In many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses - even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.This dynamic has repeatedly emerged in numerous contexts. Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies - once viciously denounced by Democrats - of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowersAnd now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.