Crack in the 99% Reveals Occupy is Weak Tea

Nicholas Lemann, writing for The New Yorker,

Because groups with wildly different perspectives dominate politics, the observation that ninety-nine per cent of Americans are being left behind economically isn't of much use politically. The ninety-nine per cent is too big a category to be an effective political force.

I used to subscribe to The New Yorker and had started noticing that their ads had become almost exclusively luxury products that I would never think of buying. I also noticed that every few months I was throwing the back issues into the recycling bin without ever having read them.

Still, it is amusing to see the Occupy conceit so handily dismissed:

Occupy Wall Street and its companion movements briefly spurred President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric, but there’s no sign that Occupy is going to turn into the kind of political force that the Tea Party movement has been.

A little basic math of the type they do not deign to use in The New Yorker unless all the numbers are written out as words would have helped to spell it out. Here are the 2010 election composite results for the U.S. House of Representatives:

Results	Republicans	Democrats
Popular vote	44,593,666	38,854,459
Percentage	51.4%	44.8%

To put it in words, if Occupy were to peel off from the Republican tally all but the three million votes representing the so-called one percent, why wouldn't those fourty-one million people form their own new party rather than voting with the thirty-nine million Democrats?

More succinctly, what were Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren thinking? It's not just a small crack in the 99%, it's a chasm.