DAN SCHNUR
Director of the University of Southern California’s Unruh Institute of Politics; communications director for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.
The difference between a movement and a large group of unhappy people is the ability to articulate specific policy goals. Those who held the earliest Tea Party rallies in 2009 had not yet developed legislative priorities to substantiate their slogans, but, over the course of several months, the congressional debate over deficit reduction and then the nation’s debt limit provided them the opportunity to directly influence policy in Washington. In an earlier era, the protesters who rallied public opinion against the Vietnam War underwent a similar evolution.
By contrast, those who’ve raged outside of meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in recent years have had much less success because their demands have been too vague, too varied or too far outside the mainstream to be addressed by the nation’s elected representatives. At this early stage, the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their compatriots across the country are still struggling to codify their unhappiness into an agenda. The test for the Occupiers will be whether their emotional aspirations can be narrowed into proposals that can attract broad public support.
Absent these more detailed objectives, polls show that the Occupiers have been able to develop a respectable level of support from the American public. More difficult will be maintaining those good feelings when their agenda does become more quantifiable. When Occupy Wall Street finalizes its proposals on economic policy and job creation, it will then graduate to movement status. But it will also be forced to put those proposals to a test of public opinion, which will determine its ability to influence the construction and passage of a legislative agenda and to become a force in American politics.
SIMON JOHNSON
Professor of economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management; co-author of “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”
The Occupy Wall Street grievances are legitimate and well-articulated — no one has been held accountable for the financial disaster that led to the loss of so many jobs and so much other damage to millions of people. The list of sensible requests is long. Here are just two.
First, the top six U.S. banks have become even larger and more powerful since the crisis of 2008. All of them insist that taxpayers should continue to subsidize their poorly run businesses — including a great deal of gambling in the form of undercapitalized derivatives trading. Forcing the big banks to break up is a simple idea that would resonate across the political spectrum.
Second, there needs to be a comprehensive, large-scale settlement that deals with the accusations of malfeasance and illegal actions around banks’ handling of mortgages before and after the crisis. So far, the Obama administration has preferred a smaller deal, covering only robo-signing and potentially exempting banks from other legal liability. But Eric Schneiderman, attorney general of New York, is pushing for a real investigation of the banks’ conduct and a bigger settlement for homeowners. Occupy Wall Street should support this responsible effort.
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