Gallup: Support for conduct of OWS protests now negative -- but overall approval steady

Verdict: Rapes bad, taxing the rich good.

Actually, the most revealing number from this poll is that, despite saturation media coverage, roughly the same number of people are paying attention to OWS in November as October. How many puff pieces will it take to wake the public up?

If were an OWSer, I’d take encouragement from that result. The public’s increasingly aware of the cretinism inside the camps and … they’re not holding it against the movement at large. Is that enough to make President Present feel comfortable in cheering for the group publicly, or will the eternal worry of riots and window-smashing force him to keep his distance? He’s headed for war with the GOP next year over taxing the rich. He could use a little populist cover, provided its ratings don’t turn toxic.

Doug Schoen of “replace Obama with Hillary” fame ran his own poll two weeks ago — of likely voters, not just adults like Gallup surveyed — and found that more people say the tea party comes closer to their views than OWS, 31/19. And that’s not all:

Voters are favorable to the Tea Party movement by a narrow plurality (42-39 percent) while they have an unfavorable impression of the Occupy Wall Street movement (43-35 percent).

And while one-third (32 percent) of likely voters are supporters of the Tea Party movement, they oppose OWS by a narrow (33 percent) plurality…

With only 9 percent of all voters saying that the OWS protests are helping President Obama’s chances of re-election — while 30 percent say they are hurting his chances — Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the OWS movement.

And this error may cost them the 2012 election.

It’s not all roses: A plurality of 40 percent says the GOP should distance itself from the tea party, which Schoen extrapolates into a general warning that voters want bipartisanship, not hard ideology controlled by the parties’ respective bases. That’s super, but as a temperature check of the left, read this unfortunately-titled but otherwise trenchant piece on liberals’ hero-worship of Elizabeth Warren as a replacement for their hero-worship of Obama three years ago. When even The One is too squishy, I fear the golden age of centrism might elude us a bit longer.