That is the part that just kills me. One of the planks in Obama's campaigns (or at least the first) was anti-torture (at least that is how I perceived it at the time, and I believe that is how I was intended to perceive it.) So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar.
I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do? Vote third party perhaps, but they would still lack any assurance whatsoever that their third party candidate was not a liar. How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars?
They aren't actually representing the people that elect them, so my conclusion is that whatever our system of government may be, it is not actually a representative democracy.
(Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms... except that the unbelievably vast majority of voters have never met these candidates, so they "know" the candidate only through the candidates portrayal of their platform. The reality is that the general public votes for platforms (or cynically, attractive faces...).)