Different Strokes at Paul Ryan's Oak Creek Town Hall

To this man's eye, several stark differences between U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan's town hall meeting Thursday and those held earlier this year were pretty apparent.

There were no boos, there was no shouting. There was barely even a hostile question. Instead, a very receptive audience of about 125 people at the gave Ryan standing ovations before and after he took the stage for a 90-minute listening session.

The discussion Thursday focused largely on jobs, the economy and tax reform. Not Medicare and Social Security, as had been the themes in April shortly after he .

The venue easily fit the crowd with plenty of room to spare. While still a good turnout for a weekday afternoon, it wasn't the overflow crowd I anticipated.

The apparently thought the same way I did. About a dozen officers were inside the community center and several more outside, with an area in front of the building blocked off. Officers from neighboring communities, including Franklin and Greenfield, were called in to help.

Officials were expecting a protest outside that, evidently, never happened. I walked outside about 20 minutes before the event and there were no signs-on-sticks to be found or chants to be heard. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare had said in a news release emailed to Patch and many other media outlets that it . A spokesman for the group did not return a voicemail left Thursday afternoon.

All in all, it made for a relatively quiet afternoon. And , where Ryan held a listening session earlier in the day.

But in a short question-and-answer session with reporters afterward, I asked Ryan if he noticed a difference between his town halls held today and those last spring.

From his perspective, not much had changed.

"I don't see much of a difference between the ones earlier this year and (today). I just see more interest. I used to do these in city council chambers. I used to do these in courtrooms. Now we're trying to find the biggest venues we can in the cities we go to ... we're scrambling to find places that are big enough to house the kinds of crowds we're getting.

"We've always had overwhelming support from the crowds. That's what we had last time, that's what we're getting this time. It's pretty much par for the course."

Perhaps. But I wonder if the outcry over Ryan's proposals is simply settling down. Humans do tend to have short memories, after all. Or maybe they realize his reforms can't pass with a Democrat in the White House. Or, possibly, it was just too damn cold and rainy and people didn't want to leave the house.

Whatever the case may be, the town hall Thursday was certainly not what I was expecting.

I'll let you know when the shock of seeing civility in political discussions wears off.

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