"We all make too much of what politicians do and are.  "Let's face it, politics is largely the art of deception, and political rhetoric is largely the art of mis-stating issues."  Thomas Sowell

Admire any politician at your own peril, they are at best a necessary evil, Reagan and Lincoln included. 

The citizens of this nation, you and I, owe far more to people like Corporal Jonathan Yale and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter and Garrett Peters than to the likes of any politician.  We have liberty because of the former, and in spite of the latter, the majority of whom are continually engaged in auctioning off our rights to create some bogus sense of a political legacy to meet some emotional need only they can understand.

For me, it has been liberating to realize that politicians have no more significance that you, than me, or than some TV talking head or pop star.  It also makes it much easier to see through the ways they practice their trade, which again, is by primarily mis-stating the issues such that we think they are on our side.  It is nothing new, and nothing to despair over, that politicians are not 'great leaders.' 

For me, the "two Americas" issue (and I nominate Mr. Edwards as perhaps the single best example of what a politician is that we've been lucky enough to 'see' of late) boils down to an America which allows itself to believe that government is an appropriate agency to create goodness (in other words, that goodness can be created by coercive force), and those that know otherwise.