“Our focus is the very high end and the very low end,” David Jackson, the CEO of Istithmar, said in an interview. “It’s the middle bracket that we think is a tough place to make money.”

Dubai-based Istithmar and its sister fund, Istithmar Real Estate, have been on a $7 billion spree in New York since 2005, as the city-state’s sheiks seem to see inequality—a specialty of both New York and Dubai—as the world’s greatest growth industry.

Embodying that high-low approach, Barneys (price this summer: $942 million) isn’t the only New York retailer in Istithmar’s stable. The other is the bargain-basement Loehmann’s.

“Luxury retail is growing at a much faster rate” than the rest of the market, said Mr. Jackson. But “there’s a lot of innovation at the high end and at the entry point.”

Istithmar’s front-line managers have good reason to be focused on New York. The real estate fund is headed by Alan Rogers, an Englishman who ran Douglas Elliman, one of the city’s biggest residential brokerages. And, to the extent that Istithmar displays a public face at all in the U.S., it’s Mr. Jackson, a 41-year-old army brat born in Boston, with a Yale M.B.A. and a Princeton economics degree, who rose to become a senior vice president at Lehman Brothers in New York.

Mr. Jackson occupies an office on the fourth floor of the angular Emirates Towers in Dubai. Out his window, Sheikh Zayed Road leads to the Persian Gulf. He said he likes Dubai for what it shares with New York and Hong Kong, his other Lehman posting: its cosmopolitanism and its sense of unlimited opportunity.

“There’s the same sense of aspiration,” he said.

Mr. Jackson is a man both accessible and elusive: In the nail-biting last hours of the Barneys deal, sealed in the second week of August, he unexpectedly answered an Observer reporter’s phone call. “We still have a lot of clock watching to do,” he said after a rival bidder dropped out.

Then the deal was done, and Istithmar vanished behind a bland statement. No celebratory interviews, no need to encourage stories about the Arabs buying up New York. Contacted this summer to set up an interview for another publication, Mr. Jackson responded nine minutes later from his BlackBerry that he’d be willing to speak—but only became available for a short telephone interview more than a month later, in which he drew a line under personal details beyond his age.

The company has, of course, been burned.

In 2006, Mr. Jackson watched Dubai Ports World’s massive, low-profile deal to buy a global port operator collapse after a political stampede started by New York Senator Charles Schumer, who in the heat of the conflict compared Arab investors to skinheads.

Mr. Jackson, for his part, didn’t even pretend to laugh at a question about whether Barneys is a strategic asset.

(For what it’s worth, Senator Schumer was willing to let Barneys go: “There is nothing wrong with Dubai investing in the United States provided it does not impact a sensitive security area and provided the purchase goes through the proper screening and checks,” he told The Observer.)

Most of Istithmar’s spending, however, has proceeded unimpeded.

The splurge began in November 2005, when Istithmar paid $705 million for the Helmsley Building at 230 Park Avenue (which it sold earlier this year for a reported $1.15 billion). It has extended to take in everything from high-end hotels like the W Hotel Union Square and a majority share of the Mandarin Oriental in the Time Warner Center, to one of the city’s signature media giants, Time Warner, with a 2.4 percent stake now worth $1.7 billion.

Istithmar also holds the old Knickerbocker Hotel at Six Times Square, which it plans to convert into a luxury hotel. It traded 280 Park Avenue to Broadway Partners earlier this year for over $1.2 billion, and, in 2006, it bought the leasehold of the office tower at 450 Lexington Avenue for $600 million.

Dubai’s purchases are part of a global spending spree fueled by high oil prices. But despite its vast wealth and its clarity of vision, and perhaps as a consequence of the port debacle, it keeps a notably low profile.

“Because we’re a government company, we have restrictions on what we can and can’t say,” said a spokeswoman for Istithmar Real Estate, who declined to schedule an interview with its CEO, Mr. Rogers.

“We do some business with the Dubai government and they’ve asked us not to” talk about them, said a prominent New York commercial real estate broker.

When asked about the series of recent New York acquisitions, Mr. Jackson said it didn’t reflect any particular strategy. “We just don’t look at our investments in terms of geography,” he said.

And Istithmar’s acquisitions, though particularly glittering, are also part of a broader trend. The weak dollar has made New York an attractive target for all sorts of global shoppers, driving the price of commercial real estate, including hotels, to new highs, a trend that seems to have purged the legendary cautionary tale of Mitsubishi’s disastrous 1989 purchase of Rockefeller Center.

Those investments have also, for the past decade, been a source of tantalizing returns.

“The Germans bought in the late 90’s, and [since 2000] the Irish have been investing in New York; they made a fortune,” said Douglas Harmon of the investment-sales firm Eastil Secured, which arranged the Knickerbocker sale for seller Sitt Asset Management. “The Greek shipping magnates have made fortunes, the English, the Israelis—even Istithmar. Everybody said, ‘That’s gotta be the last stop on the train,’ but they weren’t stupid. They were taking their oil money and diversifying their investments.”

Istithmar is hardly the only Arab investor in New York City recently. Saudi-backed Kingdom Holding Company has a piece of the Plaza. The Sultan of Brunei owns the New York Palace. The Dubai Investment Group, not associated with Istithmar, owns the Jumeirah Essex House, a luxury hotel on Central Park South.

“When Mandarin announced that hotel [deal], everyone thought they were nuts,” said John Bralower, a hotel specialist at Carlton Advisory Services. “[Istithmar] has looked pretty smart so far—they paid high prices, but it looks like they were worth it.”

Ben Smith is a former staff writer at The Observer. He writes for Politico.com. He can be reached at bsmith@observer.com.

In a statement e-mailed to reporters, Mr. Schumer declared it “sad that the President felt he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America,” and warned that “this controversial nominee, who would make the Court less diverse and far more conservative, will get very careful scrutiny.”

Later, as Washington woke up to the nomination, Mr. Schumer was the first Democratic Senator to face the press, his heavy reading glasses riding down his nose as he seemed to echo Senator Edward Kennedy’s famous warning, delivered in 1987, about Robert Bork. In Judge Bork’s America, Senator Kennedy said, “blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.”

Mr. Schumer said the question of the moment was “whether [Judge Alito] would use that seat to reverse much of what Rosa Parks and so many others fought so hard and for so long to put in place.”

The remark raised another question: How had the combative Brooklyn Senator risen, without fanfare or official recognition, to be “the voice of the Democrats on judges,” in the words of Schumer ally Kate Michelman, a former president of the National Abortion Rights Action League?

On a Senate Judiciary Committee stacked with famous names, Mr. Schumer has emerged as the Democrats’ most prominent voice on what is, right now, the most important battle in Washington. That position allows him to step out of the giant shadow cast by his superstar colleague, Hillary Clinton, the would-be, may-be Presidential candidate. With his staunch opposition to conservative judges, his denunciation of “theocrats” and “economic royalists” in Mr. Bush’s coalition, and his media ubiquity, Mr. Schumer has become an unlikely champion of the Democratic left.

“He’s not going out looking for a fight, but when it’s appropriate that there’s a fight, that’s where the fact that he’s a Brooklyn guy really helps the party,” said Mr. Schumer’s former chief counsel, Jeff Berman.

This is a fight Mr. Schumer has been girding for since soon after Mr. Bush took office in 2001. That June, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times attacking the “taboo” against “examining the ideologies of judicial nominees.”

“The not-so-dirty little secret of the Senate is that we do consider ideology, but privately,” he wrote, and called for Senators and judicial nominees to lay their ideological cards on the table.

