Well, you are definitely right about one thing: policy analysis is, unfortunately, a task too exhaustive for the average American. Therefore, I can definitely imagine a counterintuitive (but right) stance turning off voters.

However, one thing that I have learned throughout this whole financial crisis is that people do care. And regardless of whether or not the underlying problem(s) are generally understood, the public wants solutions...and good ones.

Political stances are always under a lot of scrutiny from the university professors and media networks. So if the general public cannot analyze and understand the full situation they will instead rely on and digest the consensus of the intellectual community. I cannot see politicians (at least smart ones) worrying about having their their voters understanding their policies. They have bigger fish to fry. They have to be right, they have a record to defend, and they want to carry on a political career that can only advance with a record of retrospectively, good judgment. Matthew Arnold put it best with, "The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

This isn't a problem of democracy. It is far more general than that: it's a problem with humans. It persists even on the small scale -- in an oligarchy, and even in a monarchy or a dictatorship. Indeed, it might be an even worse in a dictatorship, because when the dictator decides to prefer an intuitive falsehood to a counterintuitive truth, there's no effective way to argue.

The answer to this problem, at every scale, is marketing. That's not what a roomful of rationalists wants to hear, of course, but it is the correct answer: Although it is wise to support proposals that are backed up by statistics (because those are the ones that are likely to work!) you also need a sales pitch. You must get people to associate the proposals with mom and apple pie, or with sexy people, or with Progress. Or you must convince them to follow the herd.

Exatly. Political leaders are rarely leaders at all, they are followers. If you want to change how politicians act, you almost have to change the rest of the voting public up to some significant portion.