Mr. Bloomberg has begun high-profile hiring in preparation for a campaign and has resigned as chairman of his company’s board and has been talking with academics and political insiders about public policy and the mechanics of a citywide race. But some of the most important consultations are taking place not in back rooms, but in a small auditorium on lower Fifth Avenue. There, on a recent afternoon, three dozen New Yorkers gathered to watch a videotape of Mr. Bloomberg as he explained his electoral rationale. Sitting in a comfortable armchair in front of a calming backdrop of books, he answered questions from an off-camera interrogator. As he spoke, each focus-group participant used a small dial to register moment-by-moment reactions—approve, turn right; disapprove, turn left—to Mr. Bloomberg’s performance.

These sessions provide a glimpse of Mr. Bloomberg’s strategic deliberations as he weighs a run for City Hall. The question at the core of Mr. Bloomberg’s quasi-candidacy is this: Can he be the Jon Corzine of New York City? Is it possible to do in New York what Mr. Corzine did in last year’s New Jersey Senate race—that is, spend gobs of personal wealth on a campaign without being tarred as a vanity candidate?

At the Fifth Avenue focus-group session, which took place in mid-February, Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers test-marketed responses to the questions he will inevitably face about his wealth, which is estimated at $4 billion. According to a participant who reconstructed the scene for The Observer on condition of anonymity, Mr. Bloomberg’s off-camera inquisitor asked whether he thought New Yorkers would vote for a businessman-candidate for Mayor.

Mr. Bloomberg’s answer suggests that he’s trying to frame his Horatio Alger personal story—he is a bookkeeper’s son from a blue-collar suburb of Boston who went on to build an immense media empire—to show that he is not out of touch with the everyday concerns of voters. On the videotape, Mr. Bloomberg discussed his modest background, his hard-working father, his early struggles to make money even after being denied a credit line, his identification with struggling New Yorkers and his belief in New York as a city of limitless opportunities. The audience listened respectfully, dialing in their reactions for possible future use by Mr. Bloomberg’s strategists.

At another point, the participant recalled, Mr. Bloomberg was asked to reveal his net worth. He said he wouldn’t divulge an exact figure, but the question was moot because he intended to leave his fortune to charity—save for small trust funds for his two children.

“They have a candidate who’s reluctant to announce his net worth, and they think it will be raised against him,” Republican consultant Roger Stone said of Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers. “The conventional wisdom is that Corzine’s money hurt him. They’re trying to formulate a response.”

The session was revealing in other ways. The focus-group participant who spoke with The Observer said that in the video, Mr. Bloomberg sounded conciliatory in talking about the Reverend Al Sharpton; offered several ideas about keeping trucks out of midtown during peak traffic hours; and recounted the history of several sexual-harassment lawsuits against his company. (Two lawsuits were dismissed; the other was settled.)

On the latter issue, Mr. Bloomberg must have acquitted himself well, because the audience apparently reacted positively to his explanation. “When that segment was over,” the focus-group participant recalled, “a guy came in and said, ‘I can’t believe you guys didn’t react negatively!’”

William Cunningham, a veteran of New York’s political wars who serves as a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, would not discuss the focus group, which was conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Mr. Bloomberg declined an Observer request for an interview.

Mr. Cunningham said that Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth, far from being a political liability, would be an asset. As a self-financed candidate, he would not be indebted to traditional interest groups and power brokers. He added that Mr. Bloomberg’s lack of experience in city government was similar to that of outgoing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was a federal prosecutor who had never held elective office before becoming Mayor in 1993. “One guy was a career federal prosecutor; the other guy built a business,” Mr. Cunningham said. “They were both successful at what they did. If voters see that you’re successful, they will listen to what you have to say in a Mayoral race.”

At the very least, Mr. Bloomberg will command attention because he is an entertaining character. He is a self-described liberal Democrat who changed his registration to Republican rather than deal with a bruising, crowded Democratic primary. The 58-year-old Mr. Bloomberg flies his own plane and helicopter and has gained a reputation as a man about town and a patron of the arts. The headquarters of his media empire, at East 59th Street and Park Avenue, resembles the deck of a busy space station. More than 2,000 employees buzz around the building constantly, eating for free in the company’s food court or sitting in glass-enclosed conference rooms. The building has no traditional, walled-in offices; even Mr. Bloomberg’s desk is out in the open on the 15th floor. The 7,000 employees who work in the company’s 79 offices around the globe carry electronic identification cards that make it possible for managers to determine, with the click of a computer button, their exact whereabouts.

The company keeps the work environment verbally clean by filtering curses and racial epithets out of internal e-mails between employees. If you try to send an e-mail with a prohibited word—such as “asshole”—the computer instantly shows a message: “The following word is considered to be inappropriate in the context of business correspondence.” (“Dick” is permitted because it’s a name, “wop” because it’s a stock-ticker abbreviation for Woodside Petroleum, and “bimbo” because it’s the symbol for Grupo Bimbo, a Mexican pastry company.)

Mr. Bloomberg has hired a team of well-known advisers to help him if he decides to emerge from these high-tech surroundings into the grubby world of New York politics. In addition to Mr. Luntz, he has enlisted pollster Doug Schoen; Maureen Connelly, a onetime adviser to former Mayor Ed Koch; Kevin Sheeky, a onetime adviser to former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; and David Garth, the legendary consultant.

