A protester leads an Occupy Wall Street general-assembly meeting at Zuccotti Park in New York City.
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For embattled Democrats, autumn in New York is a revelation. President Obama, wounded and weakened, struggled to get the country's attention during his September pivot to a class-based counteroffensive, a call for the wealthy to pay their "fair share" in taxes to fund a new $447 billion jobs bill. Senate Democrats, for their part, have embraced a 5.6% tax on those with incomes over $1 million. But neither the President's plan nor the efforts of Senate Democrats have stirred the nation, and both ideas have been voted down. Democrats now wonder whether the reawakening of the political left has any staying power and, if so, how best to harness it. "It has enormous potential," says Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster. "It's the kind of thing that you want to ride but not capture."
A Different Reality?
Two years ago, republican political consultants were offering remarkably similar advice to their clients. "There will be no leaders to the Tea Party," the pollster Ed Goeas, who later became a consultant for Michele Bachmann, predicted presciently in early 2010. "What there will be is a consensus and a belief and a direction that is much deeper." He told Republicans to tie themselves rhetorically to the anti-incumbent, antigovernment thrust of the Tea Party message without taking any ownership. Electoral victory would follow.
That's just what happened. Republican leaders like House Speaker John Boehner were able to rally voters around the simple idea that the federal government and its debt were the cause of their problems, even though Republicans like Boehner had played a central role in building up those deficits. He rode the Tea Party wave to a Republican sweep in 2010 without ever trying to steer the movement. Now Democrats hope to do the same thing with the Occupiers.
But the movement they want to ride is still in the process of learning to walk. Near Wall Street, the protesters have set up food service and a makeshift first-aid station and have self-published a community newspaper. Their anger is shared, but their policy focus is still subject to debate. It's hashed out nightly in laborious group meetings that are run by consensus. While the Tea Party drew people from the base of the Republican Party, this movement is filled with young people who have little history in electoral politics, much less policymaking. On a typical day, about 1,000 people fill the park in the heart of New York's financial district; their staying power is by no means guaranteed.
Like the Tea Party, however, their unifying idea is simple enough. The anger they express has a clear target: not the government but the wealthy. Talk has already turned to launching a consumer boycott of the big banks in favor of credit unions. On e-mail listservs and in person-to-person meetings, more weekend protests are being planned, and Nov. 17 has been chosen by a coalition of progressive groups for a major show of force in city squares around the country. "Politically it looks like we are heading into a very different reality," says Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org which has been supporting the Occupy effort. "Inequality is suddenly a topic of conversation in politics."