With Judge Alito, Mr. Schumer is getting what he asked for. The judge has 15 years of opinions that include one in favor of a law requiring women to notify their husbands before seeking abortions, along with a broad record of rulings and a consensus about his intellectual qualifications.

So is Mr. Schumer satisfied? Well, not exactly.

“There are two steps here,” Mr. Schumer told The Observer in a telephone interview from his Senate office the evening of Judge Alito’s appointment, pausing occasionally to munch on a take-out Chinese dinner of steamed shrimp and vegetables on rice. “The first one is to get them to sit down and say what their views are. But that’s just a means to an end. Which is to have judges--and I have one criterion--who are mainstream.”

In becoming the Democratic voice on matters judicial, Mr. Schumer started with an edge on some of his colleagues: a Harvard law degree, a relatively safe seat and a proximity to, and affinity for, the cameras. But as with everything else in his career, Mr. Schumer has mostly propelled himself to the center of the action. It started with his status as an extremely junior member of a high-powered Senate committee, and his assignment to one of its least interesting subcommittees: Administrative Oversight and the Courts, which had recently heard testimony on administrative procedures in the Department of Agriculture.

“Nobody wanted it,” Mr. Schumer said of the subcommittee assignment.

Then, on May 9 of 2001, Mr. Bush announced his first round of Appellate Court nominees, a group that made it clear he took seriously his conservative supporters’ wish for a judiciary remade in the model of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The group of 11 included two, Priscilla Owen and Miguel Estrada, who would wind up in the middle of the filibuster fight. It also included the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.

Less than a month later, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party, giving the Democrats control of the Senate and making Mr. Schumer the chairman of this dull little subcommittee. Within weeks, it wasn’t so dull.

That July, Mr. Schumer turned his subcommittee into a platform for hashing out the central issue of judicial confirmation: What qualifies a person to be a federal judge? With the other key members of his committee largely focused on their own chairmanships elsewhere, Mr. Schumer devoted himself to the judges.

“Chuck came with one thing that [Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, Senator Kennedy and others] didn’t have as much of, and that’s time,” said Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority Leader.

His first hearing in a series (“They became a little famous,” Mr. Schumer says; “people still cite them”) was titled “Should Ideology Matter?”

The move surprised the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans.

“The courts subcommittee primarily handled court administration--but it’s the Senate, and your jurisdiction is as broad as you can make your argument to be,” said Makan Delrahim, then the Republican counsel to the full committee.

The hearings proceeded through the summer and resumed in 2002, serving as a kind of a backup document to the Senate Democrats’ filibuster of Judge Estrada and several other nominees.

They drew criticism from Republicans: The ranking member on the subcommittee, Senator Orrin Hatch, labeled Mr. Schumer’s call to return to open evaluations of ideology a “historic misstep.” The next fall, as Mr. Schumer led a hearing about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals titled “The Importance of Balance on the Nation’s Second-Highest Court,” Mr. Hatch griped that “the premise of this hearing reminds me of a nickname that some clever college freshman gave to one of his required first-year courses: Introduction to the Obvious.”

And after Republicans retook the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, Mr. Schumer’s seminars came to a halt.

But the damage had been done to the notion that asking nominees about ideology would be an unfair “litmus test.”

“What Chuck is saying is, call it a litmus test or not, the Senate does have an obligation to make sure a new Supreme Court judge is going to respect these fundamental pillars of the constitutional order,” said City Councilman David Yassky, a former law professor who worked for Mr. Schumer in the House. Mr. Schumer argues that attempts to roll back recent precedents--like Roe v. Wade, and the wide use of the commerce clause in the Constitution to justify federal regulation--represent unacceptable “activism.”

Urging Confrontation

In the summer and fall of 2001, as Mr. Schumer led his public hearings, he was conducting another fight in the privacy of the Senate Democrats’ caucus meetings in the L.B.J. room just off the Senate floor. There, Mr. Schumer was making the case that conservative judges were worth fighting.

“He had to persuade a lot of people--it wasn’t easy,” Mr. Daschle recalled.

As Mr. Schumer remembers it, he made his case to his colleagues one by one, and then in a speech to the full caucus.

“I had to work them. I had to sit down with Diane Feinstein and Joe Biden, who were very leery of this,” he said. Then, in caucus, “I got up and I said we should not do this because we’ll win politically--we won’t. We should do this because that’s why we’re Senators. If we don’t, we could be looking in the mirrors 20 years from now, when we’re shaving or putting on our makeup or whatever, and say, ‘How did we let this happen?’”

In the end, just two filibusters held; Judge Estrada withdrew. But Mr. Schumer was right that they wouldn’t help his party politically. Many observers think they contributed to costing Mr. Daschle his job and the Democrats their majority.

Three years after Mr. Schumer’s last hearing, the climactic fights over the Supreme Court are at last underway. Chief Justice Roberts made it through largely unscathed.

“Roberts was quite stealthy, but he was so brilliant he could pull it off,” said Mr. Schumer, who voted against confirming the Chief Justice.

But when it came to Harriet Miers, Mr. Schumer argues that conservatives--concerned that she would tilt left--finally conceded his point that ideology matters.

“Sam Brownback and I sat down, and we agreed” that a nominee’s views should be better known, Mr. Schumer said of the Kansas Republican. “We’ve won that argument now. I don’t think they’ll ever be going back to a stealth nominee.”

And now, as Judge Alito approaches his confirmation hearings, the lines are being drawn more clearly than ever. One protégé of Mr. Schumer, Congressman Anthony Wiener, declared on Nov. 1 that the Alito nomination was an “open-and-shut case,” that the judge’s opinion in the notification case was grounds for disqualification.

Mr. Schumer hasn’t been quite as blunt. Instead, he co-opts the conservative criticism of liberal “judicial activism,” arguing that conservatives now practice what they once condemned.

“I always felt that judges should interpret law, not make law,” he said. “I remember in college and law school in the late 60’s and early 70’s, even though I agreed with the substance of the Warren Court’s decisions, I thought that some of them were making law.”

Not, the Senator quickly added, with civil-rights rulings like the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which was issued in 1954. But the Warren Court also greatly strengthened defendants’ protections against police searches.

“I think they went too far on criminal law,” Mr. Schumer said. And while the Senator laughs off the running speculation that he aspires to sit on the Supreme Court himself one day, you could almost hear his testimony to the committee.

“I think they went too far on criminal law,” Mr. Schumer said. And while the Senator laughs off the running speculation that he aspires to sit on the Supreme Court himself one day, you could almost hear his testimony to the committee.

A trim man in shorts and sneakers, with a number on his shirt, walked up to the Senator, shook his hand and wished him good luck. Only later was the Senator informed that the man was his opponent, an obscure State Assemblyman named Howard Mills.

That November, Mr. Schumer broke the state’s record for an electoral margin, receiving an astonishing 71 percent of the vote.

Two years later, Senator Hillary Clinton finds herself facing an opponent who may well be as weak and little known as Mr. Schumer’s 2004 victim. But Mrs. Clinton isn’t running to set records: Her results, instead, will be a judged by Democratic Presidential primary voters concerned about her ability to defeat John McCain or another Republican for President in 2008.

And the expectations game is already well underway, with Mrs. Clinton facing several measures by which her ability to persuade the center will be evaluated: Will she get at least 60 percent of the vote? Will she carry the Ohio-like precincts of western and central New York? Will she trail other Democratic candidates, perhaps Eliot Spitzer, who figures to be the party’s gubernatorial candidate?

