Will Lakeland town hall on health care reform be a repeat of Tampa?
Pro-reform AARP has planned a town hall meeting for Wednesday afternoon in Lakeland, and the big question is: Will it feature the same kind of testiness, shouting, shoving and calamity that has befell other town halls, including one last week in Tampa’s Ybor City?
Organizers don’t think so. A Florida AARP spokesman told March on Politics that the organization has already held some of these town halls (part of a grassroots-TV ad blitz to support the president’s initiative) and while some got heated none reached the level of the Ybor event. UPDATE: Florida AARP spokesman Dave Bruns tells me this afternoon that while the AARP events have seen some “very pointed exchanges” (and, in Leesburg, one woman who came forward and dumped her cut-up AARP card in front of the speaker) that they have not seen the kind of disruptions that have plagued other town halls. “There’s been some backlash about what happened in Tampa,” Bruns said.
The town hall is on the radar screen of the Lakeland 9-12 Project, an offshoot of Fox host Glenn Beck’s right-wing fomenting. But RedCounty — a conservative blog that chronicles various counties across the nation, including Hillsborough — is urging civility:
