While politicians and the mainstream media waited weeks to acknowledge Occupy Wall Street, it looks as though the public hasn’t ignored the movement. A new poll shows that more Americans favor the protests than they do President Obama.
A new poll released on Thursday from Time assessed Americans’ opinions of all things current events, only to reveal that the general public’s favor of the continuing Occupy Wall Street movements exceed that of their own commander-in-chief. Approaching its fifth week now, the ongoing protests that originated out of New York’s Zuccotti Park that have since spread internationally have managed to garner more support than Barack Obama himself, with 54 percent of those polled favoring the demonstrations to the president’s measly 44 percent.
And although conservative critics have largely shunned the Occupy Wall Street protests as being an disorganized and chaotic attempt to recapitalize on the Tea Party’s success from yesteryear, the same poll from Time shows that the approval rating of the populist-geared GOP gang is only half that of Occupy Wall Street.
Speaking to RT yesterday, The Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger, one of the co-founders of the Tea Party movement, said that the protesters with Occupy Wall Street can learn from the mistakes that Palin and pals encountered when they waged demonstrations of their own.
“One of the things that the Occupy movement seems to have going for it is it has not turned around and issued a set of formal demands,” Denninger said. “This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone is looking for a set of demands.”
Denninger added that in the case of the Tea Party, organization was largely to blame for the movement’s downfall. “One of the things we wanted was the end to bailouts and an end to government deficit spending, and as you can see that didn’t happen,” said Denninger.
Elsewhere in the poll, an overwhelming majority of Americans (81 percent) say that the country has “seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” While many Americans say that they are in support of the Occupy Wall street movement, a majority of participants in the poll also add that the gap between the rich and poor in the US has grown too large and that banks should be held accountable and prosecuted for their role in the financial collapse.
In support of Obama, the poll suggests that more Americans favor his job as president when pitted against the George W Bush administration.
Time’s poll was conducted between on October 9 and 10, 2011, and pulls data taken from 1,001 adults surveyed.