Specter: Town hall protesters are ‘not representative’

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – At the center of the national furor over town meetings gone wild, Sen. Arlen Specter said here today the people interrupting the gatherings to protest proposals to overhaul the health-care system "are not representative of the American people" but deserve to be heard.

"They are significant and their views need to be taken into account," Specter told reporters after a town hall meeting at the Penn Stater Hotel this morning. He said that those in opposition to something are always more "vocal" than those in support, but believes the anger displayed at recent town halls is motivated by a deeper anxiety than the back-and-forth over health-care proposals.

"It's the economy, the facts that millions of people have lost their jobs and millions of others are afraid of losing theirs," Specter said.

During the 90-minute town hall meeting, Specter sought to allay some concerns, saying he would not vote for a bill that would add to the deficit.

He also argued that a public option for health insurance would not destroy the private insurance market or lead to "socialism," as many speakers alleged.

Specter was greeted with skepticism and jeers, but none of the tense confrontations of the meetings he held in Lebanon, Pa., and Lewisburg, Pa., yesterday.

Specter was careful to avoid the criticisms some fellow Democrats have leveled at health-care protesters, that they are pawns of special interest groups who organize them by the busload, mobs whipped up by conservative talk radio or, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "un-American."

"Somehow if you are organized you are 'bad,'" Specter told the audience of about 400. "But that's America. I don't criticize anybody who comes to these meetings, even if they give me hell."

In an interview with MSNBC's Hardball program last night, Gov. Rendell said much of the outrage at the town hall meetings came from so-called "birthers" who seek to have President Obama removed from office by pressing the discredited argument he is not a natural born citizen.

Calling them "absolutely nuts," he said, "The birthers are a perfect slice of these people who have lost their rationality and they have become obsessed with certain things, and that obsession is hurting the democratic process."

Rendell said said he had "never seen ugliness and rage like this" in his three decades in elected office.