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.
"Republican and political amateurs tell me daily that the only important thing is to get the Clintons and Gores out of the White House. Nothing could be further from the truth and this thinking is an ultimate deathtrap. Without a highly articulate spokesman advancing a well thought out broad agenda, winning an election is an ultimate disaster during which your opposition gets a rest period while the world watches your candidate prove the criticisms the opposition made during their election campaign. You lose leverage during your own term in office because of internal organizational dissension and directionlessness. You've simultaneously undermined your ideological and political strength in future elections. Winning an election with an incompetent or compromising or compromised candidate is deferred suicide.
The worst thing that can happen is to win an election with someone who is too incompetent, or is reluctant, to confront and refute your ideological enemy. It makes a better case for the view that the enemy is so correct as to be unrefutable than the enemy could make by himself. Ideological silence or ineptitude confers an image of indominability, immortality, invulnerability, and permission upon the opposition. The message given is that the only thing your presidential candidate can do is lamely apologize by embarrassed silence for not adopting the ideology of the political left. Your supporters are betrayed to find when they vote against the opposition they still have no voice and the opposition remains the dominant political voice.
In subsequent elections that image of indominability and permission are used against you. The ideological weaknesses of your weak previous office-holder are declared by the radical left opposition to be the wise valid positions of your party, while deviation from weaknesses and attempts to correct them are labeled extremism. A competent new candidate in your party is nearly mortally crippled by needing to spend as much time and effort refuting or reversing the silent ineptitude and embarrassment of the previous officeholder from his own party as he does making a rational ideological case. This allows the opposition the opportunity to present your candidate as being a divergent radical within his own party for saying what the previous candidate or officeholder was too inept or disinclined to say.
Concurrently, you find your own political party has become a comfortable nesting place for an influx of weaklings and trash now promoting and attempting to extend the agreeable softness and weakness of weak predecessors.
It must be understood there absolutely is no such thing as a moderate or center position in politics where there is a radical left. Any time your candidate moves half way to accommodate or make peace with the left, the left responds by moving farther left, which then moves the middle point farther left. Consequently, in the last 40 years moderation and middle ground have been moving targets receding leftward at the speed of light as so-called moderates and peacemakers desperately and lamely pursue the endlessly moving average set and reset by ever-increasing radicalism and pathology on the left. The shift has been such that the leftist position of 40 years ago is now called right-wing extremism.
Electing peacemakers and "nice guys" in dealing with the radical left is the equivalent of quitting the antibiotic medication which is fighting an infection threatening to turn into gangrene. The infection gains strength while unopposed, and your political party or next presidential candidate faces the future having lost an arm or a leg. "