The Gary Null Blog

NEW YORK—The mushrooming Occupy Wall Street protests, now on the verge of spreading to more than 1,000 cities and towns across the U.S. and beyond, may have come of age this week.

But the second most interesting number (apart from the anger-tracking figures updated at OccupyTogether.org) is 38 per cent — President Barack Obama’s approval rating, according to the latest Gallup survey.

Occupation up, Obama down. It’s an equation the White House is desperate to change, as the Democratic machine grapples with how best to harness the progressive populist uprising to generate electoral energy for November 2012.

The rolling fury that took hold of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park three weeks ago remains audaciously leaderless. But it is also changing quickly, as new blood arrives to bolster the cause, in ways that are dismaying to Occupy Wall Street’s earliest adopters.

On Wednesday, it was the arrival of Big Labor that seized the headlines, as unionists marched in the thousands through Manhattan’s financial district. But in the encampment that night — and truly, the hardcore actually sleeping on these paving stones comprise 140 characters or less — fear of co-optation was rampant.

The Occupy Wall Street hardcore sees itself as bigger than partisan politics. And the disappointment with Obama — after what they view as a series of business-friendly surrenders on financial regulation, the environment, budgets and even health-care reform — borders on contempt.

But they don’t own Occupy Wall Street anymore. That was evident Thursday morning, when the encampment began to fill with even more arrivals. And some of the new faces showing up in Zuccotti seem more representative of the working-class angst gripping the country.