And there would be a LOT of nasty surprises on what that electorate would vote for, too, IMHO.

My own view is closer to Joel Hirschhorn's than it is most of the responders here. Sure, I've done my share of criticizing the electorate for acting dumb as a box of rocks, but how much better has the “leadership” been?

The easy way to create more opportunity for responsible course correction when the 2 party system wasn't doing right by the citizens would be the adoption of instant runoff voting. Third parties would suddenly become more viable and competitive – which would in turn create a more healthy democracy.

You can't even make one post without trying to take a swipe at Obama, “the left” , or “liberals” can you DLS? I can agree with most the above statement, except for your parenthetic part.

http://www.amazon.com/velvet-monkey-wrench-John...

A granola hippie-style book (from John Muir Press) written decades ago had a nice extreme idea, getting rid of the states and having government organized to the closest level possible, which I believe the author called “neighborhoods.” Then there would be a capital of North America where their representatives would meet as needed. It was an interesting book (”but there shall NEVER BE ANY HANDGUNS anywhere…”). Heyy, mann. Real power to the people.

More modest and sensible things to do in place of rushing to silly extremes would be to impose term limits, first of all, which the public has wanted. A more radical step to take that is still better than direct federal government democracy (which is even more anti-federal than our current misused system) is to break up the duopoly and go to a multi-party system with proportional representation in the US House of Representatives. Approval voting for single office holders (Senators and President and Vice President) is superior to other methods, and should be adopted promptly. More radical still but still better than trashing federalism would be random selection of delegates to the House of Representatives, whereby each seat is occupied from someone chosen at random — glorified jury duty — from each district. (It goes without saying that districts need to be rationalized and fully reorganized as well, encompassing contiguous, suitably-related counties, Census tracts, or ZIP code zones.)

All of these are better than turning the federal government into the equivalent of American Idol where all the audience members can vote and initiate new laws about anything they want, truly making the federal government into a giant candy store (so such people would be led to believe and even view Washington).

Direct democracy has another name – Mob Rule.”

Yes, and consider the additional damage done to federalism if we made anything and everything the possible object of action by such direct-democracy mechanisms.

“Do you really want 527-style groups exerting even more influence on our country? [...] With more referenda, the special interests will just saturate the airwaves with lies and get whatever they want.”

I saw that several years ago with abuse of these mechanisms in California.

They're great in theory but subject to abuse. And of course why should there be much if any such direct action happening between people in this country and Washington rather than state and local governments? You think viewing Washington as a candy store is bad already…

The concept of more direct democracy may be appealing on a populist basis, but it is stunningly bad in practice.

Direct democracy has another name – Mob Rule.

You advocate taking the decision making process away from people we elect for just that purpose and handing it over to an easily swayed crowd of ill-informed, emotion-filled sheep. If you would have said voters for any referendum would be limited to those who could pass a basic 10 question test on government, I might have been able to give it a little support, but just working the mob into a froth and voting is out of the question.

Elected officials need to know that when they make tough, necessary decisions they will have the time to implement them and hopefully be able to see the results by the time the next election rolls along. Removing that ability would lead to short term thinking dominated by misconceptions and distortion.