“She has to get 60 percent of the vote at least—if someone hits 40 against her, she’s damaged,” said Utica-based pollster John Zogby. Mr. Zogby said he has seen voters who used to say they had an “unfavorable” view of her move into the “favorable” category, and that more recently some who had held “strongly unfavorable views” were moderating. (In an earlier round of the expectations game, Mr. Zogby inadvertently helped make Mrs. Clinton’s easy victory in 2000—winning 56 percent of the vote—a stunner as he produced a steady drumbeat of polls for the New York Post that predicted her defeat. “These things happen,” he explained.)

Another pollster, Mickey Blum, said that Mrs. Clinton’s performance relative to other Democrats would be the key.

“I think that the thing that she may be concerned about, rather than a number, is how her numbers end up comparing to the other people who are running for the other statewide offices, and especially Spitzer,” Ms. Blum said. “If she gets 60 percent and he gets 70 percent, people will say, ‘Yeah, well, great, you won—but he brought you along.’ She doesn’t want to look like she’s riding on his coattails.”

Ms. Blum’s most recent poll, for NY1 News and Newsday, had Mrs. Clinton’s likely challenger, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, winning 30 percent of the vote. Pollsters believe that figure represents a hard core of reflexively Republican or anti-Clinton voters who are certain to vote for Mr. Spencer or another Republican nominee.

“Unless Al Sharpton endorses [Mr. Spencer], there’s nothing she can do” to reduce his vote, said a Democratic strategist.

This is the notorious expectations game, one that Mrs. Clinton’s advisors shrug off on the assumption that she can’t win such a media-driven contest.

“No matter what our final tally is, there will be those who will say its not enough. So we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” said Howard Wolfson, an advisor to Mrs. Clinton.

The numbers game, however, will call for strategic choices about how she runs her campaign: Should she, like Mr. Schumer, pump millions of dollars into expensive television advertising in New York? Or should she continue to invest in what is essentially a shadow Presidential campaign, with a national fund-raising network and a deep, expensive staff?

“I would think she would want to win comfortably—I think they’d even be satisfied in the high 50’s,” said a Democratic pollster, Joel Benenson, who downplayed the national importance of her margin. “The question is how much do you need to win convincingly in New York—and then, once you hit that point, do you want to spend more money?”

Upstate Myths?

At the heart of the issue is an argument that Mrs. Clinton’s performance this year— particularly upstate—is a test of her national potential. When The New Republic headlined a piece earlier this year “Hillary’s Upstate Myth,” her Democratic skeptics seized on its dual (and slightly contradictory) argument: “[U]pstate New York is not that conservative. Clinton hasn’t done all that well here—in fact, she lost the region in 2000 and remains a highly polarizing figure.”

But the very fact that she did as well as she did in the region six years ago came as a surprise to many analysts. And while nobody expects her to win over conservatives, her appeal to moderates will be tested in comparing her results this year with the 2000 figures in specific suburbs and upstate communities.

“She just needs to show—which she can—that she can win in areas where nobody thought she should,” said Ms. Blum. “That she can win in upstate counties, and that she can win in places where nobody gave her a chance and among people who she never expected.”

Of course, the standards of proof in the business of managing political expectation can be a bit elusive.

“It’s all about spin,” Ms. Blum said.

Mr. Schumer—now the white whale of New York electoral politics—is wishing her luck.

“Senator Schumer hopes she does as well as possible,” said the Senator’s spokesman, Risa Heller. She noted that Mr. Schumer is chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, the chief fund-raiser for Democratic Senate candidates. In that capacity, Ms. Heller said, Mr. Schumer will “do everything he can to make that happen.”

A trim man in shorts and sneakers, with a number on his shirt, walked up to the Senator, shook his hand and wished him good luck. Only later was the Senator informed that the man was his opponent, an obscure State Assemblyman named Howard Mills.

That November, Mr. Schumer broke the state’s record for an electoral margin, receiving an astonishing 71 percent of the vote.

Two years later, Senator Hillary Clinton finds herself facing an opponent who may well be as weak and little known as Mr. Schumer’s 2004 victim. But Mrs. Clinton isn’t running to set records: Her results, instead, will be a judged by Democratic Presidential primary voters concerned about her ability to defeat John McCain or another Republican for President in 2008.

And the expectations game is already well underway, with Mrs. Clinton facing several measures by which her ability to persuade the center will be evaluated: Will she get at least 60 percent of the vote? Will she carry the Ohio-like precincts of western and central New York? Will she trail other Democratic candidates, perhaps Eliot Spitzer, who figures to be the party’s gubernatorial candidate?

“She has to get 60 percent of the vote at least—if someone hits 40 against her, she’s damaged,” said Utica-based pollster John Zogby. Mr. Zogby said he has seen voters who used to say they had an “unfavorable” view of her move into the “favorable” category, and that more recently some who had held “strongly unfavorable views” were moderating. (In an earlier round of the expectations game, Mr. Zogby inadvertently helped make Mrs. Clinton’s easy victory in 2000—winning 56 percent of the vote—a stunner as he produced a steady drumbeat of polls for the New York Post that predicted her defeat. “These things happen,” he explained.)

Another pollster, Mickey Blum, said that Mrs. Clinton’s performance relative to other Democrats would be the key.

“I think that the thing that she may be concerned about, rather than a number, is how her numbers end up comparing to the other people who are running for the other statewide offices, and especially Spitzer,” Ms. Blum said. “If she gets 60 percent and he gets 70 percent, people will say, ‘Yeah, well, great, you won—but he brought you along.’ She doesn’t want to look like she’s riding on his coattails.”

Ms. Blum’s most recent poll, for NY1 News and Newsday, had Mrs. Clinton’s likely challenger, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, winning 30 percent of the vote. Pollsters believe that figure represents a hard core of reflexively Republican or anti-Clinton voters who are certain to vote for Mr. Spencer or another Republican nominee.

“Unless Al Sharpton endorses [Mr. Spencer], there’s nothing she can do” to reduce his vote, said a Democratic strategist.

This is the notorious expectations game, one that Mrs. Clinton’s advisors shrug off on the assumption that she can’t win such a media-driven contest.

“No matter what our final tally is, there will be those who will say its not enough. So we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” said Howard Wolfson, an advisor to Mrs. Clinton.

The numbers game, however, will call for strategic choices about how she runs her campaign: Should she, like Mr. Schumer, pump millions of dollars into expensive television advertising in New York? Or should she continue to invest in what is essentially a shadow Presidential campaign, with a national fund-raising network and a deep, expensive staff?

“I would think she would want to win comfortably—I think they’d even be satisfied in the high 50’s,” said a Democratic pollster, Joel Benenson, who downplayed the national importance of her margin. “The question is how much do you need to win convincingly in New York—and then, once you hit that point, do you want to spend more money?”

Upstate Myths?

At the heart of the issue is an argument that Mrs. Clinton’s performance this year— particularly upstate—is a test of her national potential. When The New Republic headlined a piece earlier this year “Hillary’s Upstate Myth,” her Democratic skeptics seized on its dual (and slightly contradictory) argument: “[U]pstate New York is not that conservative. Clinton hasn’t done all that well here—in fact, she lost the region in 2000 and remains a highly polarizing figure.”

But the very fact that she did as well as she did in the region six years ago came as a surprise to many analysts. And while nobody expects her to win over conservatives, her appeal to moderates will be tested in comparing her results this year with the 2000 figures in specific suburbs and upstate communities.

“She just needs to show—which she can—that she can win in areas where nobody thought she should,” said Ms. Blum. “That she can win in upstate counties, and that she can win in places where nobody gave her a chance and among people who she never expected.”

