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" Here&amp;#039;s a word that hasn&amp;#039;t popped up in the various post-mortems of the election so far: Occupy. From the start, it&amp;#039;s been my opinion that the very least you could say about the movement was that people were yelling at the correct buildings. And, I agree with Todd Gitlin in that the first iteration of the movement pushed things about as far as it possibly could. But its effect on the election just passed could not be more profound, and it should not be ignored \u2014 though it likely will be \u2014 by the rest of the people trying to make sense of What It All Means. Occupy changed the national dialogue. Willard Romney&amp;#039;s surreptitiously taped comments about &amp;quot;the 47 percent&amp;quot; would not have had the resonance they did had the Occupy movement not gotten the country talking about the 99 percent and the one percent. It created a new rhetorical paradigm that simply would not have been there had it not been originally shouted at the correct buildings. And it was that new paradigm that triumphed Tuesday night. In Massachusetts, Scott Brown thought highlighting Elizabeth Warren&amp;#039;s links to Occupy was a kill shot. Scott Brown is now a lame duck. In Wisconsin, the movement that arose against Governor Scott Walker&amp;#039;s union-bashing, which was no more distant than a first-cousin to Occupy, undoubtedly was the ongoing energy behind the candidacy of Tammy Baldwin who, among her other progressive bona fides, voted against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Clinton-era blunder that made the whole Wall Street crisis inevitable. Tammy Baldwin is now a senator-elect. In Ohio, the movement that arose against local union-bashing \u2014 and that was no more distant than a first-cousin to Occupy, and which was fueled by a revival of trade-union power that was fired by the success of the auto bailout \u2014 undoubtedly was pivotal not only to re-electing Sherrod Brown to the Senate, but also to delivering Ohio into the president&amp;#039;s column. Occupy completely routed, at all levels of the national campaign, the economic balderdash spouted by the Tea Party and its billionaire sugar daddies. For a movement that allegedly had &amp;quot;no concrete goals,&amp;quot; those are some pretty concrete results right there. (And Warren, Baldwin, and Brown are only the most direct and obvious beneficiaries of the new way we talk about our political economy. Even if they don&amp;#039;t want to admit it, I think people like Jon Tester and Bob Casey and Claire McCaskill owe their survival to that new rhetorical paradigm \u2014 if only in the gentle way it was given voice by the president&amp;#039;s campaign \u2014 as does Joe Donnelly for his election in Indiana.) Okay, so now what? Harry Reid has himself a powerful hand to play now, and every bit of that new power comes from the port side. Warren, Baldwin, and Brown represent a legitimate constituency within the party for a lot of what Occupy was on about \u2014 a newly energized progressive economic populism. It ought to be harder to marginalize, say, Bernie Sanders when he was so many people at his back right now. Any upcoming negotiations on the national economy ought to be seen in that light, and Reid should use his new and more powerful hand to enforce a little discipline. Sorry, Joe Manchin, no more stupid commercials with you shooting a bullet through Democratic bills. Sorry, Grand Bargaineers, you&amp;#039;ll have to wait in the lobby for a while. The rookie from Massachusetts is here to talk about her appointment to the Senate Banking Committee. I have my eye on people who are going to try and mute the message that came through so clearly. McCaskill&amp;#039;s always been a pain in the ass, and, in her victory speech the other night, when she talked about being &amp;quot;a Missourian first,&amp;quot; I heard the first faint stirrings of a pre-emptive alibi slouching in the direction of the great god Simpson Bowles. Heidi Heitkamp, the new senator from North Dakota, was conspicuously mushy on the Affordable Care Act during her campaign. And this new, revived progressive &amp;quot;Backbone Caucus&amp;quot; gives Reid cover to push back against what Paul Krugman calls The Very Serious People who are sizing up Social Security for Pete Peterson&amp;#039;s groaning board. Like, for example, the Very Serious Peter Orszag: And finally, the political value would be high because Social Security looms larger in people&amp;#039;s minds than it does in the numbers. Reforming it would give the administration fiscal credibility disproportionate to the actual impact on the long-term deficit.  Pardon me? To whom would accrue &amp;quot;the political value&amp;quot; of monkeying with the crown jewel of Democratic social policy, and with whom would it give the administration &amp;quot;fiscal credibility,&amp;quot; even though Orszag admits a few paragraphs north that Social Security &amp;quot;is not a significant driver of our long-term deficits.&amp;quot; It would be a direct repudiation of the primary force that drove the election on Tuesday in the vain hope of currying political favor from a political opposition that already has announced that it doesn&amp;#039;t plan to change its basic strategy of opposition. Orszag works for Citigroup. That was one of the correct buildings that people yelled at. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16666/harry-reid-occupy-110812/?click=news>