Is it not natural that a man who is a candidate for the favor of the people, and who is dependent on the suffrages of his fellow citizens for the continuance of his public honors, should take care to inform himself of their dispositions and inclinations and should be willing to allow them their proper degree of influence upon his conduct?
The key is "proper" degree of influence. This can run the gamut from a President who governs strictly by the polls to one who governs strictly by personal diktat. BJ Clinton pretended to be the former if one can ignore the unfortunate tendency of his and his PR department to first attempt to orchestrate the polls before they "listened" to them. 0bama is in a far less subtle category - his is the approach of a self-proclaimed paragon of moral rectitude whose task it is to force a refractory and sinful people into a mold of greater political purity. Clinton was a back-door despot, 0bama is an open one. Neither considers himself a representative; both flatter themselves that they are, to the contrary, "leaders."
But the Constitution was written very much around the concept of representation, not leadership. Hamilton and his critics, Jefferson and even, eventually, his co-author Madison, were apparently unaware that they were forming the germ of a factionalism that allows the elected to be responsive not to the people as a whole, but only to those followers who they regard as putting them into office. In theory that rivalry is dropped once the last vote is counted; in practice it is relentlessly perpetuated until it is no longer effective. Only then do we get the achingly familiar lip service to "President of ALL the people." By the time the latter pops up it is already too late for it to become a reality.
I almost wish I hadn’t read that.