Letters to the Editor

Fake Town Hall

Well, it’s a new low for Long Beach’s consummate politician. Slimy Robert Garcia has outdone himself with his secret Town Hall.

Two weeks ago I began inquiring as to if and when Garcia would be holding Town Halls for the citizens of Long Beach to attend and finally have some questions answered. I called both his Long Beach office and his Washington D.C. office, and was told on four different occasions over the two-week period that I would receive an email with the information. I even gave them my contact information all four times, just to be sure – never mind that they already had my info, as I do receive his newsletters.

To this day I have not received any email at all! (And yes, I have checked my junk folder.) I had also been told that I could only know the time and location of the Town Hall when I RSVP to the email (the one I never received). My last series of phone calls to both offices was met with “Sorry, the event is full and now closed and we cannot disclose the location.”

So, not only as a citizen of Long Beach, but as a special correspondent to the Beachcomber newspaper, I was denied admission to a public Town Hall held by a publicly elected public official. I then learned that a reporter friend of mine attempted an RSVP and was ignored. So much for freedom of the press.

And now having watched the C-SPAN broadcast of what Garcia calls a “Town Hall,” I see that my suspicions that I was being purposefully excluded were well-founded. Given the dozens of visibly empty seats, the worshipful, obviously hand-selected and well-mannered (or should I say well-controlled?) audience, it is pretty obvious what is going on and that the public and press were never welcome. What is the difference between a carefully curated, invitation-only “Town Hall” and a private Robert Garcia rally? I’ll wait.

Robert Garcia leads the circus of egomaniacal, secretive, performance-oriented political clowns just looking for a bigger and bigger stage on which to perform, saying all the things we want to hear but actually doing nothing, and not giving a damn for the concerns of We the People.

And, Garcia is no stranger to manipulation. Like a snake that sheds its skin, remember that just before he ran for Mayor of Long Beach as a Democrat, he was an active Republican: California Youth Coordinator for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, Founder of the Long Beach Young Republicans, and he ran Republican Frank Colonna’s 2006 Long Beach mayoral campaign. (See the “Past Republican Activism” section of the Robert Garcia article on Wikipedia.)

Clearly, he has no compunctions about switching sides when it may prove to further his ambitions. I am quite sure there is a seat reserved for Robert Garcia at Donald Trump’s table.

Merry Colvin