Tea Party Envy Careful what you wish for, liberals.

By JAMES TARANTO

Let's give credit where it's due: The Washington Post's Richard Cohen seems to have coined the excellent phrase that is our headline today. "I suffer from Tea Party envy," he confessed at the outset of an early-August column. Although he contemns everything the Tea Party stands for, he continues, "I am jealous of its sense of purpose, its determination and its bracing conviction that it is absolutely right."

Now, the left thinks it has found its Tea Party in the combined efforts of the Occupy Wall Street drum circle and something called the American Dream Movement, described in an Associated Press dispatch:

Liberal groups are trying to build a grassroots movement that will help revive the economy and protect Medicare and Social Security, but whether they will be successful--and use it to help re-elect President Barack Obama--is unclear.

Organizers of this week's "Take Back the American Dream" conference in Washington have studied the origins of the tea party as they try to build a countermovement to support liberal causes. The effort is a response to Republicans' takeover of the House in 2010 and disenchantment over Obama's attempts at compromise.

The head of TBAD is none other than Van Jones, who was ousted as the Obama administration's "green jobs" czar when Glenn Beck revealed his Marxist past and his having signed a 9/11 "truther" petition. Jones introduced the idea way back in February, in a Puffington Host essay urging "all who love this country" to "do everything possible to spread the 'spirit of Madison' to all 50 states."

When he refers to the "spirit of Madison," it isn't James he has in mind, but rather the capital of Wisconsin, where members of government employee unions were holding unruly demonstrations in an effort to preserve the legal privileges they enjoyed at taxpayer expense. They failed, but Jones is still trying. An email from MoveOn.org this morning informs us that this afternoon, "thousands of people from the American Dream Movement will march in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Foley Square to Wall Street."

Yesterday we had a few laughs at the expense of Tea Party enviers in the media like E.J. "Baghdad Bob" Dionne and Nicholas Kristof--easy targets, we'll admit. But let's note that there are a few similarities between today's raging lefties and the Tea Party--or at least the Tea Party as the left imagines it.

For one thing, the Occupiers are mostly white, as Malcolm Sacks, "a New York activist who has been participating in the Zuccotti Park occupation," tells al-Jazeera:

In general, the whole freak-out about the economic crisis, in the US at least, is kind of a response to the economic crisis finally hitting white people. . . . It finally feels like a crisis for the majority, including middle class and working class white folks, which is why we're seeing white people at the front, and taking over, these protests. . . .

There's a core of people--the media and press team--who are doing a lot of the organising and shaping the public image. . . . We tried to talk to one of the media folks about the problem of there not being people of colour, and the problem of people of colour not necessarily feeling comfortable participating, and there was resistance on their part to acknowledge that. They deflect criticisms by saying, "if anybody want's [sic] to get involved they can get involved. If they want to be represented, they just come and they can do it too."

Meanwhile, at National Review Online Charles Cooke has video of an Occupier berating a Jewish man with anti-Semitic slurs. Cooke reports that "shortly after my video camera was switched off, [the Occupier] (inexplicably) shouted the N-word at the same man."

NRO's Jonah Goldberg notes that Michael Tomasky is the latest lefty journalist to sign on as a cheerleader for the Occupiers, then notes:

[Tomasky] then goes on to lecture a movement he already supports--regardless of its agenda and its leaders--about how to succeed (short version: Put normal-looking people out front to convince Americans that Occupy Wall Street is something it isn't). I find the whole thing hilarious. Tomasky is the quintessential liberal sucker. His only advice to the left is on tactics and public relations. It's advice they won't take and he'll keep supporting them anyway.

The advice to put normal people out front is a classic bit of Alinskyite common sense, as we noted in February. It is advice the Tea Party might have profited from following more often. In 2010 Republicans lost three winnable Senate races--in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada--because they nominated Tea Party candidates who were too extreme or seemed too weird to capture a majority.

Then again, without the Tea Party it's unlikely that Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Mike Lee of Utah or Ron Johnson of Wisconsin would be in the Senate today. On the whole last year, the Tea Party was a terrific boon for both conservatives and the Republican Party.

Mediaite.com notes that Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, lefty presidential candidate and Democratic National Committee chairman, is warning Republicans that front-runner Mitt Romney has a "big base problem":

Usually that's not a problem. Republicans are very disciplined, they'll pull behind him. Actually, even the Democrats pull in behind after a fight like this. This year you've got the Tea Party. They are not playing with a full deck. I mean, they could go off the rails here. This is going to be really interesting. They might sit home, or vote for somebody else, or find a Libertarian, or Ron Paul might do something. Who knows.

Our guess is that if Romney is the nominee, the vast majority of Tea Partiers will hold their noses and vote for him, the way the nutroots types who loved Dean did for John Kerry in 2004. To be sure, in the 2004 election the "electable" challenger lost to the incumbent. But as Dave Weigel observes, "if unemployment was 9% in 2004, Kerry would have won."

Meanwhile, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone on the left that OWS and TBAD may be the left's Tea Party in a bad way. Goldberg observes: "Occupy Wall Street is a sinkhole and it's not done growing. All sorts of folks are going to be pulled into it before this is over. At this rate, I expect the White House to go ass over tea kettle around Thanksgiving."

The Tea Party on the one hand and OWS/TBAD on the other have in common that they are both opposition movements. But OWS/TBAD is an opposition movement on behalf of the incumbent. As the AP notes in reporting on Jones's convention, "many [attendees] hope the American Dream movement can generate enthusiasm for Obama next year."

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