RLK made some good points up until this last paragraph.
40 years ago the far Left was represented by hardcore Black Panthers, hardly the meager Left of today.
40 years ago the Left wanted the U.S. out of all wars, hardly Lieberman's position on Iraq or Gore's position on Afghanistan today.
40 years ago the Left wanted to nationalize health care, yet today you won't hear an electable Leftist even *breathe* such a threat (though they very well still want it) out loud.
40 years ago the Left wore red T-shirts stating "The Time is Mao", hardly something that you see in Washington today (outside of a few imported protesters, anyway).
In contrast, the Right has been winning battle after battle by pursuing incrementalism. We control the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, the Presidency, more than half of all state governors, and more than half of all state legislatures.
40 years ago there were more Democrats registered to vote (by almost 2 to 1), than Republicans. Today, they are about even in numbers.
40 years ago all unions were Democratic on all issues, but today unions are FIGHTING Democrats and Leftists regarding new job creation through drilling in the ANWR and rejecting the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.
40 years ago Congress was passing national gun control laws. Today, Congress is arming pilots and immunizing gun manufacturers from frivolous lawsuits.
40 years ago the U.S. was willing to sign the CCCP-U.S. ABM treaty, but today we are willing to reject it.
And we didn't get this far from where we were 40 years ago by throwing long bomb passes every down. No, we did it through incrementalism.
This is precisely what Bush is doing today. We get one tax cut, fine. Then he goes for another and gets it, too. Some provisions aren't "permanent", so later he goes for extending or even making them permanent. Old treaties, one by one, get rejected. Old executive orders and regulations, one by one, get rejected or reversed.
Incrementally, Bush is rolling back the Left. The International Cirminal Court no longer threatens Americans. CO2 regulations are no longer choking electricity providers. Families of four making $40,000 per year are now only paying $45 per year in federal income taxes. The U.S. Dollar is no longer so over-valued that it props up the exporting economies of old, socialist Europe. The newspaper industry is no longer provided an anti-competitive monopoly position that prohibits conservative radio companies from buying newspapers or starting up fresh competition.
Little by little, the Left is being rolled back. In the next 6 years, Bush will even get vouchers passed, and private schools will soon thereafter destroy the political power of the public school teachers' unions.
But none of this would have been possible if Bush had tried to go for it all in one step. It had to come one small piece at a time. Removing the double taxation of dividends was clearly *not* something that could have been done in the first tax cut, for instance, but it was possible in the 2nd.