Occupy Wall Street: Mob or Movement?

If Occupy Wall Street is indeed at a tipping point, will it tip into obscurity or be a genuine political force? Two views today:

• 'Losers': Ann Coulter says this is no political movement, it's merely a "mob" of "directionless losers" spouting "random liberal cliches lacking any real reason or coherence." And all those comparisons to the Tea Party? Sorry. "The Tea Partiers have jobs, showers, and a point," she writes at the Townhall blog. Tea Partiers get results via the voting booth, not civil unrest, and "they are probably going to succeed in throwing out a president in next year's election. That's what democracy looks like." Full post here.

• New populists? Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Ketcham says it's still an open question what the legacy of OWS will be, and "fizzle" is one possibility. But he sees a parallel with the 1890s Populist movement, "a broad, economics-driven revolt that targeted a predatory class of corporate capitalists—the robber barons of the Gilded Age." The Populists even formed a political party, the People's Party, and they did make a difference—they "drove the Progressive era of reform of the early 1900s." Full post here.