I'm not sure it's fair to mock the public figures, because it's not like the guys in between them were anything particularly remarkable either. Democracy doesn't select skilled leaders, it selects charismatic ones with 'flexible moral values' of the sort that are useful for gaining sufficient backers. It's fairly predictable that democracies with relatively wide suffrage would trend towards electing pop figures.

This also is exactly democracy was mostly felt to be an unsustainable system by the ancient philosophers. And in reading Plato's assessment of democracy, and its cycles, in "The Republic", he sounds like much more like a prophet than a philosopher.