"Occupy Wall Street" does NOT represent the American middle class

Democrat pollster Doug Schoen explodes the Democrat/progressive Narrative about the "Occupy Wall Street" gang. It's a wishful-thinking-based storyline (promoted by the liberal media) that casts the demonstrators as righteously aggrieved "victims" of capitalism, who represent the views of "99 percent" of Americans and their aspirations. Reports Schoen:

Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%)....

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That's why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for their party.

Team Obama and their willing media accomplices are such prisoners of the leftist Narrative that many actually believe that these street agitators and social misfits reflect the demographics of Middle America. We can only hope that continue to drink this Kool-Aid until November 2012.

An unsurprising political fall

Way back in 1978, I met the former Margaret Kelley, a young woman running a quixotic campaign for state representative as a Republican in the Democratic stronghold of downtown Boston. I was impressed enough to volunteer to become her campaign manager, and also personally smitten enough to later become her husband. (We raised a daughter together before separating and divorcing in the mid-1990s).

Margaret was running against another political newbie, a Democratic lawyer from Boston's Italian North End neighborhood by the name of Salvatore DiMasi. He struck us at the time as a terminally ambitious young man on the make, too slick to be scrupulous (as he demonstrated in several ways during the campaign). In other words, a typical creature of Boston machine politics.

We gave it a gallant shot, even took a couple of precincts away from him in the election. But the gerrymandered votes were heavily stacked in the North End, where against a name like "DiMasi," the name "Kelley" didn't have the odds of a pizza slice's survival in an Italian sports bar. We were out-registered Democrat to Republican something like 13-1; we lost about 2 to 1; for us, that was a moral victory.

In the intervening years, Sal DiMasi rose like scum to the top of a stagnant pond, up through the ranks of Massachusetts politicos eventually to become the Speaker of the state House of Representatives -- in short, one of the most powerful politicians in the Commonwealth. He did it the old-fashioned way for a Boston Democrat: by a combination of cronyism, corruption, and outright criminality.

It all caught up with him in 2009 when the Boston Globe exposed his sordid machinations. Sal DiMasi has just been sentenced to eight years in federal prison "for steering millions of dollars in state contracts to a software company and secretly profiting from the scheme."

I saw this guy's lack of scruples first-hand in 1978, so this news comes as no surprise to me now. I do find it dispiriting that so many voters expect this sort of behavior as the norm -- even as desirable -- from their politicians. So, before we dismiss the memory of Mr. DiMasi with indifferent contempt, perhaps we should ponder the words of the guy who once said: "Politicians, like water, cannot rise higher than their source."