Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party followed similar trajectories. Both grew, seemingly as grassroots movements, enjoyed brief popularity and are now widely disliked by the electorate. But the two movements bequeath different legacies.
While Tea Party power may have ebbed somewhat, there is no doubt the movement achieved real power and exerted (for the worse, in my view) real influence on national policy. Occupy Wall Street left us with little more than a piece of an idea — the 1 percent — and many Democratic politicians would rightly argue they had been using that language long before Occupy made it famous. CONT.
Mark Mellman (Mellman Group), The Hill