All of this explains why efforts to taint Occupy Wall Street as nothing more than a bunch of latter-day hippie radicals haven’t worked. It’s also why Obama, by sharpening his arguments about what’s fair and what’s unfair, has finally stopped his slide in the polls.

A recent survey by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center showed Occupy Wall Street to be more popular now than the Tea Party, which keeps losing ground. The poll also showed that these two movements are quite distinct — they are not part of some generalized protest. Only 10 percent of those surveyed supported both Occupy Wall Street and the tea party. And, as my colleague Greg Sargent has documented tirelessly, on many of Occupy’s core issues (favoring higher taxes on millionaires and believing in a more even distribution of income and wealth), public opinion strongly supports the anti-Wall Streeters.

Obama’s aides have a habit of congratulating themselves too much when things start going well. The president has a long way to go, and he is pursuing a strategy now that he resisted for a long time. But it ought to encourage him that Paul Ryan is terribly upset. Telling the truth about inequality is politically wise, and morally necessary.