The staging of John McCain's fake "townhall meeting" this Friday in Lakeville, Minnesota, promises to go beyond merely hokey as the latest polls here show Obama shooting to a 14 point lead over McCain. It seems McCain's upcoming appearance might turn out to be more of a desperate last ditch attempt to keep his campaign alive with a not-so-clever ploy to force people to volunteer for his losing cause.
When McCain's campaign initially announced its second visit back to Minnesota since the RNC anointed him their presidential candidate in St. Paul, we were excited to get another chance to "do democracy" so close to home. Since McCain's "townhall meeting" happens to be scheduled just down the road a few miles from where we live, we figured it would be easy to alert the same group who held signs and banners outside the first McPalin visit to Minnesota and line the public sidewalks leading into the event. On second thought we wondered if, as real members of the "town" (Lakeville and neighboring suburbs), we shouldn't keep an open mind. If we were truly being given an old-fashioned town hall opportunity to meet the presidential candidate, ask questions, provide public feedback and debate the issues, then why be so stand-offish on the sidewalk when we could go right in and practice democracy a little closer to the action?
The next step, however, getting the necessary tickets to go inside, through McCain's twelve listed "Victory Offices" in the state proved to be Mission-Just-About-Impossible. Many of the voice mailboxes were full and some of the offices, oddly enough, share the same telephone number. Finally we reached someone by the name of "Tony" in the "Eden Prairie Victory Office" who was clear about one thing: that this was NOT a McCain campaign rally but rather a "townhall meeting". Tony added, however, that if a person wanted to get a ticket to attend the "townhall", he or she would have to agree to volunteer for McCain's campaign. When asked if an "undecided" voter or someone who has not thus far supported McCain could sign up for a ticket to attend without becoming an indentured servant to the campaign, Tony couldn't answer and instead gave us the telephone number (651 356-8251) for the McCain State Victory Office. "Brittany" who answered the phone at their state office didn't know the answer to that question either but said "Ben" the Campaign Manager would have to make those kinds of decisions.
Needless to say, since none of us are quite ready to submit to further background checks or swear the necessary loyalty oaths involved in the McCain ticket-screening, we'll probably end up viewing the festivities from the town's sidewalk. It'll be interesting nonetheless to see who shows up. It's hard to believe any real mavericks will be let in. Of course we'll do our best to warn all the blindfolded types going in about the dangers of following the right-wing group think right over the cliff.