I hear this a lot, and I think the destination-oriented approach to the problem is the wrong way. As part of the Frontier movement, who whole-heartedly argue that settlement is the only economically justifiable reason for human exploration, we don't just want to go to the Moon, or an asteroid, or anywhere else. We want to go to all of these places, and more.
Destination-oriented approaches aren't going to open the solar system to us. They may ramp up public excitement a bit, but lets be honest, public excitement never got us very far. Don't fall for the myth that Apollo happened because of overwhelming public support, or because Kennedy really believed in it, or anything else -- it served a geopolitical agenda of demonstrating the superiority of the American model during the struggle to win the allegiances of the third world. As advocates of opening the frontier we need to learn to take what we're given and do the most we can with it.
And quite frankly, the ambiguous flexible path approach is the best way to do that. More than anything else, it doesn't require the critical step of "Get more money from congress." If we rebuild a solid infrastructure of multiple launch vehicles to get to LEO (with competitive pressures to improve performance and reduce cost) then in 5 years when a new administration may point in a new direction, they'll have a good starting point from which to redirect the program to accomplish something within 4-5 years (a new administration won't cancel something thats almost done). If in the process we find more new and profitable things to do further away from the Earth's economic sphere, then all the better, because commerce is always going to form a more stable base than the fickleness of feel-good politics. If our systems aren't designed only for the Moon, or for Mars or anywhere else, then we can go wherever it makes the most sense to go at the time.
30-year programs and custom one-off systems for a single mission are far more detrimental to human spaceflight than the passing political pressures or the vagaries of public opinion.