Meet the People: Lawmakers Head Home and Prepare for the 2010 Campaign Season

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3, 2010 -- A year ago, in August 2009, Democrats returned home to their districts and probably started to lose control of Washington.

Overheated, confrontational town hall meetings, as seen in grainy cell phone videos on YouTube, dominated news coverage, gave public voice to the tea party movement and drove moderate Republicans from the health reform debate.

Democrats ultimately passed the health reform law, but the process was much more painful for them than anyone predicted.

As lawmakers head home for the summer this year, it's not the fate of the health care bill that is at stake for Democrats, it is their majority in Congress.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., was questioned at his town hall meetings and protests erupted outside last August.

He ultimately supported the health reform bill, but he is not shying away from town hall meetings this year. Himes has announced another slate for early August.

But instead of focusing on health reform, however, he hopes to focus on how to reduce the spiraling national debt and has invited David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general and a recognized deficit activist, to give a presentation at one town hall meeting. Himes expects, in part because the health reform bill is now law, that passions will have cooled and the summer of '10 will stand in marked contrast to the summer of '09.

"The budget has not been demagogued nearly the way that health care was," said Himes, in a phone interview from Connecticut. "There's no budget equivalent of death panels. ... You can look at a pie chart and pretty much understand our long-term budget problems."

Himes should expect some company at his meetings from tea party activists.

"He will be questioned," said Bob MacGuffie, the Connecticut-based tea party activist who wrote a widely-cited memo, and posted it online last year, encouraging disruption of town hall meetings.

"They ran into 'We the People,'" said MacGuffie of last August.