It looks as if OWS still has some imaginative surprises up its sleeve.

On Wednesday, twenty-four intrepid Occupiers set out from Zuccotti Park. Destination: Washington, D.C. Mode of travel: foot. Projected speed: 20 mpd (miles per day). E.T.A.: Wednesday, November 23rd, the day the debt-limit-fiasco-spawned congressional “supercommittee” is supposed to pull $1.2 trillion out of its, er, hat. Demand: Please, Congress, let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, on schedule, at the end of next year.

Here are three reasons why this is an excellent idea, with Goldman Sachs-like leverage possibilities:

Self-sustaining efficiency. Two dozen people holding up signs isn’t a big number in a big-city downtown square. But the same number with the same signs trudging along the shoulder of an interstate highway is a startling advertisement for itself. The number will grow and grow as people join up along the route for a few hours or a few days. By the time the group gets to the capital, it will probably be quite large.

Media bait. Campsites are old news. The walk is new news. Campers just sit there. Walkers go somewhere. Occupy the Highway, as it has dubbed itself, will be irresistible to “Eyewitness News Team” TV news directors: a local story with a presold national angle, cheap and easy to cover, with good visuals, vivid (and probably sympathetic) characters, rich comic possibilities, and a tried-and-true story line: a road movie! In other words, surefire material for either a show-opening “today’s top story” or an offbeat signoff. The national and international press will do feature stories, too.

A canny demand. As far as I know, this is the first time the Occupy movement has endorsed a specific policy proposal. “Death to Capitalism”? “All Power to the Workers and Peasants’ Soviets”? No such luck, Fox News. Occupy’s throat-clearing suggestion turns out to be one that is anything but “radical.” It’s reasonable, moderate, maybe even achievable. Most Americans think that it’s only fair to ask the rich to pay a little more at the high-end margin. Even most Republican Americans think so. The only ethno-cultural grouping that overwhelmingly disagrees consists of Republican members of the House, Republican senators, and Republican candidates for President.

My only quibble is a detail of how OWS—via its semiofficial Web site—is trumpeting the venture:

On November 23rd, the Congressional Deficit Reduction Super-Committee will meet to decide on whether or not to keep Obama’s extension to the Bush tax-cuts—which only benefit the richest 1% of Americans in any kind of significant way. Luckily, a group of OWS’ers are embarking on a two-week march from Liberty Plaza to the Whitehouse [sic] to let the committee know what the 99% think about these cuts. Join the march to make sure these tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans are allowed to die!

No matter how you spell it, the White House is the wrong part of town for this particular march on Washington to march to. Obama is already on board. Yes, he went along with extending the top-bracket tax cuts. But he did so under protest, because it was the only way to shield extensions of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut from the Republican obstruction machine. And he has just spent weeks campaigning for exactly what the Occupiers are demanding. They should therefore leave any suggestion that “both sides” are equally at fault to “centrist” Beltway pundits.

The right part of town would be Capitol Hill—ideally, 310 First Street, S.E., the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, a couple of hundred feet from Eric Cantor’s corner suite in the Cannon House Office Building.

Meanwhile, you can follow the progress of the hike here.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.