I’m still watching This Week with George Stephanopolous from today but something in it struck me so much that I had to write something. Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean are debating health care with George. George raises the question about whether the movement of people coming to townhall meeting is real or contrived, organized or not. I won’t mention the issue of all the Democratic “grassroots” causes that are funded by large donors like George Soros and organized by people who are paid to gather up folks and turn them out, like ACORN. (The only difference is ACORN gets some of your tax dollars to do this.) I just want to highlight this part of the show:

Stephanopolous: And I know your allies, Governor Dean, have been saying that this is all just, you know, paid for, people recruited by lobbyists here in Washington. But you can’t create, you can’t force people to go out to a town meeting. You can’t manufacture that kind of anger, can you?

Dean: Well there uh, there actually is, um, there is a lot of orchestration. There’s the Brian McGuffey memo which actually tells people do what, do what they’re doing, which is sit in the front, jump up and interrupt.

Stephanopolous: He’s got like 23 friends on Facebook though.

There are two things about this that interest me. First is the idea that we are measuring people’s influence now by how many Facebook friends they have. I completely understand George’s point: if McGuffey posts something on Facebook about how to disrupt a town meeting and only 23 people are hearing him, how influential can he really be? I’m not sure whether that’s an ingenious new way to measure influence, or a sign of the apocalypse. But if that’s how we’re doing things these days, then please feel free to add me to your Facebook friends so I can enhance my credibility.

Second is the idea that Howard Dean is going on national television to talk about how these townhalls are contrived, and the proof that he cites of the artificial nature of this national movement is one guy who has 23 people listening to him? Republicans do themselves a disservice when they look at the Code Pink crazies or the 9/11 truthers and paint the entire Democratic party with the crazy brush. Likewise, Dean and other Democrats do themselves a similar disservice when they point to a few cases of people taking advantage of the changing climate against government intrusion into health care to push their agenda, and label all Republicans as zombie tools of the health care industry.