Between rounds of jeering that interrupted his every sentence, Rep. Rod Blum (R-Iowa) took a little more than two minutes to explain what else he'd like to change about the Obama-era health-care law now that he has voted for the GOP's partial repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
“Get rid of some of these crazy regulations that Obamacare puts in,” Blum suggested at an Iowa town hall meeting Monday, “such as a 62-year-old male having to have pregnancy insurance.” The crowd yelled all the louder.
The gathering in a Dubuque high school gym went on for more than an hour like that: angry questions, political explanations, boos from the bleachers.
Barbara Rank, a retired special education teacher, did not get up from her seat like many of her neighbors did. “I did not have a question to ask,” she told The Washington Post. But the next day, on her morning walk past a boulevard of government-maintained flowers, Rank realized she had a response to Blum. She wrote it down in 96 words and sent it to her local newspaper — and since then, more than 100,000 people have offered a fair critique.
Rank, 63, has an AOL email account but no Facebook account. She learned what Reddit was only on Friday, she said, when her daughter informed her that someone had posted a snapshot of her letter under the headline, “This is democracy manifest,” and that tens of thousands of people were voting it onto the website's front page.
“It makes me laugh,” Rank said. “It's such a silly little piece.”
Tell that to the Daily Kos, where a writer thanks her “for calling out ignorant so-called public servants like Rod Blum of Iowa.”
Or to thousands of like-minded commenters on Reddit and Twitter.
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