The citizens' assembly, being non-governmental and community-based, would have no power to compel their participation. But I think very few would refuse. Who knows, maybe C-SPAN would want to cover it.

Since the debt ceiling debacle of July 2011, Obama has gotten clearer that he cannot have a successful presidency if he does not push harder for equality and the common good.

Obama's soft communitarianism has yielded little. Iran continues to thumb its nose at his solicitations; the GOP is mocking it; and Wall Street is paying out bonuses using taxpayer dollars.

A revival of the American community requires us to spend much less of our energy and resources on fighting one another, and invest much more of it in the common good.

The conservatives' well of ideas may well have run dry, but the American majority has hardly turned liberal. So could the most compelling ideas be neither conservative nor liberal but communitarian?

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. long claimed to have found that American politics swing back and forth between conservative and liberal periods. After 8 years of Bush, a liberal comeback is due (if not overdue).