Recent town halls conducted by Arkansas' two U.S. senators couldn't have been more different -- in experience or impact.
Tom Cotton faced more than 2,000 people in a raucous audience in Springdale last week. The event was live-streamed to an overflow crowd outside the auditorium and to a national audience.
John Boozman opted for what he called a "tele-town hall," speaking one on one with the dozen or so callers who got through to him Monday night.
He gave no clue how many called in to listen. And listeners could get no sense of what any of the ones who didn't get to speak to the senator were thinking.
By contrast, anyone viewing Cotton's town hall in person or on screen could quickly gauge the participants' collective mindset. It was as plain as the signs they held and the words emblazoned on their T-shirts. This was largely an anti-Trump crowd that was there to demand response to his behavior from their senator.
It's hard to say how much, if any, either "gathering" influenced these Republican senators or affected how they will do their jobs going forward. Neither needs to sweat re-election in this Republican-leaning state, at least not now. Cotton won't be up again until 2020. Boozman just won re-election in 2016 and is at the front end of a six-year term.
Under the circumstances, either or both might have gotten away with having no exchange with Arkansas voters at all during this recent recess. Greater interests than their own re-election were at play, however. While their own seats aren't vulnerable, the Republican majority may be.
Republicans have a bare majority in the Senate now and might lose it in the mid-term elections in 2018, if this newly aroused electorate follows through by voting then.
What these two senators did, effectively, was fade some of the heat for their president and perhaps for Republican colleagues who will be up for re-election.
President Trump's rocky start has so riled Americans, including Arkansans, that many have shown themselves willing to organize and protest.
That huge turnout for Cotton's town hall was part of the protest, with many of the attendees repeatedly holding up red cards to signify their opposition to Trump's actions and/or Cotton's answers.
They were hard to ignore, although Cotton reminded them that the election in November that put Trump in office represented the sentiment of many, many times over as many of his constituents as did the Springdale crowd.
Boozman also recalled the 2016 election -- and the strong pro-Trump Arkansas vote in particular -- in response to opposition voiced by a caller.
Those are the numbers tattooed into the senators' brains and are an easy counter to even as vociferous a town hall as Cotton experienced last week.
Cotton, of course, may be more sensitive to the larger electorate, given the frequent suggestion that he will someday run for president himself. Remember, his town hall played to a national audience and was heavily reported in national news. Perceptions about how he handled himself will carry forward.
Notably, Cotton has gotten fairly good marks just for showing up and taking whatever his constituents dished out.
He awkwardly tried to move on to another question after a young disabled woman told him she would die if she loses her health care insurance. She wanted a commitment from him to replace, not just repeal, her Affordable Care Act coverage.
He talked more with her after the crowd demanded it, but he didn't give her specifics on a replacement for ACA.
The fate of the federal program, better known as Obamacare, was featured in questions to both Cotton and Boozman, both of whom have long called for the law's repeal.
The senators also fielded questions about Trump's immigration policies, asking why the senators would consider spending so much money on Trump's proposed border wall when the U.S. has so many infrastructure needs and the burgeoning federal debt and deficit.
There were other questions, too, to the senators, ranging from veteran's affairs to environmental issues, but health care and immigration dominated both town halls.
Boozman's outreach proved tamer than Cotton's, but it couldn't have had as much impact on participants as Cotton's did.
Whether they came to support the senator, as some certainly did, or to taunt him, Cotton's constituents were caught up in the experience of direct democracy.
Callers to Boozman's tele-town hall mostly just tied up their phones for an evening.
Commentary on 03/01/2017