What I find remarkable is how it seems about 99% of the population is so naive as to demand that the politicians 'represent the public' and have some agenda based on what's good for society, what they think is right, apart from any other considerations - while such people exist, and are called the candidates who get about 0.5% of the vote, and have no power.
When the system absolutely requires the politicians to choose between compromises and getting almost no votes, what's the point of all the criticism? It's misdirected. Most politicians, from what I see, hate the same thing the public does, but that doesn't change things. So what about any ways to improve things? Well, look no further than the public, who can't be bothered to make that a priority.
They'll scream bloody murder over the resulting policies, but fall asleep if you bring up the systemic issues that cause those bad policies. So what does a politician do when faces with having to enact bad policies, while dealing with a screaming public who hates the policies but won't get behind fixing the system? That's why we have all the spin and misleading.
Don't look at Bush screwing the public by appointing the foxes to guard the henhouse on regulations - instead remember he's the guy who will protect you from being killed by terrorists, so who cares about regulators?
And if that's not enough, 'look at those pansy democrats, with their $400 John Edwards haircuts, aren't they so bad you have to pick the republicans'?
I think most politicians are in a situation of having to make the compromises and they sleep at night by trying to do some good when they can. They all have a few items trying to do some good on their agenda. And they can rationalize by figuring that someone else in their spot would be even worse.
We can say the solution is 'get the money out of the campaigns' all day, but it's like saying 'eat healthier and exercise more' to our ever-larger population. Instead, the voters themselves make compromises, and just ignore the system while having generally disfavorable views (under 30% approval for republican bush and the democratic congress), and this leaves them pretty powerless, combined with their being pretty lazy for the most part.
And yet for all that people aren't *really* dissatisfied despite the threatening deficits and the Iraq war. I think most people's real boundaries for foreign policy is not creating gas ovens to burn innocent people like the nazis on the one hand, and not allowing constant terrorist attacks or military invasion of the US on the other. The rest is all with people's comfort level of 'maybe it's wrong, but the US is still powerful and Americans are ok'.
Frankly, I think we need some sort of fundamental changes to fix a system where a Viet Nam war - political driven by misguided leadership at the expense of millions of lives - can happen because Americans feel like 'well, we have to fight (daily evil horde, in this case global communism, today it's global Muslim terrorism)'.
The same audience that enjoys prosperity in America is not exactly going to set policies for what happens to people in some overseas land with as much care as those people would like. This is why even in Viet Nam, is was that tens of thousands of Americans killed and not the millions of Vietnamese (and Cambodians, including the later victims caused by destabilizing the government), were the factors changing public opinion.
There's a fundamental problem that there's profit to be made by exploiting others, and the civilian population of the nation who stands to gain, whatever nation, is pretty easily persuaded to go along - often in blissful ignorance.
What can be done? For a start, getting the money out of the campaigns. And the readers snoozes, until the day they're the ones on the receiving end of the bad policies, which will not happen for most of them, since the US does take care of its own for the most part.