This week an eccentric Midtown Manhattan newspaper editorialized, seemingly with deadpan irony, that “The Occupy Wall Street protesters had achieved a great deal” before the forces of Mayor Bloomberg literally cleaned the scum out of Zuccotti Park.
In fact, the sum total of what Occupy Wall Street has accomplished is zero. The media that defend OWS claim that it is a success because it has . . . gotten lots of media coverage. But inspiring chat around the national watercooler is not an achievement. If media mentions equalled political importance, we’d all be waiting for President Kardashian’s big speech about Iran.
The OWS movement amounts to a floating rave: It’s Leftapalooza. Or maybe, given its bratty, entitled, loserish stench, it’s Leftoutapalooza. In any case, as with most parties, it may kick up a lot of mischief while it lasts, but on Monday morning all it leaves you is a headache and a cleaning bill.
Consider what the Tea Party accomplished: It started out with a single coherent message — opposition to government hyperactivity in the realm of spending, taxing, cronyism and bailouts — and then leveraged that into rallies, Town Hall confrontations and insurgent political campaigns.
Tea fueled the tank for the drive to replace establishment Republicans, such as Kentucky’s Trey Grayson, with principled ideologues such as now-Sen. Rand Paul. Tea chased Arlen Specter first out of the Republican Party and then out of the Senate, replacing him with the vastly more conservative Pat Toomey. It very nearly stopped the most ambitious bill since the 1960s, ObamaCare, despite overwhelming liberal majorities in both houses of Congress, then led an effort to repeal it that at first looked fanciful but now looks formidable. In the process it ensured that no Republican could hope to receive his party’s 2012 nomination without denouncing the health-care law — even a Republican who pushed an early version of it. Tea powered a massive victory for Republicans in the 2010 congressional elections and helped replace Ted Kennedy with Scott Brown, Anthony Weiner with Bob Turner.
The Tea Party has political power. OWS? Well, it has . . . Michael Moore. It has Susan Sarandon. It has a radical lending library and a website and surprisingly good catering.
It enjoys the tepid and meaningless support of President Obama, who said, “We are on their side”and issued a vague promise to go after “those who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers.”
We’re still waiting on the big law that will punish those known to harbor insufficiently community-spirited feelings. After the Bloomberg cleanup, Obama said nothing, even though he was on a plane with several reporters as his spokesman issued a noncommittal statement. Message: OWSers are free to vote Obama but will get nothing in return.
OWS is fielding no candidates, and it’s difficult to see what corner of the country might be sufficiently left-wing for OWS to elect one of its own.
Elizabeth Warren, the Obamacrat who seeks to replace Scott Brown in the Senate, once bragged that “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what [OWS-ers] do” (sorry, professor, you’re too late: Karl Marx already created it). She immediately found the remark used against her in a campaign ad and tiptoed away from OWS, saying she was still against Wall Street but OWS “is an independent, organic movement.” Which she planted?
And that was before OWS support began fading as it became associated with rape, assault and the expressed YouTube wish of one protester to burn down Macy’s. (What did Macy’s ever do to anger anyone? OK, those perfume ladies are annoying, but they’re not exactly Lehman Brothers.)
Two months in, OWS is a wedge issue only for politicians who oppose it. It is shaping (or endangering) no legislation. It isn’t even clear what it wants.
David Crosby graced Zuccotti Park to sing with Graham Nash. “No more war!” he called out. Right on! Don’t take the brown acid! Vote McGovern!
“Unofficial” demands on the Occupy website include a trillion dollars for planting trees, an end to fossil fuels, a racial and gender equal-rights amendment (wait a second — wouldn’t that kill affirmative action?), fully socialized medicine, a $20-an-hour minimum wage, free college education and debt forgiveness for all.
A repeal of the law of gravity would be as easily passed as any of these proposals.
Then there’s that vague idea to put fat-cat bankers on double-secret probation, or something. Except President Obama has been bragging that he already did that, with the Dodd-Frank law that doesn’t appear to have Goldman Sachs quaking in its wingtips.
Political analyst Alec Baldwin, in the course of praising OWS on the Huffington Post, said he has learned much from the movement. Such as? “The current government will likely do as it has historically done, which is to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the long-term interests of the middle class.”
So: The primary achievement of OWS has been to demonstrate its own ineffectiveness.