Surely we elect politicians to vicariously make our political decisions and we do that because it's a complicated field with a lot of different things going on.

Trying to read about the Lisbon treaty made my head hurt and frankly I wouldn't want to have to make a yes/no decision on it. Looking at the madness stirred by the right in America over the proposed Health Care reforms also points out how hard it is to get messages across and how easy it is to twist things. After all, the glib and simple soundbyte isn't necessarily the point about something.

People have low attention spans, they don't like complexity but things are complex. While people who have the time and energy, plus the political history knowledge to make sense of political aspects might want to be asked their opinion they're a minority, aren't they? While everyone might profess an opinion on politics, isn't asking the country as a whole about something the Government should be dealing with tantamount to picking a national sports squad and their tactics by the same method? Would that be a good idea either? (Maybe that would...)

tl:dr? Okay cheers.