Thrust into the middle of the national healthcare reform fight several times in the last few weeks, Rep. Brian Baird (D-Vancouver) finally took to the stage for his own Town Hall-style meeting at the Clark County Amphitheater in Ridgefield Tuesday night.
The road to this week's event has been an uncommonly bumpy one for Baird, a well-respected Congressman who has held more than 300 different public meetings with constituents without incident since getting elected in 1999.
But this year – and this debate – has been quite different.
"I find myself defending a bill I'm not sure how I'm going to vote on," Baird said during an interview with the VBJ at his district office in Vancouver last week.
This cautious approach by Baird in regards to healthcare reform makes the source of the furor surrounding his attempts at public discourse on the subject difficult to pinpoint.
"At first, I think it happened because he wasn't going to hold public meetings," said Joseph Backholm, executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, a group that has been highly critical of the various healthcare reform proposals debated in Congress. "A lot of people viewed it as an effort to side-step his constituents."
However, according to a spokesman, Baird received a faxed death threat to his office before making the initial decision not to hold in-person Town Hall-style meetings with his constituents – not after. Shortly after the incident, he decided to hold phone conversations about healthcare reform with district residents using an automated computer system.
But the furor in some quarters only deepened when that decision was made, with several menacing phone calls reportedly made to Baird's office in response. Last week, the Congressman switched gears again, announcing a series of five Town Hall-style meetings. Earlier this month, a meeting in Longview was postponed due to public safety concerns made by police.
Days before Tuesday's public meeting, Baird changed the venue from Vancouver's Skyview High School auditorium to the Clark County Amphitheater – a much less claustrophobic, 18,000 seat venue, 3.5 miles away in Ridgefield.
The Congressman's office attributed the switch in venues to the number of attendees expected at the event.
"I have always been a huge advocate of town halls," Baird said in a statement last week announcing the new series of in-person constituent meetings. "Frankly, I have had concerns about how we can have constructive dialogue and, unfortunately, in response to some of the things we've been seeing across the nation, I have said some things myself that I regret."
