ABSTRACT
The National Issues Convention revived the spirit of John Dewey and his faith in grassroots democracy. This experiment in political communication also established the validity of Deliberative Polling as a grassroots civic process for coming to public judgment on major social issues. And, it provided the media with the opportunity to create an issue-focused political coverage model in the spirit of the First Amendment-coverage that could help foster a public debate that is “uninhibited, robust and wide open.”1
