Conrad and Senate Budget's top Republican, commission member Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, have advocated supplementing the commission's work on educating the public with an outside group of advisers. These could come from such places as the Peterson Foundation, the Concord Coalition, the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution, which have banded together for the past four years to stage a series of events around the country initially labeled a "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" but recently re-minted as "The Fiscal Solutions Tour."

The executive director of the Concord Coalition, Robert L. Bixby, says that effort has convinced him that engaging the public directly -- by allowing them, for example, to engage in role-playing exercises in which they can "make" budget choices -- would do more to raise the national consciousness then a series of commission meetings to take testimony from experts.

The proliferation of technology and social media also affords the commission new opportunities to reach the public. "It's an easier thing than ever with Web sites and participation by people in reviewing materials and expressing their point of view," Durbin said.

But not even the most successful public education campaign would smooth over the ideological disagreements confronting the commission's work. Panel member Jeb Hensarling, a House Republican from Texas, said he's all for a big outreach effort -- so long as it's exclusively about the deep spending reductions that could close the budget gap. Democrats on the panel, of course, won't be limited that way.

Using outsiders will not necessarily be a way to avoid politics, either, depending on who those outsiders are. Liberal advocacy groups and unions, already wary of the commission, would bristle at the involvement of some groups that they contend are out to undermine social safety net programs in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Beyond raising awareness of the nation's budget woes, a commission unable to agree on a solution could nonetheless turn over a plurality report with some ideas to the president, who will be sending Congress his fiscal 2012 budget just after the panel disbands. If one or two Republicans endorsed those ideas, the president could incorporate them in his budget and put a credible stamp of bipartisanship on the document.

"And so the work of the commission would live on that way," said Bixby.