Playing the Expectations Game

Yesterday morning the press was full of breathless stories about how Obama would meet a potentially hostile crowd for his Obamacare town hall in New Hampshire. How will he handle criticism? Will anyone disrupt the event?

It was a set-up.

Let's look at one of the questioners at the event:

A girl from Malden asked President Obama a question at Tuesday’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire about the signs outside “saying mean things” about his health care proposal.

Eleven-year-old Julia Hall asked: “How do kids know what is true, and why do people want a new system that can — that help more of us?”

The question opened the door for the president to respond to what he called an “underlying fear” among the public “that people somehow won’t get the care they need.”

The girl later told the Globe that picking the president’s brain was “incredible.”
“It was like a once in a lifetime experience,” she said.

Julia’s mother was an early Obama supporter in Massachusetts during the presidential election, so she had previously met First Lady Michelle Obama, the Obama daughters Sasha and Malia, and Vice President Joe Biden.

“This was my first time meeting Barack Obama, and he’s a very nice man,” Julia said. “I’m glad I voted for him.”

Don Surber has a list of the questions asked at the event. If there were Obamacare critics in the crowd, they were pretty much silent during the event.

Now, it's not at all unusual for presidents to pack the house with their supporters. Bush did it. Clinton did it. Obama is doing it. That's all fine and good. The nonsense of the whole thing is the role the press played in making it look like this could be an event with some suspense.

Rich Lowry of National Review tweeted this upon the completion of the event:

that town hall was abt as hard-hitting as a jonas bros concert

And that's why this event will do Obama absolutely no good in moving opponents to his side. He was preaching to the choir.