Tuesday, August 11, 2009
News Pictures from outside Rep. Hank Johnson health care town hall forum
Posted by Andisheh Nouraee on Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 4:19 PM
I arrived too late to get inside Rep. Hank Johnson's town hall forum on federal health care reform.
I did, however, walk around outside to snap a few pictures.
Some observations.
More than nine of 10 people waiting in line at the event were white.
Georgia 4th Congressional District, which Johnson represents, is 53 percent black and 35 percent white. In other words, the crowd was 2.7x whiter than the district. I posted several wide shots of the crowd on my Flickr page, so you can check my math.
Does that mean the crowd was packed with Republicans?
Sort of.
When a Georgia crowd is 2.7x whiter than expected, it almost certainly means the crowd had a higher proportion of Republican than the district does.
But it doesn't mean the crowd was dominated by people who oppose the health care proposals going through Congress.
On the contrary, I saw many more signs expressing support for health care reform and Democratic positions than I saw signs opposing.
I also counted the license plates of cars parked in four randomly selected rows of the parking lot and didn't see any evidence of "astroturfers" flooding in from more conservative suburban Congressional districts.
By the way, I heard plenty of debates among people in line. For the most p
If you want to know what happened inside the meeting, ask GriftDrift.
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