Arnold Schwarzenegger is holding town hall meetings up and down the state in his campaign for governor. But he never invites the town.
"These people don't even live here," said East Los Angeles resident Augusto Alarcon, 48, referring to the crowd inside the Hollenbeck Youth Center, the site of one of Schwarzenegger's recent town halls.
Alarcon, who lives around the corner, was kept out on the sidewalk. "I wasn't invited," he explained.
Like all the Schwarzenegger gatherings, the Hollenbeck event was designed to mimic New England-style democracy -- a California version of civic-minded Connecticutters filing through open doors to greet and grill a village politician.
Except that the doors in East L.A. were guarded by police officers. Campaign staffers shooed away neighborhood folks without tickets. And there was no grilling by the 250 attendees, who had been recruited by groups friendly to the candidate.
The scene was not uncommon. Many election-season town halls are invitation-only affairs as carefully scripted as a commercial. Some are filmed for advertisements, with the lights ablaze, the stage decked in flags, and the questioners as flattering of the candidate as the camera angles.
At minimum, town halls provide nicely packaged news footage for local TV stations, which can be the next best thing to an ad.
"They make for good free media," said Jerry Lubenow, director of the Center on Politics at UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies. "Voters like them.... People want to believe they're real."
The practice of turning town halls into candidate vanity venues long predates the California recall.
Bill Clinton made clever use of them -- some less fan-packed than others -- during his 1992 drive for the White House. Two years later, at an MTV town hall, he famously revealed his underwear choice (briefs), in answer to a question that appeared prearranged to endear Clinton to young voters. ("It wasn't a setup," said Ann Lewis, a former Clinton communications director.)
In 2000, Arizona Sen. John McCain held dozens of town halls during the presidential primary in New Hampshire, where they were closer to the freewheeling model of the Granite State's traditions.
"I saw McCain get some very ugly questions," said Dan Schnur, who was the senator's communications director.
