Goal posts.

There is a price to be paid for all this co-opting and compromise.

Barack Obama knew it too. He just wouldn't say it. He refused to criticize right-wing ideology. Or to make a full-throated case that Democrats offered an ideological alternative.

Instead, his favorite campaign line on the Republican record was a story about competence: The Republicans "drove the country into the ditch," and "now they want the keys back." But Republicans aren't bad drivers; they drive exactly where they want to go, pedal to the metal. Sure, they sometimes compromise on tactics – certainly Reagan did. But he, and they, never waver on strategic aims. They plant their flag in an uncompromising position, and wait for the world to come around – which, quite often, it eventually does. This is because in a media environment based on the ideology of "balance," in which anything one of the parties insists upon must be given equal weight to whatever the other party says back, the party that plants its ideological flag further from the center makes the center move. And that is how America changes. You set the stage for future changes by shifting the rhetoric of the present.