This is really to get you to read R.J. Eskow's excellent takedown of Doug Schoen's "poll" concerning Occupy Wall Street. He really misses nothing. It makes you wonder what exactly the "Third Way" or whatever they call themselves now believe.
Lots of good points here. Eskow gives us a primer on how to get credentials in the right centrist arena (and makes an excellent point about what might have happened if Penn/Schoen hadn't done the polling for Hilary's run for president). It's inside baseball to an extent, but better we know how things work than we don't.
More important, and I don't think he's exaggerating here, the tone of Schoen's op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (by now, the print arm of Fox News) says OWS is much more accepted by the people it describes as the 99% than the mass media wants to believe. I figure the hippie-radical-anarchist meme will get louder and louder as the movement goes, and that, of course, can be solved by shining a REALLY bright light on what happens, as DKos and Keith Olbermann are doing. As Eskow notes:
No wonder the faux-centrist/"Third Way" crowd hates OWS. The protests put the lie to phony notion that the "center" agrees with the corporate-funded policies they espouse. And they illustrate the fact that the real "center" holds opinions that are usually stigmatized as "progressive" inside the Beltway . Douglas Schoen characterizes those opinions as "a deep commitment to left-wing policies" -- that are frequently supported by most Republicans. A few more revelations like this and their whole scam will be exposed. That's why we're seeing the glint of hatchets swinging in the Potomac sun
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The more pieces/posts like this show up on the net, the less credible the whiners in the middle will be. Maybe Tom Friedman's head will explode.