Of course, the standards of proof in the business of managing political expectation can be a bit elusive.

“It’s all about spin,” Ms. Blum said.

Mr. Schumer—now the white whale of New York electoral politics—is wishing her luck.

“Senator Schumer hopes she does as well as possible,” said the Senator’s spokesman, Risa Heller. She noted that Mr. Schumer is chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, the chief fund-raiser for Democratic Senate candidates. In that capacity, Ms. Heller said, Mr. Schumer will “do everything he can to make that happen.”

“The Clintons are pretty slick. They’ll never have any fingerprints on it,” he said.

Mr. Spencer now says he was joking—“I was doing, like, a Charles Grodin routine,” he insisted—but his suggestion that Mrs. Clinton’s hidden hand has influenced the Republican primary process wasn’t far off. It’s just that far from conspiring against the plainspoken Mr. Spencer, Mrs. Clinton has helped turn him into the front-runner for the Republican nomination to oppose her.

The steady, mocking attacks on Mr. Spencer’s Republican rivals by Clinton allies have helped set the stage for a race that contrasts the guarded, cautious incumbent Senator with a combative Vietnam veteran whose conservative stances put him well to right of New York’s center. Mr. Spencer’s sharp tone could play into what has become a potent feature of Mrs. Clinton’s arsenal: victimhood. Her fund-raising emails have harped on a (thus far) largely nonexistent set of shadowy anti-Hillary groups. And at a time when Mrs. Clinton’s alleged “anger” has become a White House talking point, the Senator’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, described Mr. Spencer as “an angry man.”

“Hillary would love to run against John Spencer, because he’s someone who might actually enhance the martyr image,” said William O’Reilly, a spokesman for Ms. McFarland. “The more you attack Hillary, the more that martyr status grows.”

Aides to Mrs. Clinton deny that they’ve deliberately promoted Mr. Spencer, arguing that their attacks on his rivals have been more opportunistic than matters of grand strategy. And Mr. Spencer insists that he’s no pushover, pointing to his eight years running the state’s fourth-largest city and to his frank conservative convictions, which include support for the war in Iraq, dissent from Roe v. Wade and a sense that he stands on the opposite side of the great cultural dividing line among baby boomers—the Vietnam War. He said he still regrets that the United States decided to “cut and run.”

“I think it’ll be a great race,” Mr. Spencer said. “I am a total contrast to Mrs. Clinton.”

But as New York Republicans try to sort out their long-shot challenge to the junior Senator, the state Democratic Party has hammered two other would-be Clinton challengers. First there was Jeanine Pirro, whose later press conferences featured Democrats handing out copies of the supposed missing page from her disastrous campaign announcement. (Ms. Pirro is now running for State Attorney General.) Now there is Ms. McFarland, a former Reagan administration official and Upper East Sider who announced her campaign earlier this month. (Mr. Spencer’s reaction to Ms. McFarland’s late entry into the race was an exasperated “What the fuck?”)

Ms. McFarland’s evidently half-baked candidacy has drawn a steady series of derisive press releases from the state Democratic Party. “For KT McFarland: What a Long, Strange Week It’s Been” was a typical headline. It has also drawn some swift research into her spotty attendance at the polls on Election Day. When the story was published in the New York Post, it came as a “total surprise” to the Spencer campaign, one of his aides said, suggesting a Democratic Party source.

State parties traditionally act as surrogates for candidates. In this case, the ties couldn’t be closer. Mr. Wolfson, the main political consultant to the state Democratic Party, is better known as an advisor to Mrs. Clinton, whom he served as campaign communications director in 2000. He denied having a favorite Republican. “It’s hard enough just to keep up with the ever-changing cast of candidates on the other side, much less choose one,” Mr. Wolfson said.

Mr. Spencer, who announced his intention to run last June, was the second to enter the race, after Ed Cox, a Manhattan lawyer whom the Republicans pushed aside in favor of Ms. Pirro.

The ex-mayor—once seen as a G.O.P. moderate and always a political outsider, even among Westchester Republicans—has all but locked up the crucial Conservative Party line, and he seems to hold a firm lead among the Republican activists who could deny Ms. McFarland a spot on a primary ballot.

Over lunch at Rosie’s Bistro Italiano in Bronxville, just across the Bronx River from Yonkers, Mr. Spencer said he was undisturbed by the long odds and offered a strikingly personal contrast with Mrs. Clinton.

“She’s the same age as me; we traveled along life, you know,” he said after outlining his time as an Army volunteer in Vietnam and a hardhat construction worker on his return. “She comes out of the 60’s—but she comes from a totally different view toward the U.S. and the world that I come from, which I can sense.”

Harsh Criticism

Mr. Spencer has been strident in his criticism of Mrs. Clinton, delighting conservative partisans with his accusations that she “aids and abets” terrorists by criticizing President George W. Bush.

“We’re at war,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with debating policy, but not with that vitriol and hatred in your voice, and you’ve seen that hatred out of Hillary Clinton.”

And his press releases tend to attack her character as much as her positions.

“Senator Clinton just lacks the honesty to call for censure. While I strongly disagree with him, at least Senator Feingold has moral conviction. I’m afraid Senator Clinton’s only moral conviction is her own personal ambition,” he said in a recent release.

Mr. Wolfson responded by referring to a recent meeting between Mr. Spencer and the White House political director, Sara Taylor.

“The first thing John Spencer did after meeting Karl Rove’s team in the White House was accuse Senator Clinton of treason. Sadly, he is still at it. With comments like these, it’s easy to see why people who have worked with John Spencer say he is an angry man who is prone to over-the-top outbursts and vitriolic statements,” he said.

Mr. Spencer laughs off such descriptions. Asked about a newspaper article describing his “titanic, obscenity-laced tirades,” he cracks, “That’s usually at the media.”

His lack of restraint, though, is a two-edged sword, and he cautions not to read too much into his brief White House meeting, which was reported—he says “inflated”—by the New York Post.

“I heard that Sara Taylor was mad” about the Post story, he said. “But the hell with her—I don’t care about her being mad. What the hell do I care? I don’t care about her or Karl Rove.”

“The Clintons are pretty slick. They’ll never have any fingerprints on it,” he said.

Mr. Spencer now says he was joking—“I was doing, like, a Charles Grodin routine,” he insisted—but his suggestion that Mrs. Clinton’s hidden hand has influenced the Republican primary process wasn’t far off. It’s just that far from conspiring against the plainspoken Mr. Spencer, Mrs. Clinton has helped turn him into the front-runner for the Republican nomination to oppose her.

The steady, mocking attacks on Mr. Spencer’s Republican rivals by Clinton allies have helped set the stage for a race that contrasts the guarded, cautious incumbent Senator with a combative Vietnam veteran whose conservative stances put him well to right of New York’s center. Mr. Spencer’s sharp tone could play into what has become a potent feature of Mrs. Clinton’s arsenal: victimhood. Her fund-raising emails have harped on a (thus far) largely nonexistent set of shadowy anti-Hillary groups. And at a time when Mrs. Clinton’s alleged “anger” has become a White House talking point, the Senator’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, described Mr. Spencer as “an angry man.”

“Hillary would love to run against John Spencer, because he’s someone who might actually enhance the martyr image,” said William O’Reilly, a spokesman for Ms. McFarland. “The more you attack Hillary, the more that martyr status grows.”

