From the White House Briefing Book:

As a closing act for the Transition, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett requested that the Office of Public Liaison create a process by which Americans outside of Washington could come together to present ideas directly to the President – a “Citizen’s Briefing Book.”

The idea was to use the Transition website, change.gov, to create a grassroots version of the research binders that presidents receive every day. But instead of advice from top government officials, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is composed of ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov.

125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area. You can tell how popular each idea was by looking at the number next to it – it represents how many people voted for the idea, with 10 points awarded for each positive vote.

So how'd that work out for the "enthusiastic public"?

(I'm including the front page only so I can express the wish that the Obama design team would come up some fresh treatments.)

#2: "Get the Insurance Companies out of Health Care." So far as I know, the only way to do that is via single payer, so I guess the "little" single payer advocates were out in force.

And this is the sad part. The disconnect between the hopes and dreams people still have, and Obama's performance, is really quite glaring; we focus a lot on health care here, so that's what I picked out, but the same disconnect is evident on foreign policy (permanent closure of all torture facilities; re-evaluate aid to Israel).

More than hope for policy, people still hope that civic engagement will bring about what they are dreaming for. The people who answered these questions -- and there are a lot of them, whether they are "representative" or no -- are screaming for the Overton Window to move left, where Obama and Versailles are resolutely jamming it firmly in place so that it moves by the smallest possible amount. Plus ça "change," plus c'est la même chose...

It's sad. Let's hope it doesn't become tragic. What happens to a dream deferred?

NOTE Come to think of it, Obama dissed the proponents of ranking policy #1, marijuana reform -- "And I don't know what this says about the online audience" [laughter] -- in exactly the same way that he dissed the proponents of ranking policy #2, getting the insurance companies out of health care -- "got the little single payer advocates up here". I can imagine how that will end well -- "make him do it" -- and I can imagine how it will end badly.