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…

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.”…

“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.”