The nation's most reviled movement wants to glom onto the nation's most admired.
OWS is twice as popular as the Tea Party:
Time magazine's new national poll is out, and there's no "slightly" here. The Occupy movement has a 54 percent favorable rating; the Tea Party's rating is 27 percent.
Of course that's not hard, considering
the Tea Party is less popular than muslims or atheists. In a study back in August, before OWS, the Tea Party was the
least popular of the 21 groups considered.
And because OWS
has already won the main battle, as Paul Krugman observed:
"You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.
And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining."
OWS has resonance with
59% of U.S. adults including
a majority of non-college-educated white people, as Greg Sargent discovered:
- In the National Journal poll, 56 percent of non-college-educated whites agree with the protesters; only 31 percent disagree.
- In the Time poll, 54 percent of non-college-educated men, and 48 percent of non-college educated women, view the protests favorably. (That's roughly 51 percent overall.) Meanwhile,only 29 percent of non-college-educated men, and only 19 percent of non-college-educated women, disagree. (That's roughly 23 percent.)
So yes, do appeal to the 99% of Americans who are victims of the greed of the 1%. Do appeal to the middle class and the working class, blacks and whites and hispanics and Asians and everybody else. But don't waste your time even comparing to the Tea Party, which is the most disliked group in the country and which does not represent anybody anymore.
Bill Maher
spelled it out:
There's not going to be a repeat of what happened last time the hippies were in the streets. Those hardhats that you're depending on to turn against the lousy hippies, here's what they're doing now. They're cheering them on, because now the hardhats are just as broke as everybody else. These people down there, they're not the counterculture. They're the culture. They don't want free love. They want paid employment. They don't hate capitalism. They hate what's been done to it, and they resent the Republican mantra that the market perfectly rewards the hard working and punishes the lazy, and the poor are just jealous mooches who want a handout. Yeah, because if there is one group of people who hate handouts, it's Wall Street.
Jason Easley is even more pithy:
Occupy Wall Street continues to be successful because it isn't a movement of people, it is the people.
The pictures and videos are of
Occupy Valdosta. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. Occupy everything!
-jsq