Obama Montana Town Hall Meeting

Was it Staged?

Looking at the video of the supposedly open town hall meeting in Montana, the first thing that any experienced Obama watcher will notice is the ever present teleprompters flanking him on the left and right. Like Secret Service agents they try to remain inconspicuous, but they are always very nearby. He never leaves home without them — the teleprompters I mean. One might well wonder exactly how one can have a town hall meeting where the questions and questioners aren’t arranged ahead of time and still be able to make use of a teleprompter. Well that would be a very good question, but there are several possibilities.

The first, most obvious and by far the most likely is that the attendees are invited ahead of time, the questioners hand picked and called on in a specific order, and the questions themselves are simply jump off points for a list of well rehearsed talking points. To imagine a situation where this isn’t true, one would have to imagine a Montana where someone declares, in a public forum, that he’s an NRA member and only two people out of one hundred applaud. To imagine that scenario, it would be necessary to have never been within 750 miles of Montana in their life.

Another possibility, while much less likely is that the questions are authentic; thought up by the spontaneously chosen attendees who are not well known to the president beforehand. In that case one would have to imagine Rahm Emanuel or some other aide hiding behind the backdrop like the Wizard of Oz, typing furiously on a laptop connected to the teleprompters. Simultaneously, the President would read the scrolling text with his now famous teleprompter to teleprompter head turning.

The last possibility is that this was an authentic cross section of Montana and every one of the questions actually composed by each randomly selected and previously unknown questioner. One would have to be simple minded enough to believe that Sheila Jackson Lee cares what her constituents think to buy that story, but it is presented here in a spirit of fairness to all of the possibilities, no matter how far fetched. While there were two questions that seemed relevant to the issues that the majority of Americans are concerned about, apparently the teleprompter was unable to come to his aid for either of those and he never was able to formulate a coherent answer to either.