The man protesting from a tree in downtown Sacramento came down from his perch and was promptly arrested.

The kids camping in the quad at UC Davis packed up their belongings and went home to mommy and daddy for Christmas break.

That was that. The Occupy movement is fading fast in the Sacramento region with multiple questions in its wake: What was it all about? What have we learned?

We learned that UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi was a terrible leader whose dithering set the stage for a needless campus confrontation between cops and kids that drew worldwide attention.

With effective planning and no-nonsense accountability, as Sacramento police have demonstrated, nothing would have happened at UCD. The kids would have done what they did on Friday – packed up their things and went home.

We've also learned that the Occupy movement is like a flame powered by a faltering generator.

It's flickering out in many respects because it's devoid of clear objectives and effective strategies for how to achieve economic equality.

The only places Occupy caught fire is where leadership was AWOL.

In California, that was Oakland and UCD – where "leaders" initially praised cops until things got out of hand.

The flip-flopping of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan confused what needed to be a clear plan for keeping the peace. Katehi presided over a mess where she said she never would have approved cops using riot gear – yet there they were.

She said she wanted the protesters' tent encampments removed peacefully, and yet the cops used pepper spray on students.

Her initial comments were muddled and it took her way too long to own what happened.

She lost control. Badly.

In the interim, UC Davis became synonymous around the globe with police brutality.

For a little while, the story brought back memories for me of the media blowup of the O.J. Simpson case or the Rodney King story.

But the UC Davis story is losing steam now because what we saw in the infamous pepper-spraying video was not the product of evil. It was the product of mismanagement.

Videos shot by onlookers clearly show students taunting cops, baiting them, cursing them.

Others sauntered up to police and pointed their cameras at them with an air of entitlement devoid of concern for consequences.

In the working-class neighborhood of my youth, kids would have never had the nerve to act this way because we knew what would have happened to us.

But by virtue of being admitted to UC Davis and having the means to attend, some of the students are societally closer to the top 1 percent of income earners that the Occupy movement rails against than the cops spraying them.

The infamous videotape of cops using pepper spray has smothered that little nuance and the less than righteous behavior of the kids.

Writers and pundits have used it to illustrate our loss of civil liberties or the militarization of domestic police.

People of a conservative bent have railed that the cops were justified because the kids encircled them.

Please. The cops had riot gear. The kids had iPhones.

In fits of hyperbole, liberals have called it this generation's Kent State.

Please. People were killed at Kent State.

The global reaction was fed largely by the callous indifference of the cops deploying the spray as if the students were bugs.

If you don't do it – if you simply take the kids' tents away and step back – they go home, just like they did on Friday.

The cops were talking on their radios to someone, but Katehi and her campus chief – Annette Spicuzza – laid the mess on the cops when it all hit the fan.

In that void of leadership, everyone from the state Legislature to the UC system has stepped forward to investigate.

Meanwhile, the kids were allowed to set up camp in the quad because UC Davis lost control so badly.

As Ed Fletcher wrote in Saturday's Bee, the Christmas break finally achieved the dispersal that UCD officials could not.

What was accomplished? Would they return? No one seemed to know.

It was the same story in downtown Sacramento, though without the global attention and without a single whiff of pepper spray.

The difference between the two places can be distilled down to one word: leadership.

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Call The Bee's Marcos Breton, (916) 321-1096.

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