President Barack Obama on Tuesday said the Occupy Wall Street movement is “not that different” from some of the tea party protests, his strongest statement yet on the demonstrations spreading across the country.
“I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News in Jamestown, N.C., the first stop on the second day of his bus tour to sell his $447 billion American Jobs Act.
“In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the tea party,” Obama told ABC’s Jake Tapper. “Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.”
I'm not going to focus on Obama's claim that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are, in some way, not all that different ( I tend to the see the Tea Party as being closer to the sentiments of the American Revolution and Occupy Wall Street as closer to the French Revolution).
What is interesting is the implication of what the president said. I thought that to the Left, the Tea Party represents racism, bigotry, sexism, corporatism, astro-turfism, Islamophobia, old white people, the Koch brothers, etc. Even if the two groups are at all similar, which they might be in some strained way, why would the president declare in public this comparison when considering this implication?
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