Obama’s Strategic Deficit

Obama’s presidency has been compromised.  While he had the tempo of “change we can believe in” the neoconservative intelligentsia were beating the drums to create the tea party movement (no surprise here).Obama’s team was comprised of tactician’s while the “Outs” were planning long-term strategy to deny the elected administration governance – they are saboteurs of the democratic process.  Why are “moral” progressives always losing to the Roves and Armeys of the “win at any cost” right? Are the center and left unable to mount a strategic defense?  One of the problems, as I see it, is that a long-term strategy is needed similar to the one used by the Chinese to recover Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet, and eventually Taiwan.  Constant pressure that will outlast the 4-year election cycle.  Constant, coherent pressure that eventually prevails. How are some parties always able to convince people to act against their own interests?  My mother was a french-horn player’s daughter who always voted the Birch ticket because she believed that she could one day be as rich as Croesus’ wife she didn’t want to have to share it with anyone.  My mother was, in a sense, a Social Darwinist. She believed that some people were better equipped to survive and those who were ill-equipped fell by the wayside and that this was the natural order.  She was an enculturated social darwinist hoping her number would come up.  There are other Social Darwinists who are more able than my mother (who had not an evil bone) to manipulate our “economic democracy” in a hyperstrategic mode.  Politics is, at the end of it, subservient to money.