Mediaboss Marketing

WASHINGTON (CNN) -

Republicans woke up Sunday to a wave of new polls that showed their Senate candidates surging ahead in key states -- including one in Iowa that looked particularly grim for Democrats -- giving the GOP a jolt of enthusiasm going into the 2014 campaign cycle's final hours.

Two days from the midterm election, Washington's political class was buzzing around news that Iowa GOP Senate hopeful Joni Ernst was 7 percentage points up in a Des Moines Register poll, and Republican candidates and surrogates popped up on the Sunday news shows, gleeful about their prospects.

"I think the wind is at our back," Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said on CNN's "State of the Union." He added that Republicans will "in all likelihood" win control of the Senate and added: "I think people are ready for new leadership."

Fueling the Republicans' optimism was a Register poll that showed Ernst leading Democrat Bruce Braley, 51% to 44% -- prompting pollster J. Ann Selzer to tell the newspaper that "this race looks like it's decided."

Hours before the poll's release, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spelled out what a loss in the Hawkeye State would mean for Democrats.

"Iowa is critical. There's no other way to say it," Reid said Saturday in a conference call with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

"Joni Ernst would mean --- coming to the United States Senate --- that Mitch McConnell would be leader of the United States Senate, who agrees with her on everything," he said, according to Politico.

And it wasn't just Iowa that had good news for Republicans. A new set of NBC News/Marist polls unveiled Sunday morning gave Republicans boosts in three key Senate races -- including McConnell's in Kentucky, as well as Georgia, where Democrats had hoped to pickup a seat, and Louisiana, where Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu is in a tough race for her political career.

Those incumbent Senate Democrats have spent the fall trying to distance themselves from President Barack Obama, whose floundering state-level approval ratings have been a drag for his party down the ticket as Republicans tie their opponents to the commander-in-chief every chance they get.

Read more here:
Republican candidate in critical Iowa race up 7 points over opponent

Direct Democracy classically termed pure democracy
TWITTER ACC. https://twitter.com/lordfec [POSTED UNDER FAIR USE MEDIA REPORTING] FAIR USE NOTICE: This video may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for ...

By: Lord fec6

See the article here:
Direct Democracy classically termed pure democracy - Video

The End of Universal Democracy: The Cameron Cowan Show
Universal Democracy http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/opinion/david-brooks-is-america-losing-faith-in-universal-democracy.html?

By: Cameron Cowan

Visit link:
The End of Universal Democracy: The Cameron Cowan Show - Video

Video 01 DDF Introduction to the Direct Democracy Forum
TWITTER ACC. https://twitter.com/lordfec [POSTED UNDER FAIR USE MEDIA REPORTING] FAIR USE NOTICE: This video may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for ...

By: Lord fec6

Original post:
Video 01 DDF Introduction to the Direct Democracy Forum - Video

Democracy is a lovely word. It evokes images of civil rights marchers singing We Shall Overcome in Birmingham, Ala. It is 10,000 keys jingling the message of Its time in Pragues Wenceslas Square 25 years ago. It is the delighted faces of Afghans and Iraqis holding up ink-stained fingers and the brief springtime of hope in Cairo.

Any serious system of democracy, however, has another word attached to it that is crucial to its success but is much less evocative, a word that is at best workmanlike and more likely to be accompanied by a shrug or an ugh than the thrill of human aspiration. That word is representative.

Buzzkill, right? And yet whatever you think of the political class, it is necessary to make democracy function. Even if advances in digital technology could take out these middlemen, elected officials would still be needed to counter the very real problem of tyranny of the majority. More than that, representative democracies, as James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of the nation.

Representatives today are more often seen as bickering and inflexible than wise and discerning. Why the lack of love? Maybe because we know too much about them. A democracy requires public officials to live in the public eye, which was fine in the days before 24/7 media. The always-on spotlight, however, has burned away the privacy needed for representatives to consult one other, to blue-sky ideas, make deals, and compromise for the good of the nation and not just their own political survival or their partys advantage. Add to that the political expedient especially for members of the US House to stay close to constituents, fundraisers, and party purists, and you have a system that is broken.

The Monitor recently asked five experts how to fix the Congress. If there is a common theme in what these five (former Senate majority leaders Tom Daschle and Trent Lott, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution and The George Mason University, and Jason Grumet, author of City of Rivals: Restoring the Glorious Mess of American Democracy) recommend it is that representatives be given space space away from the spotlight, space to do business, space free from relentless campaigning and opposition gotchas, space to make Capitol Hill their workplace and not just a base they tag once a week. (You can read what they say by clicking here.)

No one is calling for a return of the smoke-filled backroom or machine politics. Lets just acknowledge that the humans we elect need the latitude to do their jobs with some degree of privacy, just as you and I need when we are noodling with ideas and weighing what can be done against what we wish could be done. Lets acknowledge that a wise nation honors its human representatives as much as its democratic ideals.

John Yemma is editor-at-large of the Monitor. He can be reached at yemma@csmonitor.com.

Read the original:
Giving our representatives room