Having SEIU officials — fresh off endorsing the Obama re-election campaign — shape, fund, dictate and decree an anti-GOP, pro-Obama march is about as antithetical as one can imagine to what the Occupy movement has been. And pretending that the ongoing protests are grounded in the belief that the GOP is the party of the rich while the Democrats are the party of the working class is likely to fool just about nobody other than those fooled by that already. The strength and genius of OWS has been its steadfast refusal to (a) fall into the trap that ensnared the Tea Party of being exploited as a partisan tool and (b) integrate itself into the very political institutions which it’s scorning and protesting.
As I noted several weeks ago, WH-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign, and that’s what “Occupy Congress” is designed to achieve. I believed then and — having spent the last few weeks talking with many OWS protesters around the country — believe even more so now that these efforts will inevitably fail: those who have animated the Occupy movement are not motivated by partisan allegiance or an overarching desire to devote themselves to one of the two parties. In fact, one of the original Occupy groups — as opposed to partisan organizations swooping in to exploit it — has announced its own D.C. occupation to, in part, “demonstrate the failure of the Democrats and Republicans in Congress to represent the views of the majority of people.”
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The only issue I have with this is that realistically, OWS does have to support the Democratic party – not necessarily Obama, but a political party that can win and generally supports the interests of the people.
The Democrats have, and do, generally support nearly every tenant of the OWS principles. The problem is that they’re also weak. They allow themselves to be beaten, and I personally think that the reason they allow themselves to be beaten is because those on the other side have managed to successfully frame all everything the Dems do as bad for the country for a large sect of the population.
OWS doesn’t have to have a political party, but they do need to vote, and they absolutely don’t need to vote for Republicans. If they give their votes to independents, Republicans win, and that is a much, much worse outcome for the OWS causes.