'It’s what grassroots activism looks like,' Eliot Spitzer said of Occupy Wall Street. | REUTERS Spitzer and OWS find each other

Eliot Spitzer’s career appears to be entering its third act.

After a meteoric rise and fall — first in politics and then as a CNN host — the former New York governor has dusted himself off again and emerged as one of the earliest, loudest and clearest voices supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement.


In a string of Slate columns, guest spots on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and public appearances, Spitzer has spent the past two months giving full-throated support and a laundry list of policy ideas to the nascent movement, even while being careful to emphasize that he speaks only from its sidelines.

He’s made enough noise to show up, alongside House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama, in an attack ad paid for by Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel highlighting alleged anti-Semitic comments made at the protests. The ad was an early glimpse at the kind of political risks that politicians make by aligning themselves with a leaderless grass-roots movement — risks that only intensified recently as mayors across the country, many of them Democrats, dispersed the encampments and thousands of protesters were arrested.

But Spitzer believes those actions will only galvanize — and, he hopes, focus — a movement he still passionately supports. “I’m confident that it will continue because it is now such a vibrant counterpoint to what’s going on in our politics,” he said.

Spitzer has gone down to Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park “a couple times,” he said, more to listen than to talk. What he saw reminded him of the other great social movements of the past century.

“It’s what grass-roots activism looks like, and as a consequence it is easy for those who want to disparage it to disparage it,” he said. “But at the same time, it is incredibly potent.”

Now that many of the encampments have been swept away, Spitzer said he hopes to see “a greater definition of purpose” and a broader organization that stretches from college students to “thoughtful leaders” like Princeton economist Paul Krugman and former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

“I think there is a foundation for continued activism,” he said. “And what form it takes remains to be seen. Many people believe that simply camping out at the various sites has, to a certain extent, run its course, but Occupy Wall Street is a necessary and critical voice and it should continue.”

In many ways, Spitzer is the ideal figure to move into the political vacuum that Occupy Wall Street creates for Democratic politicians wary of getting too close to the movement. All through his time as a CNN host, he carefully tended the “sheriff of Wall Street” political brand he acquired from his days as New York’s crusading attorney general, using his first on-air opinion piece to call for Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

With nothing to lose and the political gifts that many once thought would take him to the presidency, Spitzer has been able to speak out on economic issues in ways that so far few prominent Democratic politicians, save Elizabeth Warren, now running for the Senate in Massachusetts, have dared.

But is Spitzer still a politician?

“My role now is to be supportive in many different ways,” he said. “That’s not one of them.”

When pressed on whether he would ever consider a future run for office, however, he left the door more than slightly ajar.

“I would like to think I’m reasonably young. I never preclude things. Right now, I’m loving the teaching and the writing.”

Spitzer was just 47 when he was sworn in as the governor of New York in 2007. After a prostitution scandal forced him to resign the next year, he lay low for a few months and then re-entered public life, first as a columnist for Slate, then as a teacher at the City University of New York, and most recently as the co-host of CNN’s “Parker Spitzer,” and, after Kathleen Parker left, as the host of “In the Arena,” which was cancelled in July after drawing poor ratings during less than a year on the air.

New York political insiders have buzzed on and off about a possible mayoral run in 2013, though the closest Spitzer-watchers say last year’s report that he was thinking of running for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s seat might be closer to the truth.

Spitzer waves aside these rumors, noting that he spent last week talking to Silicon Valley executives and doing interviews with NPR and the BBC. “They are not New York voters,” he said.

Still, Occupy Wall Street has been a kind of political windfall for Spitzer.

“He is in a good position to come out and say these people are right, because he’s been making these points for a long time,” said Michael Levitin, managing editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Priscilla Grim, co-editor of the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr blog and a project manager and editor at the Occupied Wall Street Journal, said Spitzer has been “remarkably” helpful in spreading awareness of the movement.

“I believe that he is trying to find a place for politics as usual to find its connection with Occupy Wall Street, which is not politics as usual,” she said.

Spitzer prefaces his policy recommendations to OWS with the caveat that he doesn’t expect such a new, organic movement to have its policy act together. Nonetheless, some of his ideas, such as a tax on financial transactions, are indeed among those being discussed at Zuccotti Park and beyond. (One website, We Don’t Make Demands, rounds up a number of occupiers’ policy ideas, including regulating high frequency trading.)

“I appreciate Spitzer’s writing in support of the movement, and I think he nailed it right on the head a few weeks ago, when he wrote that we have already succeeded, by focusing the national conversation on the serious issues of structural inequality,” said Aaron Bornstein, one of the occupiers involved in Occupy Wall Street’s Think Tank working group. “We are not a politician, or even a candidate. It’s not our job to write legislation, or to issue policy guidelines. It is our job to demonstrate that a very large and suddenly vocal constituency has been ignored.”

How does that constituency intersect with the broader electorate? Less than it used to.

A Gallup poll from this week found a significant drop in public support for the protesters’ methods over the last month, but an increase in the percentage of people who support the movement’s goals. Overall, about a quarter of respondents support the movement, and 19 percent oppose it.

While a handful of Democratic officials have offered support for OWS, more have taken Obama’s route of offering carefully worded sympathy for the protesters’ frustrations, without endorsing the movement per se.

Such caution is understandable.

Crossroads GPS has dropped a more than $500,000 on a buy for an ad attacking Warren for her support of OWS, suggesting that it means she endorses drugs, violence and the radical redistribution of wealth. And last week, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes got hold of a memo written in part by two former aides to House Speaker John Boehner now working for a Washington lobbying firm offering the firm’s services to the American Bankers Association to conduct “opposition research” and craft “negative narratives” about Occupy Wall Street.

Pelosi raised money off the memo, trying to harness the potential attack to energize Democrats, but as David Weigel noted, pointedly did not mention Occupy Wall Street in her appeal.

Such hedging shows the tough spot that Democrats are in with Occupy Wall Street — an unruly group whose critique of the financial services industry extends to many who gave heavily to Obama and other Democrats in recent elections.

Spitzer himself has been noticeably critical of Obama’s caution on the broader issues that OWS is raising.

“I think the deeper concern that many people have is that the policies that the president has put in place have not been sufficiently bold in addressing the underlying economic problems that we’ve got,” Spitzer said.”The support is welcome, but I would like to see him make it concrete in the form of mortgage reform, in terms of financial services reform — those are the areas that we need to see real leadership.”

But the politician with whom he might be drawing the sharpest contrast is his longtime rival, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo enjoys high approval ratings and solid liberal bona fides for overseeing the passage of gay marriage this year. But he has won few friends among the Occupy Wall Street crowd, largely because of his opposition to extending New York’s “millionaire’s tax,” which is set to expire at the end of the year. Occupy-affiliated protesters have held several demonstrations and set up a camp in Albany over which Cuomo threatened to support local police’s enforcement of a curfew.

Behind this stance, according to various watchers of New York’s political scene, is Cuomo’s alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire and with the New York Post in particular — which has gone out of its way to highlight the violent, unpleasant and downright nutty aspects of the Zuccotti Park encampment in its reporting and recently featured an editorial urging Cuomo not to buckle under pressure from “the old hippies and young narcissists of Occupy Wall Street.

Spitzer, rarely at a loss for words, clams up when asked how he thinks Cuomo has responded to the Occupy movement.

“The wrong way, and I’ll leave it at that,” he said. “I don’t need to distract by getting into my views on how Andrew Cuomo has handled it.”