"What Does Obama Do With Occupy Wall Street?"

Mike Lux (Crooks&Liars);

I have been warning Democratic politicians about for a long time now, something that grows with every month of economic stress and political dysfunction: there is a growing divide between progressive activists/outsiders and the Democratic Party leadership. As long as there is the sense that the big banks on Wall Street and other big corporate special interests keep making massive amounts of money while the middle-class is getting crushed, the unemployed have no prospects, and young and poor people have no ladder to climb into the middle class, people are going to be angry. And if they don’t feel like the Democrats are actually fighting for them on these core economic issues, instead of helping the Democrats win elections, people like the folks in Occupy Wall Street will take to the streets and denounce both political parties and the entire political establishment.

My Democratic friends will argue that this isn’t fair, that they have a far better track record than the Republicans on helping people, and that they are trying really hard. I’m sympathetic to some of them, because there are a lot of good Democratic politicians who really do care about making things better for most people (the 99 percent, as Occupy Wall Street calls us). But they need to do some tangible things that will show people whose side they are on.

I believe there are three things that will really matter in determining whether most disaffected progressives and Democrats will go into the 2012 elections reasonably united. MORE...