OWS is no Tea Party
By Michael Johns
As the Occupy movement enters its second month, the inclination to compare and contrast it with the nation's mammoth tea party movement is proving irresistible. The Occupy protests are “not that different from some of the protests we saw coming from the tea party,” President Barack Obama suggested to ABC News last month.
But aside from both movement's populist foundations and a shared opposition to the 2008 TARP bank bailouts, few other specific common denominators are emerging. "No matter how similar the tea partiers and the Occupiers appear, they will never agree about most of the political questions that matter," Huffington Post columnist and author Kent Greenfield wrote earlier this month in a column generally supportive of the Occupy movement.
From the tea party perspective, the comparisons are being similarly rejected with a growing sentiment that the differences between the two movements are striking not just from a policy standpoint; they go right to the heart of the ethos of each, perhaps best reflected in the tea party movement's general civility compared to the theft, violence and property damage associated with many Occupy protests (arrests at Occupy protests nationwide now exceed 3,000 with countless incidents of property damage, violence, and even rape).
FreedomWorks president and tea party supporter Matt Kibbe, author of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, wrote in a November 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed that "when tea partiers petition their government for a redress of such grievances, as more than one million did on Sept. 12, 2009, they don't get into fights, they don't get arrested, they say 'excuse me' and 'thank you,' they wait in hopelessly long lines for porta-johns, they pick up their trash and leave public spaces and private property exactly as they found them." "No one told myself or other tea partiers to do these things; we just believe that you shouldn't hurt other people and you shouldn't take their stuff," he wrote.
A new public opinion poll released yesterday by The Daily Caller and conducted by The Resurgent Republic shows that both movements enjoy the support of slightly more than a third of the American electorate, with 37 percent viewing the tea party movement favorably compared to 34 percent for the Occupy movement. Among politically critical independent voters, however, the tea party enjoys substantially greater support than the Occupy movement, with 41 percent viewing it favorably versus only 32 percent for Occupy.
As the Occupy movement enters its second month, the inclination to compare and contrast it with the nation's mammoth tea party movement is proving irresistible. The Occupy protests are “not that different from some of the protests we saw coming from the tea party,” President Barack Obama suggested to ABC News last month.
But aside from both movement's populist foundations and a shared opposition to the 2008 TARP bank bailouts, few other specific common denominators are emerging. "No matter how similar the tea partiers and the Occupiers appear, they will never agree about most of the political questions that matter," Huffington Post columnist and author Kent Greenfield wrote earlier this month in a column generally supportive of the Occupy movement.
From the tea party perspective, the comparisons are being similarly rejected with a growing sentiment that the differences between the two movements are striking not just from a policy standpoint; they go right to the heart of the ethos of each, perhaps best reflected in the tea party movement's general civility compared to the theft, violence and property damage associated with many Occupy protests (arrests at Occupy protests nationwide now exceed 3,000 with countless incidents of property damage, violence, and even rape).
FreedomWorks president and tea party supporter Matt Kibbe, author of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, wrote in a November 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed that "when tea partiers petition their government for a redress of such grievances, as more than one million did on Sept. 12, 2009, they don't get into fights, they don't get arrested, they say 'excuse me' and 'thank you,' they wait in hopelessly long lines for porta-johns, they pick up their trash and leave public spaces and private property exactly as they found them." "No one told myself or other tea partiers to do these things; we just believe that you shouldn't hurt other people and you shouldn't take their stuff," he wrote.
A new public opinion poll released yesterday by The Daily Caller and conducted by The Resurgent Republic shows that both movements enjoy the support of slightly more than a third of the American electorate, with 37 percent viewing the tea party movement favorably compared to 34 percent for the Occupy movement. Among politically critical independent voters, however, the tea party enjoys substantially greater support than the Occupy movement, with 41 percent viewing it favorably versus only 32 percent for Occupy.