Aides to Mrs. Clinton deny that they’ve deliberately promoted Mr. Spencer, arguing that their attacks on his rivals have been more opportunistic than matters of grand strategy. And Mr. Spencer insists that he’s no pushover, pointing to his eight years running the state’s fourth-largest city and to his frank conservative convictions, which include support for the war in Iraq, dissent from Roe v. Wade and a sense that he stands on the opposite side of the great cultural dividing line among baby boomers—the Vietnam War. He said he still regrets that the United States decided to “cut and run.”

“I think it’ll be a great race,” Mr. Spencer said. “I am a total contrast to Mrs. Clinton.”

But as New York Republicans try to sort out their long-shot challenge to the junior Senator, the state Democratic Party has hammered two other would-be Clinton challengers. First there was Jeanine Pirro, whose later press conferences featured Democrats handing out copies of the supposed missing page from her disastrous campaign announcement. (Ms. Pirro is now running for State Attorney General.) Now there is Ms. McFarland, a former Reagan administration official and Upper East Sider who announced her campaign earlier this month. (Mr. Spencer’s reaction to Ms. McFarland’s late entry into the race was an exasperated “What the fuck?”)

Ms. McFarland’s evidently half-baked candidacy has drawn a steady series of derisive press releases from the state Democratic Party. “For KT McFarland: What a Long, Strange Week It’s Been” was a typical headline. It has also drawn some swift research into her spotty attendance at the polls on Election Day. When the story was published in the New York Post, it came as a “total surprise” to the Spencer campaign, one of his aides said, suggesting a Democratic Party source.

State parties traditionally act as surrogates for candidates. In this case, the ties couldn’t be closer. Mr. Wolfson, the main political consultant to the state Democratic Party, is better known as an advisor to Mrs. Clinton, whom he served as campaign communications director in 2000. He denied having a favorite Republican. “It’s hard enough just to keep up with the ever-changing cast of candidates on the other side, much less choose one,” Mr. Wolfson said.

Mr. Spencer, who announced his intention to run last June, was the second to enter the race, after Ed Cox, a Manhattan lawyer whom the Republicans pushed aside in favor of Ms. Pirro.

The ex-mayor—once seen as a G.O.P. moderate and always a political outsider, even among Westchester Republicans—has all but locked up the crucial Conservative Party line, and he seems to hold a firm lead among the Republican activists who could deny Ms. McFarland a spot on a primary ballot.

Over lunch at Rosie’s Bistro Italiano in Bronxville, just across the Bronx River from Yonkers, Mr. Spencer said he was undisturbed by the long odds and offered a strikingly personal contrast with Mrs. Clinton.

“She’s the same age as me; we traveled along life, you know,” he said after outlining his time as an Army volunteer in Vietnam and a hardhat construction worker on his return. “She comes out of the 60’s—but she comes from a totally different view toward the U.S. and the world that I come from, which I can sense.”

Harsh Criticism

Mr. Spencer has been strident in his criticism of Mrs. Clinton, delighting conservative partisans with his accusations that she “aids and abets” terrorists by criticizing President George W. Bush.

“We’re at war,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with debating policy, but not with that vitriol and hatred in your voice, and you’ve seen that hatred out of Hillary Clinton.”

And his press releases tend to attack her character as much as her positions.

“Senator Clinton just lacks the honesty to call for censure. While I strongly disagree with him, at least Senator Feingold has moral conviction. I’m afraid Senator Clinton’s only moral conviction is her own personal ambition,” he said in a recent release.

Mr. Wolfson responded by referring to a recent meeting between Mr. Spencer and the White House political director, Sara Taylor.

“The first thing John Spencer did after meeting Karl Rove’s team in the White House was accuse Senator Clinton of treason. Sadly, he is still at it. With comments like these, it’s easy to see why people who have worked with John Spencer say he is an angry man who is prone to over-the-top outbursts and vitriolic statements,” he said.

Mr. Spencer laughs off such descriptions. Asked about a newspaper article describing his “titanic, obscenity-laced tirades,” he cracks, “That’s usually at the media.”

His lack of restraint, though, is a two-edged sword, and he cautions not to read too much into his brief White House meeting, which was reported—he says “inflated”—by the New York Post.

“I heard that Sara Taylor was mad” about the Post story, he said. “But the hell with her—I don’t care about her being mad. What the hell do I care? I don’t care about her or Karl Rove.”

“If I was running for Governor, I would have run a whole different race,” the newly re-elected Senator told The Observer in a telephone interview. “The primary vote is 80 percent downstate. I would have been downstate all the time. I was upstate.”

Mr. Schumer spoke a day after dousing a rumor that had him and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer playing a game of chicken, with the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2006 as the prize. On Nov. 15, Mr. Schumer announced that he had accepted a sweet deal from new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: a leadership post and a prized seat on the Finance Committee. And suddenly, as he had it, there was only one player in that game all along.

“I would never say ‘never’ and would not be pushed into that, either by my opponent or the press,” Mr. Schumer said of his long refusal to rule out a run for Governor. “People got one and one and equaled 11.”

But if Mr. Schumer doesn’t want to be Governor, what does he want to be? The answer, it seems, is that New York’s senior Senator would like to be Daniel Patrick Moynihan. At age 53 and about to begin his second six-year term, Mr. Schumer’s decision to stay in the Senate marked a clear choice for the future. Mr. Schumer wants to be judged by the standards of New York’s handful of large Senate figures: Robert F. Wagner, Jacob Javits and, of course, Moynihan, with whom he served for two years before the late Senator retired in January 2001.

“He’s on track to be a lion of the Senate,” said William Cunningham, a former Moynihan aide who is now Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s communications director. “With this decision to stay in the Senate, he is what Pat Moynihan hoped he would be when he first ran. When Senator Moynihan campaigned with Chuck, Pat made the point that it’s good to have somebody that age, because you have the time that you need to build up seniority.”

The parallel between the son of a Hell’s Kitchen saloonkeeper and the son of a Brooklyn exterminator isn’t an obvious one. The four-term Senator Moynihan was unorthodox, distant and occasionally cryptic, better known for his academic research than for his devotion to constituent service. The Brooklyn legislator is blunt and ubiquitous. Moynihan was a party maverick; Mr. Schumer just took a party leadership role. Moynihan sequestered himself on his farm to write books; Mr. Schumer, recalled State Senator David Paterson, is the kind of politician who wakes up early on New Year’s Day to attend the inauguration of the North Hempstead supervisor.

“Unlike with Moynihan, you’ll never be able to say ‘I don’t know where my Senator is’ with Schumer,” said U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, the dean of New York’s Congressional delegation.

But Mr. Schumer told The Observer that he regards Moynihan, who died last year, as a model.

“Moynihan is somebody I’ve always looked up to, aspired to be,” said Mr. Schumer, who recalled auditing Moynihan’s comparative-government course as a freshman at Harvard.

“I’ll tell you a very interesting story,” Mr. Schumer continued. “The week after I won [in 1998], I’m sort of flush with victory and Moynihan calls me up and he says, ‘Come to my office.

“‘In a few days, I’m going to announce I’m not running for another term,’” Mr. Schumer recalled Moynihan saying. “‘The fact that you are there allows me to do this.’ He felt I could continue his legacy.” Moynihan did, in fact, announce his retirement on Nov. 8, 1998. Hillary Clinton succeeded him.

Moynihan’s legacy--from laying the intellectual groundwork for welfare reform to fighting for federal money for New York--stemmed in part from his own seniority and his seat on the Finance Committee, one of the two most sought-after Senate perches, which he chaired from 1993 to 1995. The Senate Finance Committee writes tax legislation.

Mr. Schumer’s move to that committee won him praise from even his old nemesis, former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, whom Mr. Schumer defeated in ’98.

