Your comment assumes that policies should be set by people with values representative of the population.
Representative democracy is not designed to follow values representative of the population. That would be direct democracy. Representative democracy is supposed to be a way of finding representatives who are wiser than the general population. So if we speak from just the slightly-more-elitist framework of representative democracy that the US founders intended, this assumption is wrong.
the slightly-more-elitist framework of representative democracy that the US founders intended
The US founders intended several different, opposing things. Some were much more elitist than others.
Representative democracy is not designed to follow values representative of the population.
That's an open question. Some prefer representative democracy because it lets ordinary people spend time on things other than politics - in which case one might still prefer to elect people who would most likely have made the same decision as you would, and oust them when they do something you wouldn't have done.
From Michael Eisen's blog:
Yuval Levin, former Executive Director of the President's Council on Bioethics, has an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post arguing that Obama's new stem cell policy is dangerous. Levin does not argue that stem cell research is bad. Rather he is upset that Obama did not dictate which uses of stem cells are appropriate, but rather asked the National Institutes of Health to draft a policy on which uses of stem cells are appropriate:
Lost in this superficially unobjectionable - if banal - assertion of the complexity of ethical issues involving science is Levin's (and many other bioethicists) credo: that the moral complexity of scientific issues means that scientists should not make decisions about them.