The political class is doing what they always do - surfing the wave. I maintain that if Bill Clinton had been governor of Arkansas in 1957 instead of Orville Faubus, he would have been the one standing in the schoolhouse door. Instead, he was tearfully experiencing non-existent church burnings. The hallmark of a successful politician is an agile moral compass, not too firmly guided by any durable principle other than election and re-election.Yes, elections are a chief concern among the elected, and our political classes are comprised of more than just these, because our government consists in a vanishing small minority of elected legislators and executives atop a massive leviathan of administrators and administrations with interests of their own, apart from, and often in opposition to, the elected and their periodic elections, and these other members enjoy a sound, coherent, and concrete moral compass, a moral compass whose first principle is a sublime faith in the efficacy of political agency over any other sector of human activity. For them, we all stand in want of their supervision lest we err and stray from our ways like the lost sheep that, in their imaginations, we are.
Politicans cater to the whims and fancies of the chattering classes - the press and government administrators and the leisure class, those whims and fancies often shaped by the feckless professorate of our more expensive schools.