

Video: Will Wall Street protesters be as influential as Tea Party?

  1. Closed captioning of: Will Wall Street protesters be as influential as Tea Party?

    >>> wall street a fourth straight week. similar demonstrations nationwide, two years after the tea party sprang to life to reshape the political map. both movements are challenging, wisdom of the economy and role of candidate. candidate michele bachmann doesn't see the similarity.

    >> i ran across two of the protests, one in washington, d.c. and one in boston, and they have nothing in common at all with the protests that were being put forward or the demonstrations you might say that were put forward by the tea party . i think that if the occupy wall street wants to be upset about something, they should go in front of the white house and that's where they should be protesting.

    >> charles blow joins us from new york. thanks for joining us today.

    >> absolutely.

    >> first off, i want to say a little of mitt romney just today, speaking to the occupy wall street protests. this was romney in milford, new hampshire.

    >> the idea of dividing our nation in a time of crisis is not the way to go. all the streets are kekd. wall street is connected to main street . finding someone to blame in my opinion isn't the way to go.

    >> i guess, charles , first of all, are the republicans as well as the white house having a difficult time trying to figure out how to deal with this protest?

    >> everyone is having a difficult time trying to figure out how to deal with this because occupy wall street kind of exists outside the framework of politics at this point, and you know, no one knows if anyone will be able to -- the left seems to want to harness that energy. energy is a precious commodity in a campaign season, but no one knows if the left will be able to harness it, and the right is kind of preemtively trying to knock it down, hoping that if they do kind of co-op the energy of occupy wall street that they will have injured it in some way. so what you see is both sides trying to figure out what do we do with this because people are showing up. people are in squares. people are in public spaces. people are demonstrating. you can't simply ignore it. so you see people like romney grasping to figure out how do i position myself relative to occupy wall street .

    >> but democrats are also concerned.

    >> absolutely.

    >> because they see the possibility of back lash because this could be rather than the way the tea party was embraced by large numbers of anti-establishment republicans and others, this could be something that actually goes down against the white house .

    >> what you have to remember about the tea party , it started when they did not have a republican in the white house . to have kind of an anti-establishment movement start that has some similarities to some of the ten ets of the left. when you have a sitting democratic president should be worry some to the white house because they're the establishment right now. president obama represents the establishment, a lot of what occupy wall street and occupation of other areas in the country are talking about is bailing out businesses that were too big to fail, and whether or not that was legal and right to do. well, obama was part of that bailing out. he supports that idea. his administration kind of functioned within that construct, and you know, barack obama and his campaign basically said they want to raise a billion dollars. where is that money coming from? it is not from money outside sleeping under tarps in downtown manhattan . that comes, money like that, comes from people in those towers around that occupation. so there's a natural tension between any establishment, but in this case definitely the democratic establishment because they're in the white house .

    >> exactly. charles blow, thank you very much. thanks for joining


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