Gingrich Keeps in Touch With His Town Hall Meetings

There is poignancy when mothers wheel in severely disabled children. And there is comic relief, with droll banter about hero worship, shopping and life in Washington.

The questions cover virtually anything and everything--Internet censorship, caribou herds, gay rights, timber salvage, chiropractors, national parks, Louis Farrakhan and the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s all part of what could be called “Newt Gingrich’s Saturday Morning Live”--regular town hall meetings held by the speaker of the House in his home district, in the suburbs north of Atlanta.

“It is,” said the star during one show, “a strange and free society.”

Gingrich held 19 meetings last year, his first as speaker. One motivation is political caution--opponents often have charged that Gingrich is too busy pursuing a national agenda to stay in touch with his constituents.

His 6th district spokesman, Allan Lipsett, said Gingrich pledged after the last election to keep up a heavy schedule of home events “just to make sure they knew and understood that he had not left them as speaker.”

But Lipsett added that the town meetings expose Gingrich to a wide range of voter concerns that go beyond the day’s hot topics back in Washington--sometimes way beyond.

“At a Washington news conference, you kind of know the areas the press are going to be interested in that day,” Lipsett said. “In a town hall meeting, he’s talking to the people who actually elected him, and they’ll ask him anything. They’ll go back 20 years. He gets questions about history, notch babies, about the Trilateral Commission. . . . “

Self-described “angry white male” Jerry Smith stood up at a Kennesaw town meeting, for example, and challenged Gingrich to “start standing up to” Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

“I’d say Newt was ready to listen to anyone and tolerate them--up to a point--no matter what the subject was,” said Allan Piggott, an advocate for people with disabilities who attended 17 meetings last year. He circulates an informal newsletter on the meetings called “Newtwatch Words.”

Aides have repeatedly suggested screening of questions, but Lipsett said Gingrich rejected altering the free-flowing nature of the town halls, in which people simply line up at microphones to ask their questions.

As a result, the meetings often become something of an intellectual tennis match for Gingrich. There are soft lobs--”How can the media outright lie?”--and hard smashes, such as one questioner’s insistence that the GOP’s Medicare overhaul would reduce benefits.

“That’s not true,” Gingrich volleyed back. “That’s not true. That’s not true. That’s not true.”

At Etowah High School here, 17-year-old Heather Jacobs informed Gingrich that many of her friends thought he was doing a good job, and that one’s “dream is to meet you.”

Gingrich’s eyebrows shot up and he asked: “Does this person have any other pathologies?”

In a Marietta meeting, Joe Crisculo, an activist for the National Organization for Women, drew restless groans from the crowd in a 10-minute diatribe about corporate wealth and inequality. Gingrich finally cut him off when Crisculo warned: “If you permit the corporations to merge and merge, you won’t be able to shop.”

“If that starts to be a problem, Marianne [Gingrich’s wife] will report it to me and we will immediately go to work,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich often regales his audience with anecdotes about the ways of Washington. For example, he said buying a ladder in Washington would require experts on “vertical ascending” and professors who hadn’t been in a store in years but could say what a store was like when they studied them.

“The city just deals in fluff all the time,” Gingrich said.

And, as is his wont, Gingrich sometimes applies movies to real life.

“If you go back and look at the movie ‘Ghostbusters,’ what I saw was a pretty good caricature of why people have lost faith in EPA regulators,” he said, in response to a question about the environment.

Aside from the entertainment value, some who bring gripes to the meetings question whether they are having any effect. “I feel like we get lip service,” said Beth Tumlin, who works with mental retardation services.

But Lipsett said this isn’t so. He said Gingrich has responded to an advocacy group that often brings disabled children to the meetings--sitting them near the speaker’s podium. Gingrich last year formed a task force on disabilities and told a November town hall that disability issues will be a priority this year.

“Old Newt came up with that task force. There’s always something he comes back with,” said Widget Richards, mother of three children with disabilities and leader of the advocacy group.

Some Gingrich foes complain the town hall meetings often are “love fests” for the speaker because some supporters intimidate those who try to ask unfriendly questions.

Richards and others in her group said they are sometimes treated rudely by Gingrich’s fans.

“If people think the community will take care of us,” she said, “they should come to the town hall meetings and hear the degrading comments the Newties make to us.”