After much hype and buildup, the AmericaSpeaks “national town meeting” on cutting the deficit was held on Saturday. I watched the proceedings via webcast for much of the morning, knowing that Digby was liveblogging it and David Dayen was on the scene here in Southern California, so that I could take part in a radio interview before heading out to experience the event in person. What I found in sunny Pasadena was a cross between a corporate “team-building” and “motivational” exercise and one of Stanley Milgram’s sinister “obedience to authority” experiments.
The good news for America seems to be that, as Roger Hickey points out, the experiment went horribly wrong … for its organizers. The bad news is that they’ll probably try to spin it the way they wanted to anyway.
