Most Americans back NSA tracking phone records, prioritize probes over privacy

[mike_c]

30. I respectfully disagree, although I also understand where you'd get that impression....

"Voters" are only one of the administration's constituencies though, and not the one that matters except for one day or so every two, four, or six years. Political leadership in the U.S. does not generally answer to voters, however. Day-to-day they answer to wealth, to the security state and the MIC, to partisanship they imagine is the engine of public discourse outside the beltway-- and sometimes it is-- and to their own inbred bureaucratic apparatus. They manipulate the public debate to sway voters by election time, but in between elections they answer to a different constituency altogether. It's not so much that "if voters don't care, politicians won't" as politicians only answer to voters when they've gotten caught doing something unsavory, if then. Otherwise, the money and power arrive from elsewhere than the electorate.

My cynicism is showing.