I've attacked this position before and I'll attack it again - the last 5 years have showed us that national US politicians do have the capacity to genuinely lead - look how far they've recently led us astray.  We just suspended habeus corpus.  We have national debates about whether torturing prisoners ourselves (rather than shipping them to other countries to do it) is good policy.  We're fighting a war that we can't figure out which lie justified.  We've ignoring the war which for the first time in 60 years, we had a universally defensible reason to fight.  There have been discussions about nuking Iran, and the armed forces are positioning themselves for the possibility that it will be politically necessary to start a war there.  Tell me Gore or Kerry would have done that with a straight face.

There always has and always will be a pull towards big money in decisionmaking, but how leaders resist or give in to that pull varies immensely.  The current leadership does things like cutting taxes for the rich repeatedly and heavily, and when they encounter enough political opposition to that to force them to stop, firing the IRS tax attorneys devoted to investigating super-high income tax fraud - the ones who bring in $70 billion a year that would otherwise be fraudulently deducted, so that we won't have to pay their ten or twenty million in salary.

If Goldman Sachs et al control things completely, why were these lawyers ever put in place?  Why have the rich ever paid taxes?  I have more than enough cynicism to go around, but the rich are not yet all-powerful.  They are not yet invincible.  A determined, skilled populist leader COULD still reinstitute a sense of liberal democracy we've had for at least significant portions of the 20th century.

Americans are beginning to wake up, and he-said-she-said journalism is slowly unravelling.  Blogs are taking up the slack, and they have an inherently more accessible range of viewpoints than network TV.  Network TV is shifting the confrontational model to personality-driven shows that perform the core responsibility of the Fourth Estate that's been ignored - analysis.  And in-depth analysis is harder to do when your job is nonsensical hypnosis (you can actually teach the entire breadth of a logic and semantics course on fallacies using a half hour of O'reilly).