This is where I part company with at least one group of folks claiming to be part of the Occupy movement: the senseless and distasteful idea of  "occupying" Iowa campaign offices.  There have already been some scattered arrests but I don't think this part of the "movement" is going to go very far because it really makes absolutely NO sense. At least, I hope not. Indeed, I find it counter-productive and a rather piss-poor precedent.

I hate to sound like Jake Tapper, but even somebody as sympathetic as me cannot discern what the bottom-line point is of disrupting –albeit non-violently– the campaign operations of different candidates, including Barack Obama.  From what I can make out through the haze is that the "occupiers" are either protesting the shallowness of American elections and/or are upset that the candidates won't heed their message so they are bringing the message to the candidates. Or is there something I am missing?

I have a question: if elections are shallow and the candidates are deaf, then why bother with them at all? Why not bring your message directly to the people? As the campaigns themselves do, no matter how manipulative and cynical that message might be.  And what is a more perfect place than Iowa? Here's a small state, flooded with campaigners and canvassers, and with a politically engaged populace which — from my long experience there– sorta likes all the attention the caucuses bring them. This is a population that is not only accessible, but also quite open to retail politicking.  If you knock on their door, there is a good chance they will listen. If you hold a town hall on a Wednesday night in Indianola, they might just show up.

(Indeed, one of the most vivid moments I experienced during the 2008 Iowa caucus campaign was a Joe Biden meeting held on a freezing Friday night, the day after Xmas, at the Elks lodge in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Biden's staff consisted of his brother and one other young volunteer. Never at a loss of words, Biden stood there for 2 hours and took quite complex questions on foreign policy, no less, from the parka-clad locals. I'm no big fan of Biden's but it sure was a reassuring moment to see guys in jeans and John Deere caps dialogue with the future V.P. about Pakistan and the Palestinians).

Hundreds, thousands of volunteers– mostly Republicans– are gong door to door as I write this bringing all sorts of cockamamie messages into many more times the number of living rooms and kitchens. Why can't the Occupy folks do the same? I could be snarky and say they can't because they themselves are not sure what the concrete message is. Talking about inequality and the 99% are not enough. To be politically serious, you must propose concrete actions that people should take and I'm not sure at all that Occupy has a clue what that might be.

I don't purport to have the recipe either, but then again I am not occupying anybody's campaign office. But whatever the message is, shouldn't the Occupy folks be organizing the 99% around these issues rather than claiming, rather falsely, that they are the embodiment of the 99%?  If pudonk, doomed candidates from Santorum to Gingrich to Bachmann along with interest groups from the NRA to home-schoolers can turn out volunteers to go door-to-door throughout Iowa, can't the so-called 99 percenters do likewise?

By staging small, disruptive demos in and around campaign headquarters all these folks to is tick people off and demonstrate in full living color their relative impotence (and their rather anemic numbers).

I also said above that I find this to be a somewhat alarming precedent. Look, I know very what a circus these caucuses and much of these elections are at their core. Does someone have, however, a better idea?  Excuse me for being a sap, but I find the campaigning and electoral process to be a rather sacred (if corrupted) part of democracy. If you don't like what the other side is doing, or saying or if you don't like any of the sides, fine by me. Then, it seems, your job would be to out-organize them, to being a message that more deeply engages them than the hooey we hear at the hollow town halls and in the attack ads.  But what you DO NOT do is interfere with the citizens' rights to organize and campaign, no matter how far their heads might be up their asses.

If there were no Occupy movement at the moment (and there might not be), how many liberals and lefties would feel OK about right-to-lifers and gun-rights people occupying the campaign offices of Democratic candidates?

This is a moment in history when Republicans are undertaking an unprecedented effort to block voter participation and discourage civic activism. The last thing we need right now is to have folks from Occupy aiding their cause by clogging up campaign offices.  Bad, bad idea.