Liberate Wall Street?

The round-the-clock occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan is over. At one o'clock this morning, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the park cleared of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who had been camping out there for nearly two months, citing health and safety hazards that apparently hadn't existed in all the time the protesters were allowed to stay there. Bloomberg also said that the Occupy Wall Street protest can continue at the park - without the sleeping bags or tents. And if this privately-owned park is run like any public park, many of which close at dusk, no one is likely to be able to stay up in the park overnight.

The massive demonstration planned in New York for this Thursday (November 17) is likely to be the high watermark for the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Without the park in Lower Manhattan as a focal point, and with authorities cracking down on overnight occupations elsewhere, the news media are likely to mostly ignore the movement going forward and move on to the scandals and celebrity tidbits that make up the bread and butter of American broadcast journalism. Sure, some protesters have called this merely the beginning of their movement. Yeah, I heard similar statements about causes that were pretty much forgotten in a couple of months. So please forgive me - no, really, please forgive me - if I sound like I think that the Occupy Wall Street movement has had its moment in the sun already. Because I do. Remember the renewed focus on the poor after Katrina? The communitarian spirit after 9/11? The rising numbers of women in Congress after the Clarence Thomas hearings? Get the picture?

I may be wrong, and I hope I am. But the Occupy Wall Street movement, which grew in part out of a dissatisfaction with government after the debt ceiling deal, can't possibly see the focus in Washington on deficit reduction to stave off automatic spending cuts by next Wednesday as a sign that anyone in Congress is listening to them. As for the 2012 elections, I wonder if there's going to be any momentum left by the time the Obama re-election campaign is in full force. You could tell from the energy of the Tea Party rallies long before November 2010 that the right was energized and in control of the debate. Right now, despite sympathy for and solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests, I'm not too sure that this movement has enough muscle or edge to muscle out and edge out the status quo. The Tea Party put figures like Pat Toomey and Rand Paul in the U.S. Senate; so far, there's little indication that people like Elizabeth Warren are going to benefit from the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Yeah, I hear a lot of optimism about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of it mirrors the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008. But then we got the Tea Party instead.