Henry Farrell and Matt Yglesias have launched into a fascinating discussion on the relative merits of market taking and market making political approaches. Market taking is identifying a current and understood desire and exploiting it. When Microsoft jumped into the video game sector, it was a market taking move -- they knew folks wanted video game consoles, they thought they could worm into that niche, and so they did. By contrast, market making is (to use Matt's example), Starbucks. No one knew there was a large market for upscale, comparatively expensive coffee drinks, but the expansion of Starbucks created one (and now Peets, Diedrichs, Seattle's Best, and others have entered as market takers).
All this is being used to argue which strategy is best: the current method of constant polling used to identify hot issues and direct campaigns at them (market taking), or a more long-term, visionary strategy that tries to predict what needs aren't being fulfilled and create the constituency to fill them through out-front leadership (market making). Both, certainly, have their uses. But what's being dismissed is also important: countermarket strategies. Matt gives these a mention, but only in the context of marijuana law reform or gay marriage, which strike me as fairly unlikely and poorly-chosen issues on which to base such a strategy.
Americans really do like that ineffable quality called leadership. That what they like about leadership is often a leader's courage in ignoring what America wants is odd, but no less true. That's why Matt misses the point a bit when he says "[policy X] would probably become more popular if a mainstream political leader would advocate for it." What's important isn't what would happen to the policy being advocated but to the politician advocating it. Oftentimes, the very act of pushing an unpopular program can do wonders for the popularity of both the politician and the policy. Don't get me wrong, the policy still needs to be good. But a variety of legislative packages currently considered out-of-bounds are very good, but still seen as beyond what the country will support.
It's the old Jesse Helms, you-know-where-he-stands approach. It was Bush's strategy during the election. It was the outcome of Clinton's decision to engage with Bosnia, an enormously unpopular move that did wonderful things for his ratings on leadership and foreign policy. It's very agreeable to paint the political world as a place where competing policy choices vie for dominance and a party's path to power relies largely on which problems it addresses, but that's just not backed up by the history.
The Democratic dominance of this century was started by a personality, FDR, whose primary attribute was leadership (with a healthy dose of timing). He was rarely the smartest fiscal manager (as his '37 recession proved), his policies often failed, were frequently unconstitutional, and occasionally hurt matters greatly, and he sneakily embroiled us in a war that Americans overwhelmingly didn't want to fight. Nevertheless, he was not only beloved, he made the Democratic party dominant for decades.
None of this denies the importance of market making strategies, but it is to say they're not the whole story. The choice is not simply between following the polls or creating something new, it can just as easily include defying the polls in order to say something about yourself. Enduring majorities, for reasons beyond my comprehension, have much to do with singular acts of courage and the legacies of individual leaders. Much of the question, then, has to focus on what strategies create the aura of leadership. My read is that overtly countermarket, big-think strategies, when they work, play a large role in that process, and we shouldn't be so quick to marginalize them.
