Video: Left Wing Town Hall Activists Undermine Their Credibility by Screaming at Cramer and Exempting Heitkamp

The local iteration of Indivisible – a national left wing group created to harrass Republican members of Congress in their states/districts – challenged North Dakota Congressman Kevin Cramer to a town hall.

Not surprisingly, since Cramer has a sterling reputation when it comes to a willingness to engage with the public, he obliged them by scheduling a town hall right smack dab in Fargo, one of the most liberal areas of the state.

(Of course, “liberal area” is a relative thing here in North Dakota.)

And, not surprisingly, the local progressives showed in en masse to express their hatred for Cramer and President Donald Trump, whose candidacy Cramer was an early supporter of.

[mks_pullquote align=”right” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]If Indivisible were anything more than a partisan front group, they also would be asking for accessibility from all members of Congress. Even Democrats.[/mks_pullquote]

It was performance art masquerading as civic involvement. A sort of kabuki theater organized by professional activists and staged for the cameras. It was no coincidence that the national media – specifically MSNBC’s resident floating buffalo expert Cal Perry – just happened to be in the room.

The holy grail is to goad the politician being targeted into saying or doing something stupid which can be fed into the left’s outrage machine.

Underlining the fact this is a left wing put-on is the Fargo/Moorhead chapter of Indivisible targeting only Republicans in their demands for town halls. It’s right on their website. They want Cramer and Senator John Hoeven to hold town halls, but make no mention of Senator Heidi Heitkamp who, like Hoeven, rarely makes herself directly accessible to the public.

While Heitkamp has held phony-baloney social media “town halls,” and some face-to-face events way back in 2014 where she deployed a moderator as a buffer between her and the audience, to my knowledge she’s never scheduled as a Senator anything even remotely like what Rep. Cramer does regularly. Which is to say an open forum where members of the public are allowed to ask questions directly (Hoeven doesn’t either).

The Associated Press, identifying Heitkamp as a “vulnerable Democrat” heading into the 2018 cycle, reports that she’s been avoiding town halls.

Both Heitkamp and Hoeven should schedule some of those sort of events. If Indivisible were anything more than a partisan front group, they also would be asking for accessibility from all members of Congress. Even Democrats.

Here’s video of the screaming and shouting from Cramer’s event if you care to watch, but I’ll warn you it’s not terribly enlightening:

https://www.facebook.com/rob.port/posts/10154619530353218

I don’t begrudge the progressives their scream therapy. Sometimes it’s a political leader’s job to let his/her constituents vent a bit. I spoke with Cramer after the event and he had a positive attitude about it. He said he thought it went well, and was only disappointed that some people in attendance had a hard time asking their questions because of the agitators in the crowd.

I wonder, though, what these activists think they’re accomplishing? Who does a screeching sort of hatred, aimed publicly at a member of Congress, really persuade?

The only person that sort of thing appeals to is likely the sort of person who wasn’t going to vote for that member of Congress anyway.

By the way, Cramer will be on my radio show this afternoon at 1:30pm on AM970 WDAY for his regular, weekly open phones segment. If you didn’t get to ask him a question at the event yesterday, feel free to call in.