Let's be honest. The American "establishment" – mainstream media, political elites, academics – have absolutely no clue what to make of the Occupy Wall Street protests. The month-old movement has spread across the world, but remains centered in dozens of America's largest cities and university campuses.
For their part, the media finally came to recognize their duty to cover the phenomenon, but only weeks after the protests started, and mostly at the urging of the modern day Edward R Murrow, anchorman Keith Olbermann. And now, as if to compensate for their original failure to pay attention, journalists are barraging us with wall-to-wall coverage that ranges from the drab to the absurd.
One American columnist, for example, posed the oddly esoteric question of whether Occupy Wall Street reflects American anti-intellectualism. MSNBC conducted an investigative report into whether food being prepared in the urban encampments truly meets vegan standards.
Even this paper's coverage has been overly expansive, ranging from breathless news flashes about Naomi Wolf's arrest to a nonsensical piece declaring the end of capitalism.
Let's all just pause and take a deep breath here.
Nowhere is more perspective needed than right here in Washington, amongst the top ranks of the Democratic party. Some, like prominent congressman Barney Frank, have bluntly dismissed the protests, saying, "simply being in a public place and voicing your opinion in and of itself doesn't do anything."
President Obama has been marginally kinder, expressing sympathy for the views of the protesters and support for the notion of free speech, but stopping far short of an endorsement of any kind.
And then there are Democratic strategists daring to hope – in hushed whispers – that these protests could be the start of a real movement, a new coalition forming a more energized Democratic base. The narrative generally involves a trite and stretched comparison of these protests to the Tea Party.
It's ambitious to suggest that Occupy Wall Street is already becoming a political force. Quite apart from the deliberate absence of leadership and organization in the movement, its disjointed complaints and sometimes contradictory demands, Occupy Wall Street has put a particular emphasis on remaining an apolitical movement, unattached to any party and unwilling to be co-opted by Washington.
Chris Ketchum writes in the Los Angeles Times that this movement will either "organize or just prophesize." I don't believe either seems likely. Indeed, the movement remains frustratingly hard to define, and that doesn't bode well for the Democratic party's chances of harnessing it to its advantage.
Yet, instinctively, the embryonic movement potentially offers Obama a lifeline back to his base – a chance to excite liberals again and, yes, to inject the sort of populist feelings that underpin the Tea Party.
Of note, the protests have stemmed the flood of left-wing criticism of Obama, giving liberals a voice and a new scapegoat for their discontent at perceived centrist policies. Indeed, Democrats who have slammed the president for his past centrist compromises are now rushing to praise him.
Congressman Luis Guitierrez of Illinois, who earlier this year threatened not to support Obama's re-election, is now quoted as saying "We're (the Democratic party) coming together. Hey, maybe the protesters unified the Democratic party."
Not quite. If there was a turning point, it was – as I have written – when the president, taking a sharp turn to the left, proposed the American Jobs Act, a piece of legislation he has campaigned for every single day. This finally gave liberals the red meat they were looking for.
Did it prompt the creation of the Occupy Wall Street movement? Absolutely not – that was organic. But it does provide a platform for the president to align himself with the protesters, if he so chooses.
More broadly, while Occupy Wall Street may not have a consistent manifesto, its protests largely fit under the umbrella of disparity between rich and poor. Many Democrats have traditionally eschewed explicitly articulating the "them and us" disparity, scared of being called class warmongers.
But it's undeniable that many of the party's policies, from health care reform to the extension of unemployment benefits, are underpinned by a consciousness of America's growing income chasm. More concretely, Obama's suggestion to tax the super-rich is completely in sync with spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
But there are two major barriers to what could become a politically advantageous marriage of motivated grassroots voters and a hard-nosed re-election campaign.
The first is obvious: Occupy Wall Street must become organized to be sustainable, it must develop a concrete political agenda the way the Tea Party did and it must officially get inside the tent with the Democrats. None of that is assured. Indeed there is nothing but a few encouraging signs of policy committees forming to create real manifestos. For now, the movement is disjointed, and seemingly happy to remain so.
The second prerequisite depends on the president himself. Will he dare to go further in support of the movement? Some advisers would have him standing among the throngs with a megaphone to show support against Wall Street excesses (a refrain, after all, with which he is comfortable).
But other, more pragmatic White House staffers warn the President to stay away from a volatile and socially undesirable minority. The protesters, they say, are not the voice of a silent majority but rather a vocal minority, and the movement could dissolve just as fast as it materialized, leaving the president on his own in a barren left wing wilderness.
Which path will the president choose? In my experience, despite recent turns to the left, this is still a consensus-building, centrist White House, with a keen consciousness of the middle-of-the-road swing voter. So it is far more likely we'll witness only cautious presidential support for the foreseeable future, more comfortable in middle America than in the middle of an angry throng of protesters.
And that's probably exactly as it should be. Occupy Wall Street remains too unpredictable, with a real impermanent quality about it. So until – and unless – this movement grows up and realizes that real change will require concrete political prescriptions there is really only so much Democrats can do to harness the power of the crowds occupying Wall Street and so much media attention.
For now, it's probably best for everyone to wait, to take that deep breath, and wait for the next phase of this uniquely American phenomenon to unfold.