Tales from town halls

By National Journal staff

updated 3:24 p.m. ET Dec. 4, 2007

For months now, the presidential hopefuls have been trooping into rooms full of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. The candidates talk. The voters ask questions. It seems simple, but the vast majority of Americans will never see the inside of one of these forums. What really happens inside campaign town hall meetings? The NBC News/National Journal reporters who travel with the candidates offered some observations.

Fred Thompson doesn't always take questions. When he does, he typically answers only a few before an aide hustles him away, citing his busy schedule. More than once, Thompson has then retreated to his luxury SUV for a meal. He sometimes tells the audience, "That's the good thing about being the candidate. You get to decide when you want to leave."

John McCain, on the other hand, will answer questions until the audience cries uncle. After an hour or more, voters have been known to glance furtively around the room, trying to plot their escapes.

Mitt Romney invites voters to "Ask Mitt Anything," although sometimes their questions annoy him. Recently, when one woman after another challenged him on private accounts for Social Security, he finally shot back, "You're getting down into the weeds. All right?"

Bill Richardson seems like a performer who assumes his audience wants multiple encores. When an aide signals that there is only time for one more question, Richardson routinely protests and insists on taking more.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's town halls, billed as "Organizing for Change," are organized and orderly. John Edwards ticks off quick, tight answers: In New Hampshire this week, he took 11 questions in 34 minutes.

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Barack Obama, on the other hand, can give responses that are long-winded or startlingly uninhibited. When a questioner told Obama that inner-city youth must be more presentable in job interviews, he agreed, answering in character: "If you walk in with your pants hanging down, hat crooked, mumbling, 'Uh... eh... bu... eh...,' you can't understand what they're saying. Employer asks them to do something. They got an attitude. 'Why he, why I got to do it? Why didn't you ask Pookie to do it?'... The employer -- they don't want that."

Selecting individual issues
Some participants toss softballs to the candidates in an effort to help them drive home points in their stump speeches or personal stories. Rudy Giuliani is often asked about the war on terror, giving him the chance to chastise Democrats for shying away from the term "Islamic terrorists." Edwards is often asked about poverty, which he describes as "the cause of my life."

When Romney is asked about his Mormon faith, it usually comes from a supporter who invites him to explain how he will sway evangelicals to his side. Voters frequently urge Obama to tell them how he will restore America's reputation in the world, thereby allowing him to discuss his multicultural background and argue that the world will see the U.S. differently -- "literally and figuratively" -- if he becomes its "face."

But for the most part, voters come to pin the candidates down on issues that matter to them. Candidates in both parties have been pressed on their views on a wide range of subjects, especially illegal immigration.

Interactive Analyzing the 2008 presidential field

Anecdotally, illegal immigration comes up more often than any other issue -- and a more scientific survey, a Pew Research Center poll [PDF] released in late October, bears out the issue's relevance on the trail. Nearly 90 percent of respondents told pollsters that immigration will be very or somewhat important in their vote for president.

Romney has been asked about rumors that the Bush administration is secretly planning to eliminate the borders between the United States, Canada and Mexico in order to form a new entity called the "the North American Union." He always answers seriously, saying, "No, no, no."

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