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Jun. 1st, 2017
politicians
Jun. 1st, 2017 10:45 pmI went for part of a Town Hall meeting appearance by Senator Markey, held at the Paramount Theater in Boston, which has replaced its burnt-out bulbs since last fall. I arrived a little late, due to getting to Alewife half an hour behind schedule. Road construction all over Lexington, plus usual rush hour stuff, seriously affected the bus timing. For about the first half-hour, he made a sort of speech, ragging on the president, comparing him unfavorably with JFK (in honor of the latter's 100th birthday last week, I think), complaining about how many jobs would be lost due to the betrayal of carbon reduction goals and the proposed budget, especially cuts to the NIH, plus jokes about the relationship between Trump and the pope, and some other tangents. Then he opened it up for questions. The first one was from someone who wanted to know how he thought the Senate version of the AHCA was going to end up. She unfortunately added something about since it was being decided by a dozen white men, "no offense." This led to a long digression on his part about how white Malden high school was when he was young, and how evenly balanced it is racially now. After a few minutes of this, she started yelling at him to answer the question. He said "I'm Irish. An answer comes with a story."
The actual answer seemed to be that he had no idea what is being framed, but he is hopeful that we'll end up with the ACA mostly as-is anyway, because the Republicans in the Senate don't all agree with each other, and the Democrats don't agree with any of them, and even if the Senate came up with something, the people in the House wouldn't compromise. The next person, in an obsequious way, asked if he would be willing to work together with Republicans like Collins to make sure this was true, and he said yes, of course, implying that some kind of across-the-aisle stuff is possible. Having been warned that all answers would be story-time, I left.
I feel well represented by him, but don't necessarily feel a need to hear him speak again.
Good one-liner: "a vision without funding is a hallucination"
The actual answer seemed to be that he had no idea what is being framed, but he is hopeful that we'll end up with the ACA mostly as-is anyway, because the Republicans in the Senate don't all agree with each other, and the Democrats don't agree with any of them, and even if the Senate came up with something, the people in the House wouldn't compromise. The next person, in an obsequious way, asked if he would be willing to work together with Republicans like Collins to make sure this was true, and he said yes, of course, implying that some kind of across-the-aisle stuff is possible. Having been warned that all answers would be story-time, I left.
I feel well represented by him, but don't necessarily feel a need to hear him speak again.
Good one-liner: "a vision without funding is a hallucination"