Occupy Wall Street is hunting around for its winter galoshes, not to mention the next phase in its amorphous, mysterious journey.

"I think that we should hibernate ... and come out swinging next spring," Kalle Lasn, the Canadian who started it all with a Twitter hashtag, told NPR. "This occupying the parks phase of the movement is probably over by now." (I'm not sure locals got that message.)

OK, so what will OWS 2.0 look like?

One hint passed through San Francisco last week, a woman called by her enemies "the Mistress of Mayhem" or "the devil incarnate" and who herself takes some credit for the intellectual midwifing of the OWS movement: Elizabeth Warren, the bare-knuckled Harvard law professor, financial-industry regulation advocate and scourge of Wall Street now running for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts.

The night Warren spoke at an Embarcadero Democratic fundraiser about New Deal-style justice and gave a compelling narrative of growing up a struggling maintenance man's daughter "at the ragged edges of the middle class," a group she says she desperately wants to save from institutional greed and thievery, the Justin Herman Plaza camper/protesters just up the street were being shuffled around more times than a military family.

Meanwhile, investment bankers kept showing up before dawn for work right next door, unconcerned and regulated only by the biological clock of world markets. "I didn't even know they'd been dispersed till I went out for some air," one of the white collar execs, a friend of mine, told me at the time of the forced Occupy SF decampment.

But if it's fear that financial institutions need in order to pay attention, Warren is the one who can deliver. Karl Rove and other Republican and business-world types have lashed out at her as what Gawker satirically calls "a violent hippie monster" for saying she supports OWS. Ron Paul says she's a "socialist."

And in Washington, just the morning after her appearance here, the Senate refused to confirm Warren's protege Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new agency she spent years building and ushering into reality. This was a bloodier defeat for the OWS fairness concept than pepper spray or the destruction of tented parks and noisy protests.

Even though her alleged and ever compromising backer, Barack Obama, gave her what Vanity Fair decided was "a Judas kiss" on the cheek when he selected Cordray over her to run the bureau, she is unbowed.

"Four months ago, all anyone talked about was the $14 trillion debt," Warren told me during her visit. "And how many cuts we'll have to make. Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation to 99 and 1." But the herding-cats quality of OWS makes her wonder, "Where will it go? No one knows." The downside? "They won't seize the moment, and they'll lose it."

To avoid that, they would do well to lash themselves to Warren, even though some organizers say they think she'll be corrupted like everyone else in the filthy lucre world of politics.

Get over yourselves. If you want a champion for a more regulated system, she's your woman.