was updated to include one debate in which an audience of undecided voters asked the questions. To the surprise of many, the questions asked by the voters were not only free of the inane and easily-dodged strategic questions of the "Why aren't you connecting" kind favored by so many reporters, but also covered a far broader range of issues than the journalist-centered debates. Each presidential election since has featured at least one town hall debate, and we've now come to expect that our leaders will hold these kinds of events. President Obama's Twitter town hall followed on his "Facebook town hall" in April, and the "electronic town hall" (featuring emailed questions) that took place in the first months of his presidency.
If these events work, it isn't so much because people are geniuses, but because they ask good questions. After the Twitter town hall, the Boston Globe made a helpful graphic comparing the Twitter questions to those asked by professional journalists in recent White House press briefings. It turns out that while the regular folks on Twitter were concerned with issues, journalists are concerned mostly with process - who's winning and losing, who's giving up what to whom in Congressional negotiations, and so on. In other words, regular people ask about the substance of policy, and journalists immersed in politics ask about the game.
That immersion may be just the problem; spend too much time hanging around with political professionals and other reporters, and you begin to think that the highest expression of your calling is forcing a candidate into a "gotcha" about something like why he isn't wearing a flag pin. That's what happened four years ago, when the dozens of presidential primary debates got more and more trivial as the campaign went on. A study of the primary debates I conducted with colleagues at Media Matters for America at the end of the primaries found that of the 2,300 questions asked in all those debates, only six concerned the mushrooming mortgage crisis, only two concerned declining wages, and while there were dozens of questions about gas prices (something politicians can do virtually nothing about), only three questions asked about conservation and alternative energy sources. Candidates were asked to name their favorite Bible verse, forced to choose between the Red Sox and Yankees, and queried about what costume they'd wear on Halloween.
Of course, the relative openness of these events allows partisans to attempt to game them; we all remember the congressional town hall meeting in the summer of 2009. They became the targets of organized political action to an unprecedented degree, as conservative groups coordinated activists to disrupt, shout, and turn meetings into chaos, in order to give the impression that the public was rising up in outrage against the Affordable Care Act.
Don't be surprised if we see a repeat performance in the upcoming Republican primary debates. It isn't that town hall debates where citizens ask questions are perfect - far from it. But most of the time, when you give an ordinary person the opportunity to participate in the democratic process, they do their best to take it seriously, much as people do when they serve on juries. The size and complexity of our nation make it impossible to make our decisions by face-to-face discussion. But it doesn't hurt to bring a bit of the old town meeting into politics when we can.
