On the fake campaign trail

Hillary Clinton got busted for planting a question with an audience member in Iowa. But there's all kinds of hocus-pocus at "town hall" events.
By Michael Scherer

Nov. 14, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- First, let us sing praise to the mythical town hall meeting -- that essential unit of American democracy, that gathering of citizen equals, that frank exchange of hopes and fears. Pharmacist Jill and farmhand Joe punch the clock and head on down to the high school gym, where they sit on folding chairs, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the town. They meet their politicians as peers. They can ask anything, and every question is answered.

Now let us turn to what modern presidential politics has done to the "town hall meeting," a practice to be placed inside quotation marks because so much of what really happens there is, well, not actually "real." Last week, Hillary Clinton's campaign was forced to admit that her aide had planted a question about global warming with a college student at a "town hall" in Newton, Iowa. When she was later asked about this apostasy, Clinton gave a verbal shrug. "In campaigns, things happen and you just go on," she told the Associated Press.