“He’s made the right decision, and not so much for his party but--much more importantly--for the good of New York,” said Mr. D’Amato. “The fact that he will now be on the Finance Committee is very important.”

The Finance Committee will be the setting for two of President Bush’s second-term initiatives: his plans to change the tax code, and his announced intention to allow Americans to invest a portion of their Social Security savings in private accounts. Mr. Schumer, who has close ties to Wall Street, told The Observer that he is skeptical of Mr. Bush’s Social Security plan, but open to changing Social Security “to modify the system and give people some more control.”

“It’s an amazing committee,” an ebullient Mr. Schumer said of Finance, “because you can take [on] ideas, big ideas. I have a little card I keep in my pocket. I have new ideas all the time.”

Sometimes overshadowed by his superstar junior Senator, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Schumer now finds himself one of the most powerful, and highest-profile, Democrats in the country. Along with his new post leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for two years, and the coming Finance Committee wars, he is also a key player in the Democrats’ stand against some of President Bush’s judicial nominees. As New York State Democrats celebrate averting a civil war between Mr. Schumer and Mr. Spitzer, Mr. Rangel speculated on Mr. Schumer’s new prominence.

“They’re giving Chuck Schumer the ability to become a Presidential candidate in four years,” he said.

Even if it’s, well, the other Senator from New York who runs for President in four years, however, Mr. Schumer is a fixture on the political scene. He’ll likely hold that Senate seat--to which he was re-elected with 71 percent of the vote this year--for “as long as he wants,” said Mr. D’Amato.

Job Security

Senate seats don’t carry the life tenure of the federal bench, but in a Democratic state like New York, it’s pretty close. No New York Democrat has lost re-election to the Senate since the 17th Amendment established the direct election of Senators in 1913. (Trivia buffs: The last New York Democrat to lose his Senate seat was Edward Murphy Jr., in 1898.) With just a decade or two of patience, Mr. Schumer--who turns 54 on Nov. 23--could hold a prime chairmanship on a key committee (assuming the Democrats manage to win control of the Senate at some point), and vital seniority on others.

“He is, by Senate standards, a very young man,” said Mr. Cunningham.

On the Banking Committee, Mr. Schumer is younger than any of the four Democratic Senators who rank ahead of him in seniority. Of six more senior Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, only Wisconsin’s Russell Feingold is younger than Mr. Schumer. And on the all-important Finance Committee, which Mr. Schumer will join as one of the junior members next session, only Blanche Lincoln (of unsafe--for Democrats--Arkansas) is younger.

Now Mr. Schumer will wait on two things: time, and control of the Senate, which will make the difference between tacking programs onto Republican legislation and steering a national agenda.

“This is clearly a long-term decision on his part, a sense that six, eight years down the road, the Democrats will retake the Senate,” said Robert David Johnson, a professor of American history at Brooklyn College. “If he’s right, he will be one of the three or four most influential players in the body. But it’s a big gamble. If they don’t get the majority back, he’ll be consigned to permanent minority status.”

Or maybe not. The Governor’s race comes up, after all, every four years. And Mr. Schumer is ruling nothing out.

“I would say this, as I said before the election: The only thing on my radar screen is being a good Senator and delivering for New York,” he said. “Maybe now, people will believe me.”

“Next thing, he’s going to force President Bush to sign an executive order banning A.T.M. fees,” one member of the crowd joked.

The joke was that what had begun, inauspiciously, at a slushy, ill-attended, classic Chuck Schumer press conference one month earlier had turned into President Bush’s most serious political defeat. New York’s senior Senator was the first politician to criticize the sale of the operator of several American ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. Just over a week later, Mr. Schumer and his unlikely allies in conservative talk radio had stampeded the Republican Congressional leadership into open opposition to the President.

“It was utterly amazing—who would believe it?” Mr. Schumer said as the deal appeared in its death throes by mid-March. “I did always think, if it achieved a certain level of visibility, that we could stop it. I thought it would be maybe at the jet-plane level, and it ended up being an intergalactic missile.”

Mr. Schumer’s campaign against the Dubai deal was a Sunday press conference gone nuclear, a political explosion fueled by the tabloid-honed, bread-and-butter Brooklyn populism that has driven Mr. Schumer’s remarkable success with the New York and, increasingly, the national media. The ingredients were familiar: a suspicion of Arab governments; an immediate grasp of an issue’s visceral appeal (Terrorists! Ports!); and a wonky intimacy with the arcana of a relatively obscure policy area, maritime security.

The Senator’s position came under fire from many quarters, with some critics suggesting that opposition to the deal was driven by xenophobia or anti-Arab racism. Mr. Schumer heatedly disputes that view.

“Let’s say skinheads had bought a company to take over our port,” he said. “I think the outcry would have been the same.”

Now the question is whether this was merely a spectacular, one-time takedown of the President by a New York Senator, or some kind of broader model for a Democratic Party that, pollsters say, many voters don’t trust with security. The driving force behind much of the Bush administration’s national-security policy has been an alliance between hawkish coastal intellectuals and patriotic inland conservatives. For a moment, Mr. Schumer and his Democratic allies tapped into the power of the national conservative movement. Critics called him a demagogue, but Mr. Schumer, for one, thinks the Dubai fight offers a model of sorts.

“This gives Democrats a window that opens on other security issues,” Mr. Schumer said.

The sale of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to Dubai Ports World was nearly complete in January, when a lobbyist for a small Florida shipping company launched a long-shot bid to derail the deal. The Florida company was concerned about the sale for business reasons unrelated to security. The lobbyist, Joe Muldoon III, put together a white paper arguing that the deal could compromise U.S. security, then started working the halls of Congress.

Mr. Schumer was an obvious choice for Mr. Muldoon. The Senator has been demanding more money for port security for years, and the deal would affect Mr. Schumer’s home territory.

In late January, Mr. Muldoon gave a Schumer aide, Josh Vlasto, a copy of his white paper.

“I have to say, I didn’t even ask them to go public on this,” Mr. Muldoon said, adding that he still hasn’t actually spoken to Mr. Schumer.

There really was no need to ask.

On Friday, Feb. 10, Mr. Schumer’s office received a call from Ted Bridis, an Associated Press reporter in Washington who had also gotten word of the deal. Referring apparently to Mr. Muldoon’s white paper, the Senator struck a cautious, critical note.

The story ran on Saturday and was little noticed. Mr. Schumer scheduled a press conference the next day to advance his complaints on a day—Sunday—that the New York press had long ago ceded to his demands for everything from improved cellular-telephone service to fair milk prices. But that day, New York was hit by a record-breaking blizzard, and the weather story turned it into a rare weekend without a Schumer press conference. Finally, on Monday afternoon, Mr. Schumer trekked to the passenger-ship terminal on Manhattan’s far West Side. With the Hudson River as a backdrop and slush underfoot, he hammered the port deal to a pair of tabloid reporters and a few local television cameras. It had all the makings of a fast-fading tabloid story, like the Sunday press release that Mr. Schumer had put out a couple of weeks earlier: “In Wake of National Body Part Transplant Scandal, Schumer to Unveil Critical Legislation.”

Mr. Muldoon, in the meantime, held his breath, fearing that Mr. Schumer’s stance would turn the issue into a partisan fight, allowing Congressional Republicans to hold firm.

Odd Allies

But Mr. Schumer had allies outside the halls of Congress. The radio host Michael Savage, the third-most-popular talker in the nation, had seen the A.P. story on a conservative news site.

“I oppose everything he stands for specifically,” Mr. Savage said of Mr. Schumer. “To me, he appears to be on the socialist wing of the Democratic Party—tax the rich, reward the lazy. I’m on the opposite side.” But he put Mr. Schumer on his radio show on Feb. 17. “We agreed on this issue,” Mr. Savage said.

