Hamilton On Public Opinion

In The Federalist 71, Alexander Hamilton expounded upon the fickle undercurrents of public opinion, and the need for the chief executive to forge public consensus, not bow to it. The essence of leadership, lost on those on the left who feel that the president should shift course with the mercurial whims of the hoi polloi, is to chart a course and navigate that course, no matter what gale winds may blow. Acquiescing to the whims of opinion polls is not leadership; it is spinelessness, (Manifestly displayed in the person of Bill Clinton, a man more concerned with being popular than being principled. Then again, when you have no principles, I guess it comes with the terroritory.) Once again, the prescient words of the great Alexander Hamilton echo into the modern day:

There are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the Executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted. The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation, that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always REASON RIGHT about the MEANS of promoting it. They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.