Sneer though many of them did, liberals envied the success of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Desperate to embrace an authentic populist movement of their own, they have been buoyed by the results of a Time magazine poll this week, purporting to demonstrate that the nascent Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, at 54 percent approval, are more popular than the Tea Party. As The Examiner’s Phil Klein pointed out earlier this week, however, the numbers produced by the Time survey are quite misleading because of the magazine’s unusually vague but artful wording of questions. For example, Time’s survey described these anti-capitalist protests to respondents as being against the “government’s bank bailout and the influence of money in our political system.” The same description could be said of the Tea Party. In fact, other polls from reputable firms that used more objective questions have pegged OWS support in the low thirties — and with slightly negative net approval ratings.

We bring this up because Democratic officeholders considering encouraging or otherwise embracing the OWS demonstrators ought to think very carefully before doing so. For starters, they should take a thorough look at who the protesters are and what they stand for. According to a New York Magazine survey of OWS participants, a mere 3 percent described themselves as “liberal but fairly mainstream.” By contrast, 34 percent of them agreed with the statement that “the U.S. government is no better than, say, al Qaeda.” Do Democrats really want to march alongside of advocates of the 9/11 Truther version of recent American history?