Left-wing activist and former Obama administration official Van Jones said “watch out” because his Save the American Dream movement, along with the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, would eclipse the TEA Party in 2012.

“It was very easy when [the] TEA Party first started, to dismiss them, to laugh at them and say ‘this is just nothing, it’s some kind of joke, it’s a fad, it’s going to go away,’” Jones told reporters after the Save the American Dream rally in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.

“It would be very easy to make the same mistake again,” he continued. “But the potential here is about 10 times greater than the TEA Party because if you look at the TEA Party [it] represented about 20 percent of the American people when they started. We represent 80 percent – so, watch out.”

Jones said that this new movement – called the American Dream movement – was already “massively bigger” than the TEA Party was when it first began. “The American Dream movement is only nine weeks old,” he said. “We are already massively bigger than the TEA Party was when it was nine weeks old.”

“Yesterday’s story was the TEA Party,” said Jones, who has described himself as a revolutionary and “a communist” in the 1990s. “Today’s story is the American Dream movement. We are what’s next...”

The American Dream movement is a left-wing political organization run by the liberal group MoveOn.org Civic Action, in partnership with dozens of other liberal groups ranging from the Hip Hop Caucus to the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood.

Jones led the group’s Take Back the American Dream Summit outside the US Capitol building on Tuesday, drawing attention to its Contract for the American Dream Manifesto, which calls for a laundry-list of liberal policy items ranging from new and higher taxes on the wealthy to higher government spending and single-payer healthcare.

Jones linked his American Dream movement to the left-wing Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, saying that both efforts were part of the same grassroots movement.

“There are two incredible expressions right now – and there may be more later – of frustration and pain and hope for this country,” Jones said after the rally in speaking with reporters. “There’s the occupy movement, which we love and respect, there’s the American Dream movement – and keep your eyes open [because] there’s going to be a flowering of movements in this country to take back the American dream.”

Jones also said that the American Dream movement would model itself after the TEA Party’s success in the 2010 elections, stressing that in 2012 candidates would run under the movement’s banner.

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