It’s only natural that The Wall Street Journal has decided to not embrace the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have camped out for over a month with the intention of shaming the financial sector among other aims. In an Op-Ed piece today, Douglas Schoen argues that President Obama and the Democrats are making a “critical error” by lending support to the movement:
President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement—and it may cost them the 2012 election.
Last week, senior White House adviser David Plouffe said that “the protests you’re seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America. . . . People are frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don’t seem to play by the same set of rules.” Nancy Pelosi and others have echoed the message.
Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.
The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies.
Until now, the main point of argument that has been leveled against the Occupy Wall Street protesters by the media has been that the movement lacks any clear goals or objectives. Now, suddenly, Schoen and the Wall Street Journal want to argue that the protesters have a “distinct ideology” which motivates them to push “radical left-wing policies”. He even goes on to clarify that,
What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.
Unsurprisingly, these claims are as misleading as are the research methods being used to assert them.
To back up his analysis, Schoen notes that a senior researcher at his polling firm Penn Schoen and Berland “interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park” and claims that the “findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.”
This is completely disingenuous. Anybody decently versed in statistics would know that the protestors in Zuccotti Park make up only a small, sub-sample of those associated with the entire Occupy Wall Street movement. With the OWS demonstrations spreading to different parts of New York City (Washington Square Park, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge) as well as to hundreds of cities across the country and globe, it’s rather deceitful for Schoen to claim that the 200 people his firm interviewed in one geographic location, Zuccotti Park, are a “random sample” representative of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
*Updated 6:30 p.m.