While Mr. Savage—who was fired from the cable television network MSNBC for telling a gay caller to “get AIDS and die”—had found a new friend, Mr. Schumer was generating skepticism on a typically friendlier corner of the dial, National Public Radio. There, reporter Adam Davidson echoed the skepticism of experts on port security like the former Coast Guard commander Stephen Flynn.

Mr. Davidson noted that he had not been able to find a single port-security expert who agreed that the Dubai takeover of some terminals in several U.S. ports was a genuine concern. Mr. Schumer’s office, Mr. Davidson said, “gave me the names of two experts who they said agree with them that Dubai Ports World is a real security threat. I called both those experts, and both of them said, ‘No, there’s no security threat here.’”

“We thought they shared our belief that there were serious security concerns,” Mr. Schumer’s spokeswoman, Ms. Heller, said.

Mr. Schumer, meanwhile, pressed the Senate to vote on the issue immediately, before the White House could tamp down the furor, by introducing legislation to block the deal as an amendment to an unrelated bill on March 8. The next day, Dubai Ports World appeared to give up the fight, releasing a statement that agreed to turn the U.S. ports over to a “U.S. entity.” The exact form of the transfer remains contentious.

And somewhere in the process, the steamroller had flattened even Mr. Schumer’s considerable ability to stay in front of a story. National coverage of it has focused on the intramural Republican battle, which is what finally doomed the deal. Even CNN’s timeline of the story notes political involvement beginning on Feb. 15, when Mr. Schumer led a bipartisan group of Senators in opposition to the deal. But the only New York Senator that the timeline credits is Hillary Clinton.

“Oh, that sort of thing doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Schumer said.

“Next thing, he’s going to force President Bush to sign an executive order banning A.T.M. fees,” one member of the crowd joked.

The joke was that what had begun, inauspiciously, at a slushy, ill-attended, classic Chuck Schumer press conference one month earlier had turned into President Bush’s most serious political defeat. New York’s senior Senator was the first politician to criticize the sale of the operator of several American ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. Just over a week later, Mr. Schumer and his unlikely allies in conservative talk radio had stampeded the Republican Congressional leadership into open opposition to the President.

“It was utterly amazing—who would believe it?” Mr. Schumer said as the deal appeared in its death throes by mid-March. “I did always think, if it achieved a certain level of visibility, that we could stop it. I thought it would be maybe at the jet-plane level, and it ended up being an intergalactic missile.”

Mr. Schumer’s campaign against the Dubai deal was a Sunday press conference gone nuclear, a political explosion fueled by the tabloid-honed, bread-and-butter Brooklyn populism that has driven Mr. Schumer’s remarkable success with the New York and, increasingly, the national media. The ingredients were familiar: a suspicion of Arab governments; an immediate grasp of an issue’s visceral appeal (Terrorists! Ports!); and a wonky intimacy with the arcana of a relatively obscure policy area, maritime security.

The Senator’s position came under fire from many quarters, with some critics suggesting that opposition to the deal was driven by xenophobia or anti-Arab racism. Mr. Schumer heatedly disputes that view.

“Let’s say skinheads had bought a company to take over our port,” he said. “I think the outcry would have been the same.”

Now the question is whether this was merely a spectacular, one-time takedown of the President by a New York Senator, or some kind of broader model for a Democratic Party that, pollsters say, many voters don’t trust with security. The driving force behind much of the Bush administration’s national-security policy has been an alliance between hawkish coastal intellectuals and patriotic inland conservatives. For a moment, Mr. Schumer and his Democratic allies tapped into the power of the national conservative movement. Critics called him a demagogue, but Mr. Schumer, for one, thinks the Dubai fight offers a model of sorts.

“This gives Democrats a window that opens on other security issues,” Mr. Schumer said.

The sale of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to Dubai Ports World was nearly complete in January, when a lobbyist for a small Florida shipping company launched a long-shot bid to derail the deal. The Florida company was concerned about the sale for business reasons unrelated to security. The lobbyist, Joe Muldoon III, put together a white paper arguing that the deal could compromise U.S. security, then started working the halls of Congress.

Mr. Schumer was an obvious choice for Mr. Muldoon. The Senator has been demanding more money for port security for years, and the deal would affect Mr. Schumer’s home territory.

In late January, Mr. Muldoon gave a Schumer aide, Josh Vlasto, a copy of his white paper.

“I have to say, I didn’t even ask them to go public on this,” Mr. Muldoon said, adding that he still hasn’t actually spoken to Mr. Schumer.

There really was no need to ask.

On Friday, Feb. 10, Mr. Schumer’s office received a call from Ted Bridis, an Associated Press reporter in Washington who had also gotten word of the deal. Referring apparently to Mr. Muldoon’s white paper, the Senator struck a cautious, critical note.

The story ran on Saturday and was little noticed. Mr. Schumer scheduled a press conference the next day to advance his complaints on a day—Sunday—that the New York press had long ago ceded to his demands for everything from improved cellular-telephone service to fair milk prices. But that day, New York was hit by a record-breaking blizzard, and the weather story turned it into a rare weekend without a Schumer press conference. Finally, on Monday afternoon, Mr. Schumer trekked to the passenger-ship terminal on Manhattan’s far West Side. With the Hudson River as a backdrop and slush underfoot, he hammered the port deal to a pair of tabloid reporters and a few local television cameras. It had all the makings of a fast-fading tabloid story, like the Sunday press release that Mr. Schumer had put out a couple of weeks earlier: “In Wake of National Body Part Transplant Scandal, Schumer to Unveil Critical Legislation.”

Mr. Muldoon, in the meantime, held his breath, fearing that Mr. Schumer’s stance would turn the issue into a partisan fight, allowing Congressional Republicans to hold firm.

Odd Allies

But Mr. Schumer had allies outside the halls of Congress. The radio host Michael Savage, the third-most-popular talker in the nation, had seen the A.P. story on a conservative news site.

“I oppose everything he stands for specifically,” Mr. Savage said of Mr. Schumer. “To me, he appears to be on the socialist wing of the Democratic Party—tax the rich, reward the lazy. I’m on the opposite side.” But he put Mr. Schumer on his radio show on Feb. 17. “We agreed on this issue,” Mr. Savage said.

While Mr. Savage—who was fired from the cable television network MSNBC for telling a gay caller to “get AIDS and die”—had found a new friend, Mr. Schumer was generating skepticism on a typically friendlier corner of the dial, National Public Radio. There, reporter Adam Davidson echoed the skepticism of experts on port security like the former Coast Guard commander Stephen Flynn.

Mr. Davidson noted that he had not been able to find a single port-security expert who agreed that the Dubai takeover of some terminals in several U.S. ports was a genuine concern. Mr. Schumer’s office, Mr. Davidson said, “gave me the names of two experts who they said agree with them that Dubai Ports World is a real security threat. I called both those experts, and both of them said, ‘No, there’s no security threat here.’”

“We thought they shared our belief that there were serious security concerns,” Mr. Schumer’s spokeswoman, Ms. Heller, said.

Mr. Schumer, meanwhile, pressed the Senate to vote on the issue immediately, before the White House could tamp down the furor, by introducing legislation to block the deal as an amendment to an unrelated bill on March 8. The next day, Dubai Ports World appeared to give up the fight, releasing a statement that agreed to turn the U.S. ports over to a “U.S. entity.” The exact form of the transfer remains contentious.

