Dawn Majors/Post-Dispatch

Several hundred citizens, virtually all of them of mid- to late-middle age, showed up at Bernard Middle School in Mehlville Thursday evening. Judging by their behavior, their object was to display their scorn and shout down U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis.

Mr. Carnahan had organized a forum on health care and services for the elderly. He lined up a series of speakers to discuss various aspects of the issue. The protesters, though, were intent on chanting slogans and raising a ruckus displaying their opposition to health care reform legislation pending in Congress.

The shouting was just a tactic. The strategy was to win the attention of the  media by using a small cast of highly motivated actors to create an impression of widespread public outrage over health care reform.

Similar demonstrations have been playing out at “town hall” meetings across the nation. The tone has been loud and hostile. Chanting and heckling have rattled speakers. In response, advocates of health care reform have been turning out at the meetings to meet the challenge. In Mehlville, the whole mess descended into anger and violence.

There’s irony in this. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s early career as a “community organizer” in Chicago became a running punch line for political conservatives.

Who could forget the dripping sarcasm of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani when, at the Republican National Convention, they mocked community organizers?

A wiser — and more successful — agitator from the right knew better. Longtime conservative author and activist Phyllis Schlafly of St. Louis noted that “community organizing” is what Mr. Obama “used so successfully to defeat the Clinton machine plus the Republican Party in a dramatic one-two punch never before seen in politics.”

She suggested that writings of the late Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules for Radicals” and father of the community organizing practices that Mr. Obama taught and practiced, deserve a place “on your must-read list if you want to understand much of contemporary politics.”

“Alinsky didn’t want just talkers,” Ms. Schlafly wrote. “He wanted radicals who were prepared to take bold action to organize the discontented, precipitate crisis, grab power and transform society.”

Angry conservatives —  cheered and supported by industry-sponsored groups and political operatives — hope to defeat health care reform by replicating the most aggressive of tactics they ridiculed so heartily.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., will hold a health care town hall meeting Tuesday in Hillsboro. One planned for University City was canceled. Ms. McCaskill says that she hopes that “Missouri good manners will rule the day.”

“There are legitimate concerns about health care reform and the status quo, and we ought to be able to have a discussion about both,” she said.

Local activists, as they look ahead, should consider one of Saul Alinsky’s cardinal rules that has to do with the potentially short shelf life of militant street theater.

“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag,” he wrote.

People who use rude interruption and desperate anger as their principal outlet for community activism can expect to lose public sympathy quickly. Indeed, they may find themselves out in the cold, having forfeited by their conduct any claim to participate in the conversation.