The political ingénue around these parts can't "see" that.
Baseball has innings, football has quarters, years have months, weeks have minutes...these people follow the absurd idea that ideology without political strategy can help advance the conservative cause better than the incrementalist approach. They believe that while everything else works incrementally, in politics you have to score, or even win every game, by going for it all on every single play. In spite of the fact that all this strategy has ever brought them is defeat, they cling to it.
If Bush advances even one of the ideas generally recognized as being part of "the conservative agenda", he will accomplish more than they ever will.
Imagine that this was an actual war, and that elections are actual battles. These politically naive individuals would agree that the battle had to be fought, they just didn't agree with everyone else on the location. So while the main bodies of the opposing armies beat the hell out of each other locked in battle for God and Country on some bloody field, these guys would be standing about twelve miles away from the engagement, bitterly complaining that no one showed up to fight them.
Bush is "incrementing" us further and further left. His vision of the USA is more like Huey Long's "Share the Wealth" noise than anything else, with Bible verses to support it.