Evan McMorris-Santoro October 10, 2011, 5:34 PM

Add Karl Rove’s name to the list of pundits and pols weighing in how to compare Occupy Wall Street to the tea party.

The short version: he’s not seeing the connection.

From The Hill’s Daniel Strauss:

Rove said that the early Tea Party gatherings were an expression of people with largely “mainstream perspectives” on the economy and deficit and constitution.

“What are these people for? To the degree that they’re for anything it’s left wing nuttiness,” Rove said Monday on Sean Hannity’s radio show of the four week old protests. “One is a constitution loving law abiding people and this is a group of left wing nuts whose goal it is to violate the law.”

Now here’s something interesting Rove said about the tea party about a year ago that got him in quite a bit of trouble with that movement:

“If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated,” he told Der Spiegel in 2010, as reported by Raw Story. “The Reagan Revolution, by contrast, was a ‘well-organized, coherent, ideologically motivated and conservative revolution,’” Rove said.

Is it hypocrisy? Not really. Rove didn’t say the tea party was a bunch of lawless hippies — just a bunch of unsophisticated rabble rousers without the clear direction of the political revolution Rove was a part of.

Anyway, according to The Architect, that’s the difference between the tea party and Occupy Wall Street

Karl Rove, Occupy Wall Street