“This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?” Adbusters wrote in an April 12 post. “Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a ‘99% Spring’ reelection campaign for President Obama?”

Skepticism of electoral politics runs deep in the Occupy movement and it could affect the ability of Democrats to mobilize activists during the 2012 campaign, despite attempts to appropriate the “99 percent” rhetoric. But Todd Gitlin, a former leader of the 1960s group, Students for a Democratic Society, who has just published a book on Occupy, believes the concerns of some in the movement are “outlandish.”…

Still, the new groups don’t sit well with Charles M. Young, a writer at thiscantbehappening.net and a 1960s-era activist. He attended one of the mid-April training sessions held by The 99% Spring on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which he said was led by representatives of the Democratic Party and Wall Street lawyers, and where Obama buttons were offered for sale.

Young, 61, feared that Occupy could be “pulled to the right” by partnering up with them and felt the effort was part of a bid to keep the “Kucinich Democrats” from leaving.

“It looks very much like what they call an AstroTurf movement, you know, something from the top down,” he said, noting he left the meeting “disillusioned.” “I don’t remember anybody saying that there was a need for the 99% Spring before it came out.”