ICYMI: Mulshine on CD 12

The SLedger's Paul Mulshine did some live blogging at Rush Holt's Town Hall meeting last night; Holt takes a beating in the school cafeteria.

Here are a couple of Mulshine's gems:

"...these people aren’t in the mood for that sort of thing. They’re ticked off over the entire Obama agenda, from cap-and-trade to health care. They’re yelling things like “Do you care why we’re here?”

Holt didn’t help his cause when he finally started taking written questions. The first was “Is there any similarity between the tea parties of today and the original tea parties?”

Instead of saying something like “I’m sure you tea-party types are all well-meaning people” – which they are – he replied, “There’s none that I can think of.”

That got a rise out of the crowd, which has a number of tea-party adherents among the several hundred who showed up.

Things just got worse for a while until finally Holt lost his patience and said “Maybe I would like to take people who would actually like to have a dialogue into another room.”

That didn’t help. Finally a local official took the mike and set up a new format. He would work as the emcee and people could come to the mike and ask questions directly. That helped a bit, but the crowd is still very anti-Holt and anti-Democrat in general.

Holt is in what is supposedly a safe Democratic district. But I’ll bet he doesn’t feel so safe this year."

and,

After the session, I met another candidate for Holt’s seat in Congress outside. His name is Scott Sipprelle and he was telling people why he would make a good congressman from New Jersey.

Unfortunately, he’s not from New Jersey. He’s from Princeton.

And Princeton is its own little world, one that doesn’t include the rest of us. I love Princeton and its historic institutions, such as the Triumph Brewpub and the Alchemist and Barrister.

But Princeton people are a bit detached, to say the least. When, after speaking to Sipprelle for a while, I mentioned I write for the Star-Ledger, he seemed to have only a vague idea what the Star-Ledger is.

And he also seems to have only a vague idea of what the Republican Party is. Sipprelle has been donating money to Democratic candidates all over America, a point on which Halfacre has been attacking him.