“We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
That was K Street lobbyist and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott talking in 2010 about the Tea Party-backed Republican freshmen. This was a rare explicit statement of what the GOP establishment hoped to make out of the 2009 and 2010 grass-roots anti-deficit, anti-tax movement. In the end, there was some mutual co-opting: Tea Partiers pushed the GOP to the Right, and the GOP tamed some Tea Partiers.
You don’t want to analogize Tea Parties and Occupy Wall Street too much, but it’s already clear that you have the same tension here: Much of the “Occupiers'” ire is directed at unprincipled Democrats and Obama’s broken promises, but Democratic politicians are trying to channel this passion into advancing the agenda Democrats already had, and helping Democrats get reelected.
The video clip above of Rep. Carolyn Maloney is the perfect example of Democratic attempts to co-opt this movement. She straight-facedly claims that the message she received from the occupiers was that Congress should pass S. 1549, the American Jobs Act of 2011 — which was exactly what President Obama and Carolyn Maloney were saying before these occupations started. Convenient.
Having spent a day and a night at the “occupied” park on Wall Street, I don’t think this Maloney-style facile co-opting will work. The question going forward is how the Democrats and these protestors will interact — what will be the tension, and what will be the cooperation?
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UPDATE: J.A. Meyerson, a faithful liberal reader who’s occupying Wall Street right now, passes along this little Democratic attempt to raise money off of Occupy Wall Street.
