People vote for a candidate, but to the extent that candidate countervails what the power centers want, they install malware of sorts, strategically placed people to thwart the agenda of the voters. If the malware does its job partially, you will have only part of the agenda achieved. If it does the job totally, you will never know whether the candidate himself was in on it from the beginning.
Maybe the only way to overcome this is for a candidate to purport to do the bidding of the power centers but secretly subvert them, i.e., to pitch compliance but radically diverge once elected, but without ever announcing it. This is such a tough needle to thread it virtually never happens -- such a leader would have to be so awake that no amount of contact with the system could corrupt him. Chances are he'd probably be crucified.
