[Kenny Bunk]

Doing nothing is a revolutionary battle tactic?
Is there some universe where this makes sense?

Absolutely. We live in one in which Obama just won a second term as a reward for doing a really bad job in his first term.

[x]

Okay, I see your point now. But such complicated dialectical strategies don't usually work in real life. The chance that the target audience will simply write the strategist off as a failure and take the opposite course of action is too great. So the idea that the Soviet Union was only pretending to collapse to draw out the West for a new offensive didn't pan out: the collapse was too real. Also, I don't see Obama or his team having anything like the discipline or patience to follow a long-term strategy that the old Communists had.

The other problem is that nobody wants to be that guy whose failure paves the way for later success -- especially if the success isn't sure to come. Politician's egos are too strong to want to play the fall guy. They don't want to sacrifice whatever chance they have at fame and power and reputation to be somebody else's Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter (or I guess we have to add George W. Bush now). If Obama is that twisted and that clever, he's not going to want to be somebody else's second banana. He may just be really incompetent, not some evil genius pretending to be incompetent so that someone else could take the credit.