"I think a President or a Prime Minister has a duty to try and convince the public that his policies are those that are in the best interests of the body politic as a whole, even if they do not always, and cannot always, be measured in terms of overt public support."

I agree that a president or prime minister, as leaders, cannot measure success or failure of their policies by overt or presumed public support. This administration doesn't function that way though. It seems possible it is even more poll driven than it's predecessors in the Clinton White House.

But I don't believe they should be acting in the interests of the body politic though. Leadership requires foresight, and the ability to envision a future, and then doing the hard work of body politicking to get the nation moving towards that vision of the future. First and foremost, it is a president or prime minister's mission to do what is in the best interest of the nation and of the nation's relationships to the other nations of the world. To say the current administration hasn't done this is a gross understatement. It is acting not in the best interest of the nation, but of the nation's conservative elite. It is not acting in the best interest of the nation's relationship to other nations of the world, but bullying, intimidating, and manipulating them.

This administration has done more damage to the social fabric of the nation, and to it's international relationships in the two years since 9/11 than any other US administration that I can think of, barring none. If someone can cite historic precedents of other administrations doing this much permanent damage, particularly in terms of it serving exclusively it's own party ideologues and campaign contributors at the expense of the rest of the nation, I don't know of any other era in American history when that occurred at a national level. Local and regional, especially with the party boss system. But the party boss system was changed in 1972 to the current primary system, so there is no precedent there either.

This is a backward looking administration, and one working solely for what it perceives as it's own self-interest. If this president were serving the entire nation, we wouldn't see this ideological amping up of the culture wars, in an attempt to destroy the roughly 50% of the nation which embraces secular rather than fundamentalist Christian anti-government values.