Democratic Party strategists are busily trying to figure out how they can tap into the enthusiasm and spreading popular appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement. President Obama is recasting his own rhetoric to sound like he supports what these occupiers want, and he is even traveling around by bus as a sign that he is in tune with their Main Street populism.

But none of this amounts to a hill of beans without real changes in the policy making establishment of the Democratic Party. Democratic leaders in Congress can make a show of tax-the-rich legislation that know won’t actually pass, and the President can go around the country barefoot and riding a camel, if the people they and he actually listen to when making economic policy are from the best-and-brightest world of Wall Street — advisers who ever and always come up with policies that favor Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.

The present Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, is known to everyone with the slightest knowledge of contemporary politics as Wall Street’s man in Washington. The person selected to head this Administration’s competitive council is the CEO of a huge corporation that ships jobs abroad and pays little U.S. taxes. The person chosen to be the Democratic lead in the group that came up with ideas to change the U.S tax code had very strong ties to Wall Street.

Since the Clinton presidency, the Democratic Party has had economic policies that favored Wall Street and big businesses and the CEOs who run both. These are the top 1 percenters that Wall Street occupiers are railing against so vehemently. And unless this link is broken, unless Mr. Obama and Democrats generally get real populist economic policy advisers, the money and policy pipeline that joins Democrats and The Street at the hip, and Mr. Obama’s I-Am-A-Born- Again-Main-Street-Populist rap are just electioneering hot air.

Step One, Mr. Obama. Fire Tim Geithner. Show you really understand what the Wall Street Occupiers want. Don’t just talk the talk. Walk the walk. Or you might just find, sir, that a lot of occupiers will decide that focusing on electing a Democratic congress that really believes and fosters their ideas is more important than electing a Democratic president who just plain doesn’t get it.

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