>>Leaders, not ideas, matter.
>>People like FDR, Churchill, De Gaulle, Gandhi, King are so rare that we forget what people like that can accomplish.
>>Keep looking.
>>It's worth it.

But also your early forebears saw fit to constrain leaders via balancing mechanisms, even ultimately the right to bear arms in defense against esteemed leadership.

The other issue would be that today's heroine can become tomorrow's orangeman. Just look at the furor over white supremacist Columbus Day and Betty Ross flags, memoryholed MLK views on black abortion rates, etc etc. These days, it's popular to newspeak leaders into ridiculous paragons or travesties of what they actually were. The dishonesty is no longer limited to "turning a blind eye" e.g. of serial dalliances by a womanizing JFK: now it's smear, attack, investigate in the new age of Inquisition under which you may never see mutual respect between branches of government ever again. As for Congress: curiously, there's bipartisan leadership in a few areas like advantageous healthcare plans for themselves or backhander wealth via family or other cutouts. There's little appetite for modern attacks on those, though I expect Trump is about to give them some of their own medicine on that one.

Speaking of medicine- no doubt you saw the Dem debate descriptions of pharma executives as drug pushers, and Biden asking why a ticket-clipping Wallstreeter pays less tax than a fireman?

Meanwhile Bloomberg points out as he contemplates throwing his own hat in the ring, that leaders are not there to express lofty ideals, pursue leadership for its own sake or win debates with witty repartee. He's right: Trump's message that households have more wealth than ever before and more people are working than in recorded history, resonates easily with an electorate increasingly bored with 24/7 panicky crying of "wolf!" to get Trump. "They hate me because I work for you rather than for secret paymasters who want to divert millions of Americans' jobs across to China or cheaply by floods of immigrants." That's the meme the Democrats have to counter.