There's little I disagree with in Michael Waldman's post or in his article on democracy for Democracy, and yet if it were a box of ideas, I would be unable to resist the temptation to dump it out and repack it differently.

The article brought to mind a concept one often hears in discussions of education or community development: We tend to focus on deficits - children's behavior problems or a community's problems with crime or poverty - and instead we should look for the child's or the community's strengths and build on those strengths.

It's a cliché in other fields, but the concept hasn't penetrated our discussions of democracy and the political process. The standard paradigm for talking about American democracy still always follows the deficit model: Identify a bunch of problems - big money, low participation, obstacles to voting -- and a set of procedural solutions to fix each one. The result is a list of reforms as long as your arm, not one of which is inspiring or has enough of an enthusiastic constituency to move it forward. For the last ten years, I've sat through countless meetings where democracy-reform activists insist that people "should" be more interested in these issues and then argue among themselves about which of the dozen or more complex, bloodless, over-hyped process reforms should be given priority, when and if the masses actually become interested.

Michael laments that "democracy has evoked more poetry than process." I would put it differently - there's been plenty of discussion of process, but no poetry in it. And now, at a moment when American democracy seems to have, by good fortune, rediscovered some of its power to inspire, some of its poetry, there are real strengths to build on. That requires drawing on some of the ideas in Jed Purdy's essay on "community" and the responses here : Democracy is not defined by procedures like voting, legislating and lobbying. It's an act of communal participation. Ideas like national service and the act of building communities of activists on the internet or in the real world are as much a part of our sense of self-government as the formal procedures.

Michael's approach - the article moreso than yesterday's post - largely follows the older process-oriented deficit model. He notes in his post that there are positive changes in American democracy, but "the maladies that I discuss in the article have not been magically swept away," and after brushing quickly past the positive changes, he returns to the familiar complaints, as if the revolution of the last year had done no more than make things a little less bad.

While Michael lands at just about the same place I do in thinking about money in politics - we both support reforms like New York City's generous matching fund system that encourages small donors - we get there by different paths. In his article, Waldman tries to salvage the old approach to money in politics (even as he here describes it as "futile attempts to dam the flow of money in politics") The small-donor revolution that peaked in 2008, he says, was "a consequence fully intended" of the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money, which "forced candidates and parties to find ways to go to smaller donors."

This is an unduly generous interpretation, and it prevents us from moving on decisively and admitting that the old approach was an abject failure. Banning soft money could have had either of two results: It could have pushed candidates and parties toward other, more elusive vehicles for large contributions; or as supporters predicted, it could have pushed candidates toward smaller donors. In the first election after McCain-Feingold, 2004, the results moved decisively in the first direction, toward elusive big-money channels like the independent political committees known as 527s. And subsequent Supreme Court rulings, particularly in the Wisconsin Right to Life case which struck down McCain-Feingold's plainly unconstitutional regulation on outside groups mentioning candidates by name, have made the soft money restriction meaningless. Parties and candidates aren't "forced" to go to small donors after all.

Rather, the rise of smaller donors came years later, after McCain-Feingold had lost whatever teeth it had. The revolution led by Obama, by Hillary Clinton, by ActBlue (which helps aggregate small contributions for congressional candidates), by Dean's 50-state strategy, to some extent by candidates like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul, and above all by the political passions of the moment are their own success, emerging from the culture of democracy, not legislative changes to the process.

This is not a trivial point. At a moment when democracy has revealed some of its inner strengths, when millions are participating as voters, volunteers and as donors (all of which are legitimate and healthy forms of engagement) the Obama administration should not fall back on tired, failed and uninspired procedural solutions that promise more than they can possibly deliver. Instead, they should look afresh at democracy as a system, one that can form a vicious circle of nonparticipation, corruption, and cynicism; or a virtuous circle in which participation, money, voting, voluntarism, and optimism reinforce and enhance each other. The challenge then is not to stop big money or eliminate barriers, but to find interventions that tap the newfound strengths of our democracy and give them a boost. That's why I favor the generous matching system in New York City -- because it makes it really worthwhile for small donors to give and for candidates to seek them out. Big donors will give too, but that's no longer a "malady, because in such a system any individual donor, large or small, is going to have far less potential influence than when money is tightly constrained and politicians are desperate for dollars.

The poetry of American democracy is not decoration. The engagement, enthusiasm, passion and optimism revealed in the last year can be harnessed to an inspiring movement to further strengthen and restore equality to American politics in ways that the deficit model never could.

For some further thoughts on this, see my article, "Can Money Be a Force for Good," in a recent special report in The American Prospect, and also - on efforts to get beyond the suffocating list of procedural reforms and take a more comprehensive and systemic approach, Larry Marx's "A Broader Definition of Democracy," from the same report and Heather Gerken's "The Case for Keeping Score."