Extreme Makeover: Occupy Wall Street Edition

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The 10-day forecast for Manhattan indicates that the freak snowstorm we had a couple of weeks ago isn't likely to be repeated soon. The weather will be sunny, with a chance of rain only on the 16th.

I'm beginning a column on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations with the weather report because it's come down to that. Weather is the greatest challenge that the OWS faces -- not a pepper-spraying, barricade-happy, maddeningly inconsistent New York City Police Department. It's not Mayor Bloomberg or a long-suffering landlord. It's the vicissitudes of weather, and the fact that this populist movement is in danger of withering away unless the demonstrators show a bit more foresight.

Occupy Wall Street: News Feed >>
The latest news, photos and videos from the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests.

I know, OWS is intentionally leaderless. Having a leader is not necessarily a great thing, as WikiLeaks has learned. But OWS is also directionless, and that could mean that it will be futureless.

OWS also has a serious public relations problem, as indicated by screaming New York Post front-page headlines playing up every dirty skell taking residence at Liberty Plaza (Zuccotti Park). It's true enough, as I pointed out on my blog a while back, that the allegations of anti-Semitism at OWS have been wildly exaggerated. But let's not forget that the Tea Party was subject to similar bad publicity, concerning racism, at about the same stage of its development and it managed to shrug it off. You can't say that about OWS, or at least not yet.

Even more important is the sense I'm getting that OWS isn't going to outlast the bad weather. The Tea Party was, and is, a major influence on Republican politics. OWS, despite being far more broadly based, has no chance of attaining the same status as the Tea Party if the present trend continues. What OWS needs is to evolve, and evolve fast, if it is to even come close to the Tea Party in significance. It needs a makeover.

I did quite a bit of reporting on the Tea Party for my forthcoming book on Ayn Rand's growing influence on the nation, and I picked up some insights that I'd like to pass on:

Make better use of the Internet. From the beginning, the Tea Party has made superb use of the Internet, helped along, no doubt, by the funding it has gotten from the Koch brothers and other right-wing fat cats. (See "Get a sugar daddy," below.) Occupy Wall Street has a reasonably good Web site, but it lacks substantive content.

One reason, of course, is that it doesn't have an agreed-upon agenda -- such as the list of suggested demands that I offered a while back. OWS already has an issue upon which all factions agree, which is income disparity. Yet nowhere on the site is there any discussion of income disparity, not even any of the widely cited statistics on the subject.

What's needed, for starters, is an eloquent explanation (perhaps a video, narrated by a non-divisive celebrity) explaining just what income disparity is and why it needs to stop. OWS needs to also make better use of the Net in organizing mini-OWS protests, and spreading the word.