Once again Obama backs the wrong horse and aligns himself with the 9 percent of Americans that self identify as "very liberal" instead of representing the majority which do not.Douglas Schoen, Pollster for former President Bill Clinton, writes an article at WSJ describing what he believes is the first systematic random sample of Occupiers on Wall Street which finds from interviews with the Wall Street protesters that they are "leftists out of step with most American voters."
Ideology of Occupiers:
Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.
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What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.
Above is the typical platform of liberals, much of it far left progressive liberals. That is the problem for Occupiers and Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and every elected Democratic official that has embraced this movement publicly, because only a small minority of the general population self-identify as liberal or very liberal.
Comparison to American voters
...Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That's why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for their party.
The numbers Schoen uses above seem to come from the latest political ideology polling done, in August, by Gallup.
Digging into the Gallup poll and we see the numbers are actually worse for the Occupiers and Obama and crew.
Conservative Republicans are a bit more likely to call themselves very conservative than liberal Democrats are to identify as very liberal. As a result, hard right Republicans outnumber hard left Democrats by more than 2 to 1, 21% vs. 9%.
Only 9 percent of liberals self identify as "very liberal".
Increasing the political damage for Obama heading into 2012, as he incited and now embraces the Occupy movement of class warfare, is the alienation of Independents, who also break with a plurality self identifying as moderate (44%) and conservative (35%) rather than liberal (20%).
Yesterday The Hill published their own polling results which found a majority (56%) believe Washington is "primarily to blame for the financial crisis and the subsequent recession" in direct contrast with Obama, far left Democratic politicians, and Occupiers.
(Cartoon at the top by Eric Allie, via Townhall)
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