Eeeeh now I have to dance around to not make this into a political topic.
I was more interested in the first look at the petition system a month or three after it came out, when they found that the landslide biggest issue showing up was endless petitions demanding the legalization of marijuana. That's most of what anyone cared about. Biggest issue on this side of the planet.
Apparently marijuana is the single most important thing in this country--whether you're for banning it or legalizing it, you have a huge and noisy lobby behind you. That's as facepalmable as when we had a war going on and the single most important thing was gay marriage (during the 2004 election campaign, Bush vs. Kerry).
Ignoring the actual stance and arguments for and against, I'm often shocked at the utter ridiculousness of the hot issues in this country. I appreciate that politics is a big flamewar arguing about differences of opinions; but I just keep waking up and going, "People of America ... THIS is what you want to argue about today?"
Let's stick to education. Education isn't much of a political topic. Everyone wants it to be better, nobody's arguing that we need to strip education, and generally there's a lot of stuff worth talking about in education that doesn't involve religion in education or evolution versus creationism.