Health care knocks on Campbell’s door

On one street corner, they’re waving American flags, donning red, white and blue hats and shirts, and singing the national anthem. About 10 minutes later, on the opposite corner, another group starts chanting at the first group, “Go back to Canada! Go back to Canada!”

Only in a debate about health-care reform could such a scene make any sense.

With debate over President Obama’s signature domestic policy issue, health-care reform, continuing to heat up like a Southern California summer, hundreds took to demonstrating outside Rep. John Campbell’s office in Newport Beach Monday afternoon.

On one side, outside the office on Newport Center Drive near Fashion Island, stood hundreds of proponents for reform, who considered themselves the new “silent majority.”

Silent, that is, not so much by choice, but by a lack of ears to hear them.

“This is because people are frustrated. No one’s been able to get their voices heard,” said Valerie Blomquist, one of the protest’s organizers. “We just want to have open discourse.”

Blomquist’s and others’ criticism of Campbell specifically is that he has not hosted a town hall-style meeting where the public can voice their concerns to him in person.

“He has not held a town hall per se, but [Campbell] has been all across the district hearing his constituents’ concerns,” said his spokesman, Brent Hall. He said that Campbell has met with many groups in his district who have invited him to discuss health care, and he’s arrived at one conclusion.

“The proposed plan is directionally opposite of where the congressman thinks we should be going,” Hall said.

Not to be outdone, Campbell supporters and health-care reform proposal opponents stood across the street for their own anti-demonstration demonstration. The messages among that group were as varied as the proponents’ were unified.

Some questioned Obama’s citizenship and claimed a grand Communist plot to take over the country.

Others perpetuated ideas of the since-debunked “death panels” claim some Republicans in Congress have been slow to distance themselves from.

But a majority, when not calling proponents socialists or shouting, “Freedom yes! Obamacare no!”, said their biggest concern was growing the federal deficit and putting health care in the hands of a government they see as incompetent.