Maybe U.S. Sen. John Boozman's tele-town hall last week carried a bit more weight than originally thought.
It turns out something like 5,000 of the senator's Arkansas constituents dialed in to hear what he had to say.
A precious few of them, just a dozen or so, actually got their questions answered live. Another hundred reportedly stayed on the line to leave a question for the senator. His staff was busy the next day responding to those callers and the work likely continued into the week.
Still, the fact that 5,000 people bothered to call in is impressive. We can't know why they all called, but presumably they either had questions for the senator or wanted to hear where he stood on issues others might ask him about.
Such strong participation at least suggests that the callers, like the people who met lawmakers face to face last week all over the nation, are looking for some accountability from Washington.
For the record, the 5,000 count is roughly twice the number of people who packed Sen. Tom Cotton's raucus town hall in Springdale earlier in the week, attracting tons of attention within the state and beyond.
Many of those folks came to talk at Cotton more than with him, to let him know their thoughts more than to listen to his.
Just being there was, for many of the participants, an exhilarating foray into participatory democracy.
Plenty of them stepped up to ask questions, although not a lot more people got their questions out than did Boozman's callers. (Cotton took additional constituent questions by phone later in the week.and met with another 450 constituents in Heber Springs before week's end.)
The effective difference in the two formats was that Cotton's crowd in Springdale could be seen and heard as they reacted to what was being asked and answered.
The one-on-one format of Boozman's tele-town hall provided a different dynamic between senator and constituents. The setting was much more sedate and seemed to be focused more on the senator's responses than on the questions he got.
At the time, all those 5,000 callers knew was that Boozman was there, answering random calls from callers who managed to get through.
Any one of them might have been given the opportunity, but none of them knew whether that chance would come.
Patrick Creamer, senior communications advisor to Boozman, explained that staff members knew where calls were coming from but not what the calls were about when they patched them through to the senator.
Boozman just took the calls as they came, while staff tried to make sure they selected callers from all around the state.
This wasn't Boozman's first tele-town hall. Far from it. He has hosted maybe 20 such events as senator and he hosted more when he was in the House of Representatives.
This one attracted more callers than any of Boozman's other tele-town halls and the callers, like those who showed up to confront Cotton, wanted most to talk about health care insurance, immigration and veterans' issues.
It was pretty much the same with the hundred who left messages for the senator after the call was shut down, according to Creamer.
Again, the volume of calls was greater than Boozman has ever gotten before in one of his tele-town halls.
That fact had to register with him. So should the number at Cotton's town hall as well as the nature of all this citizen input. Cotton's constituents, after all, are Boozman's, too, and vice versa.
Most of these town hall crowds, whether they called in or showed up to participate, have been characterized as largely Democratic, organized by one of the Indivisible groups that are mimicking the way the Tea Party got the Congress' attention some years back.
But something Boozman said is as true today as it was when former U.S. Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt offered the advice to Boozman as he entered the House.
Once an election is over, a representative shouldn't see Democrats or Republicans -- just Arkansans, and should serve them all.
Of course, election of a Republican, or his re-election, and the issues on which he campaigned definitely guide his thoughts and actions.
But any representative needs to hear all of his constituents out, regardless of their politics.
Boozman and Cotton have each gotten an earful.
Commentary on 03/08/2017