Jeff Jarvis asks:

So what if a President appointed a Secretary of Interaction whose job it is to encourage an open exchange of ideas and understanding.

I guess that's how people know you're a liberal. Your ideas all involve creating a new federal agency. Does anybody really think a president would use this as anything more than a polling tool?

Consider Bill Clinton. He used his polling not to develop new ideas, but to give the impression that he was more centrist than he really was. What if this new Secretariat had received a post warning of some terrorist attack that later came to pass? That message would be gone from the system before anybody could ask why they hadn't seen this coming. All the same techniques that make public comment hearings long and boring, in Jeff's words, would be used to make the system return the result the president wanted it to.

Maybe the real political spectrum should be divided between realists and idealists. Most conservatives and libertarians believe that power corrupts, which is why they advocate smaller, more localized government. Although conservatives would probably support more governmental power than libertarians, I think that I've seen enough to say that the founders were wise to recognize the need for a national government, but not to trust it too much, leaving most of the government to the states. Now, I would say that we suffer from mission creep in all three branches of national government. What is ironic is that they supreme court is reaching out to limit government of duly elected representatives, while the other two branches are steadily gathering more power away from the state and local governments to themselves.

Be that as it may, I think that liberals are losing numbers as their traditional positions are shown to be ineffective. The libertarians seem to be the swing group of the future, sometimes agreeing with liberals, sometimes with conservatives. I don't think that things are going to get any simpler very soon .