Will 'Occupy Wall Street' hurt or help Obama?

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“I’ve got 99 problems and Wall Street is #1”. So read signs seen at the Occupy Wall Street protests currently underway in New York City, and quickly spreading like wildfire across the nation. The grassroots movement got its start using social media outlets Facebook and Twitter, and has grown as thousands of students, unemployed workers and socially conscious activists have taken to the streets to express their frustration. People are angry that they’re playing second fiddle to profits.

The sentiment at the heart of the 99 percenter protests, is that the top 1 percent of the nation’s earners – especially wealthy bankers and corporate tycoons — received a government bailout at the height of the economic crisis, and have gone on to recover, with profits and bonuses at an all-time high, while the poor and middle-class remain muddled in the malaise of less opportunity and dwindling wealth.

theGrio: Is black America sitting out ‘Occupy Wall Street’?

As the political stalemate in Washington has garnered international attention, the voices of average Americans have been lost. But liberals and progressives have finally decided to speak up. And a wave of action is being drawn from shore-to-shore, in red and white, but mostly blue.

WATCH RACHEL MADDOW’S COVERAGE OF THE OCCUPY WALL STREET:
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President Obama’s victory in 2008 resulted in a conservative backlash, which has been most effectively expressed by the Tea Party movement. Adulation over the ascension of the nation’s first African-American president left many liberals deliriously happy, but unwisely unmotivated. Content with Democratic control of all three branches of government, Obama, Pelosi and Reid focused on the stimulus package and health care reform, while a well-oiled attack machine funded by the Koch brothers, dubious conservative Political Action Committees (PACs), and opportunistic spokesman like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, built a dominate and viscerally vocal base of support among conservative activists.

Non-stop media coverage of Tea Party events and demonstrations came to dominate the political discourse and was further exacerbated by the Birther movement and carnival barkers like Donald Trump, constantly questioning the president’s legitimacy.

By sticking to their talking points and simple principles of smaller government and less-spending, the Tea Party provided a model of political organization that resulted in the GOP winning control of the House of Representatives in the November 2010 mid-term elections. The White House and the Democratic National Committee learned its lesson: never take your eye off the ball, even when you’re ahead in the game.

It is ironic that the Tea Party originally grew out of frustration with the Bush Administration’s decision to bail-out Wall Street under former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s TARP program. Before the movement took a decisively anti-Obama slant, it was reacting to taxpayer dollars being used to rescue what many saw as over-paid, over-indulged and irresponsibly negligent investment professionals.

TARP was designed to purchase the distressed assets that Investment Banks were now stuck with after engaging in speculative trades of risky mortgage backed securities. The idea behind Paulson’s plan was that providing banks with more liquidity and freedom from the toxic assets, would allow them to lend more to the average worker and American families.

But this never happened. Instead banks shed workers like a snake sheds its skin. Americans were shut out of their homes. Corporations instituted massive lay-offs to provide cover for lack of demand of their products, and thousands of American workers were forced to collect unemployment benefits. Two years later, many are still looking for jobs, while the same banks, namely Bank of America and Citigroup, are increasing account charges with the aim of collecting excessive profits that President Obama’s legislative re-haul of the financial banking system sought to resolve.

People are angry and with good reason. The Occupy Wall Street protests represent the disaffected voices responding in peaceful outrage at what seems to be a corrupted system, which has been so powerfully stacked against them. And with African-Americans and Latinos representing 40 percent of the nation’s unemployed, it is clear who has suffered the most.

This past Monday the Campaign for America’s Future began its conference, a cooperative venture with an array of progressive organizations, most notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones. Jones, President Obama’s former czar for green jobs, has been aggressively building a counter-movement to the Tea Party and wants to demonstrate what a real progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment — in a positive sense.” The Occupy Wall Street protesters agree.

As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne observed earlier this week, a vocal liberal voice is exactly what Obama needs in the lead up to the 2012 campaign. “The absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger” Dionne explained, “His health-care reform is remarkably conservative — It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements.”

Members of the Democratic Caucus and centrist pundits have suggested that the president must run a populist campaign against Boehner’s ‘Do Nothing Congress’, and have suggested that this is the only way he can win re-election. Indeed, as Obama has traveled the country to build support for his American Jobs Act, there are already signs he is willing to take Republicans on at the ballot box, by challenging them to answer for their legislative inaction. To truly mobilize this support it seems the president will need an enthusiastic base willing to fight with him. To that end, it is encouraging that big unions have now joined the grassroots OWS students and progressive protesters.

But labor union involvement has been received with mixed support. As unions and Democratic Party politicians express support for the OWS movement, the original organizers face concern that their message may get diluted. Some are far-left liberals who have been disillusioned by Obama’s centrist politics and willingness to compromise with Republicans. But there is strength in numbers, and the political reality remains that President Obama is a far better electoral bet than anyone in the GOP field of candidates.

As a national map of the OWS protest shows, the demonstrations are mainly spreading in Democratic Blue States – which Obama won in the 2008 campaign. From New York to California, Ohio, Massachusetts, Florida and Obama’s home state of Illinois, it is clear that the anti-Wall Street protesters are far more likely to be Obama supporters than GOP ideologues. Harnessed correctly, the president may well use this as an opportunity to re-connect with the very people who got him to the White House.

“If that makes me a warrior for the working-class, then I’ll wear that badge. I have no problem with that,” the president recently espoused while selling his jobs bill, which includes an effort to close tax loopholes that benefit the wealthiest 1 percent. That is the kind of rhetoric the OWS supporters want to hear from their president. They’re angry and want to see him equally outraged. Managed correctly, Obama can prove that though he is the president of all the people, he has not lost touch with the most vulnerable. And the OWS protests may well serve as a useful counter attack to Tea Party insurgence.

Edward Wyckoff Williams is an author, columnist, political and economic analyst, and a former investment banker. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.