And somewhere in the process, the steamroller had flattened even Mr. Schumer’s considerable ability to stay in front of a story. National coverage of it has focused on the intramural Republican battle, which is what finally doomed the deal. Even CNN’s timeline of the story notes political involvement beginning on Feb. 15, when Mr. Schumer led a bipartisan group of Senators in opposition to the deal. But the only New York Senator that the timeline credits is Hillary Clinton.

“Oh, that sort of thing doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Schumer said.

It was from an editor at a division of Crown Publishing. He wanted a book about Hillary Clinton from Mr. Limbacher, an Oyster Bay printer who moonlights as a writer for the fiercely right-wing Web site NewsMax.

“Crown came to me—it wasn’t my idea to write a book,” Mr. Limbacher said.

The following spring, Hillary’s Scheme appeared under Random House–owned Crown Publishing’s new conservative imprint, Crown Forum. Addressed to conservatives, the book’s central argument was: Be very afraid. Its sourcing was drawn from a rich field of existing anti-Hillary literature, stretching back to the early 1990’s, and whose Boswell is Clinton apostate Dick Morris. Like the growing stack of biographies and polemics on Mrs. Clinton, the book’s driving force was the fact that attacks on New York’s junior Senator sell—regardless of reviews.

“There’s an endless fascination with Hillary,” said Jed Donahue, Mr. Limbacher’s editor at Crown Forum. Mr. Donahue was lured to New York’s corporate publishing world from the conservative Regnery Publishing. “She is someone who people on the right take very seriously.”

Mrs. Clinton is the subject of about 30 volumes already. About a dozen more will be written, researched or set in type between now and the fall of 2007—when the 2008 Presidential race will be in full swing. This year’s crop is slender and unabashedly conservative: Crown Forum has two more, John Podhoretz’s Can She Be Stopped: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless … (due out in May), and conservative media critic Brent Bozell’s Whitewash (out this fall) on the media’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton.

A book by David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party: How Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and the Sixties Left Took Over the Democratic Party, is set for release in August by the Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson. And Dick Morris—fresh off Regan Books’ release of Condi vs. Hillary (Mr. Morris likes Condi; Mr. Podhoretz’s Hillary-killer is Rudy Giuliani)—has contributed his name and a short introduction to “I’ve Always Been a Yankees Fan”: Hillary Clinton in Her Own Words, which World Ahead Publishing, a California company, will publish next month.

The quote book, like many of the more recent volumes, builds on the growing body of Hillary lit: Many of its quotes are questionably sourced lines from, among others, Ed Klein’s widely criticized The Truth About Hillary. For relatively solid grounding, this universe has critical but reality-based tomes like Dick Morris’ earlier book, Behind the Oval Office; Gail Sheehy’s psychobiography, Hillary’s Choice; and Peggy Noonan’s best-selling essay, The Case Against Hillary. At the other end are the questionably researched attacks, like David Brock’s The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, since disowned by its author but still frequently footnoted, and Mr. Klein’s, with its prurient speculation about Mrs. Clinton’s sexuality.

It’s a universe in which Vince Foster’s death remains an open question, and Mrs. Clinton’s true, liberal core is taken for granted. It has its own stars, like Mr. Limbacher (whose NewsMax is its newspaper of record), and even its own Joe Klein.

Across the cover of “I’ve Always Been a Yankees Fan” is the following blurb: “A great collection—this could be Hillary’s Unfit for Command. — Joe Klein.”

Joe Klein?

“Joe Klein is the FrontPage Magazine contributor and author of Global Deception,” says World Ahead Publishing marketing director Judy Abarbanel.

Oh, that Joe Klein!

On the horizon is a second, thicker batch of Hillary books: New York Times investigative reporter Don Van Natta and his former colleague Jeff Gerth—chronicler of the Clintons’ Arkansas business dealings— have a biography due out from Little, Brown in the fall of 2007, for which they reportedly received a $1 million advance.

Washington biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of the Kennedy chronicle Grace and Power, is writing a book about Bill and Hillary as President and First Lady— “a portrait of them in those years,” she told The Observer.

“The point of it is to deepen people’s understanding—and that’s important to me, and readers have responded to my books,” Ms. Bedell Smith said. “I think there is a market for it.”

Finally, there’s the mysterious Carl Bernstein biography of Mrs. Clinton, which the Watergate icon reportedly sold to Knopf in 1999 and which, according to the biography posted on his speaking agency’s Web site, was supposed to appear in 2003. It is still unreleased, and a spokesman for Knopf, Nicholas Latimer, tersely declined to offer a timetable for publication.

“The book has not been delivered,” he said. Mr. Bernstein didn’t respond to a message left with him at Vanity Fair, where he is a contributing editor.

Another nonpartisan volume is due out this fall from Washington Post political editor John Harris, author of a recent biography of Bill Clinton, and the chief of ABC News’ political operation, Mark Halperin. Published by Random House, its subject is American politics and the two dominant political families, the Bushes and the Clintons, according to a person familiar with the book.

Star Power

The power of Mrs. Clinton’s name at the moment—“She is the only star in American politics except for the President,” says Mr. Podhoretz—is such that publishers, when possible, jam her name into the subtitle of books only tangentially related to her. That’s apparently the case with Mr. Horowitz’s forthcoming dispatch from the culture wars, and it is also the case for a forthcoming volume by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, scheduled to come out next March. Its title: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.

A press release from the publisher says that the book “reveals that the original fascists were really on the left” (though, come to think of it, they weren’t all that nice to the Communists); it does not, however, focus on Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Goldberg said.

“Hillary’s not a real big part of my book—part of it is a concession to my publisher, who wanted to make it clear that it’s not simply a historical book. She’s sort of there as an icon of contemporary liberalism,” Mr. Goldberg said. “I’m getting a lot grief for having her in the title. People think—understandably and reasonably—that it’s about selling books, and it’s this invidious slap at Hillary in order to sell books.”

While many Hillary writers, from Mr. Morris to Mr. Podhoretz, argue that their subject is underestimated and that conservatives should worry more (and buy more books), Mr. Goldberg takes the opposite line.

“Conservatives have convinced themselves, partly because of all that nonsense Dick Morris spews, that she is this superwoman with superpowers,” he said. (Mr. Morris didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Since Regnery broke through with anti-Clinton literature in the 1990’s, publishers almost can’t lose. Forgotten volumes like Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton spent weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, where Mr. Klein’s The Truth About Hillary reached second place. And Mrs. Clinton’s autobiography, Living History, astonished skeptics by selling more than a million copies within a month of its release.

Still, there is one way to lose with Hillary: You can publish a book that praises her. HarperCollins editor Judith Regan, who didn’t respond to messages, learned this when she published Susan Estrich’s The Case for Hillary, which was widely reviewed but sold roughly a tenth as many books as Mr. Klein’s, according to a publishing-industry insider.

Since Hillary’s Choice, Ms. Sheehy’s 1999 book, and the subject’s election to the Senate in 2000, Mrs. Clinton’s office has cooperated with none of the biographers.

“There are only two official books about the Clintons: My Life by Bill Clinton, and Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both remain the definitive works on their lives and work, and both make great gifts and are still available in paperback,” said Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, and Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Philippe Reines, in a joint e-mailed statement.

For the writers and publishers who regard her as a muse, Mrs. Clinton is a virtual cottage industry—and one that shows no sign of a slowdown any time soon.

“My argument was originally that 2004 was her best shot,” recalled Mr. Limbacher. “Then we revised it for the paperback edition after that clearly wasn’t going to happen, saying that 2008 was still a possibility.”

— additional reporting by Nicole Brydson