“The first time I met with Bloomberg, close to a year ago, he asked me whether he had a chance,” said Mr. Koch. “I said no. But now, based on the way the other candidacies are going, I think he has a good chance. He can run as a businessman who is going to keep the good things that Giuliani and Koch did, and not let the city revert to the days of spending and radicalism.”

Mr. Koch, who is supporting City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, also told The Observer that he would be open to supporting Mr. Bloomberg in a general election should Mr. Vallone lose the Democratic Primary. “I’m not making any commitments,” he said.

No Great Issue?

Not everyone agrees with Mr. Koch’s assessment of Mr. Bloomberg’s chances. “I don’t see him connecting with the public,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, who advised Mr. Giuliani during his successful 1993 Mayoral run. “I don’t think he knows much about the city. Why would we turn to someone not involved in city government? There’s no great issue right now that could propel an outsider candidate into Gracie Mansion.”

If history is any guide, Democrats lose control of City Hall only in the wake of major demographic shifts or amid severe crises of Democratic leadership. Mr. Giuliani won because the city seemed to be collapsing amid disorder and civil unrest; the youthful John Lindsay won because of population shifts that swelled the rolls of young and minority voters; and Fiorello La Guardia rode to power amid a wave of revulsion at the corruption of Tammany Hall. And neither La Guardia nor Lindsay—the only two Republican Mayors besides Mr. Giuliani in the 20th century—groomed a Republican heir-apparent. Lindsay, in fact, became a Democrat before leaving office.

Mr. Bloomberg’s chances could be further complicated by political machinations unfolding far away from Mr. Bloomberg’s midtown redoubt. Conservative Party chairman Michael Long, who owns a liquor store in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, told The Observer that he is talking with several possible candidates interested in running for Mayor as a Conservative. Mr. Long said that one of the people under consideration is a conservative political pundit who “has been on TV a number of times and who has some celebrity status.”

Mr. Long declined to name his mystery candidate, but the New York Post reported on March 6 that National Review editor Richard Lowry is considering a run. In past Mayoral elections, the Conservative Party candidate has won up to 30,000 votes—a small number, considering that Mr. Giuliani collected nearly 800,000 votes in 1997, but certainly enough to cut into Mr. Bloomberg’s support among Republicans. Mr. Long’s opposition may have cost Mr. Giuliani the extremely close 1989 election against David Dinkins, when the Conservatives ran cosmetics heir Ron Lauder for Mayor. Mr. Giuliani overcame opposition from the Conservative Party in 1993 thanks to overwhelming support from disaffected outer-borough residents—a crowd that may not connect with Mr. Bloomberg.

“I don’t know if he embraces Republican values,” Mr. Long said of Mr. Bloomberg. “I don’t know if he possesses any core values. I would hope you possess some of the values of the party you converted to. If he converted just for political expediency, it will haunt him.”

Perhaps not, because Mr. Bloomberg most likely will run as a pragmatic, non-ideological Republican, one who will keep government clean and continue Mr. Giuliani’s managerial successes. He may try to run on both the Republican and Liberal Party lines, as Mr. Giuliani did, so he can position himself as a centrist even as the Democrats compete for the left in their own hard-fought primary.

“I think that there’s a center-right Giuliani constituency that’s still up for grabs—blue-collar ethnic Catholics, conservative Jews, law-and-order voters—but it’s more center than right,” Mr. Stone, the Republican consultant, said.

Mr. Bloomberg’s quasi-candidacy is not about sounding grand ideological themes so much as selling himself as a manager, as someone who wants to offer incremental solutions to niggling, prosaic urban problems. For instance, the focus-group participant said, Mr. Bloomberg talked about relieving traffic congestion by imposing fees on trucks that come into the city during peak traffic hours. On education, he suggested several novel, if sketchy, ways for aggrieved parents to share their opinions of the school system with education officials.

For his part, Mr. Bloomberg seems to have little patience with the view that being Mayor is, as John Lindsay’s re-election campaign of 1969 stated, the second-toughest job in America. Not long ago, he described the job this way:

“It’s getting everybody, explaining it to them, holding their hands while they do it; it’s picking the right people, attracting good people; it’s delegating to them; it’s making sure that they’re coordinated and work together.”

Nothing to it.

The adviser, Richard Miller, was a senior vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Mr. Miller had been assigned the task of formulating a comprehensive new energy policy that would offer new ways of meeting soaring energy demand and set guidelines for the construction of new power plants.

The policy statement, two years in the making, was released last month with very little fanfare.

But just two weeks before the plan became public, Mr. Miller quietly resigned. According to sources familiar with the situation, he left in part because he clashed with Daniel Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, over City Hall’s decision to block construction of a huge new power plant on the Brooklyn waterfront. City Hall had argued that a new plant was incompatible with Mr. Doctoroff’s plans for a sweeping redevelopment of the waterfront.

But Mr. Miller, who had long argued that the city needs to beef up its capacity for generating energy within the five boroughs, thought City Hall’s opposition to the new plant was misguided, sources said.

This difference was part of a broader disagreement between Mr. Miller and City Hall--a difference that has taken on a new urgency in light of the catastrophic blackout that deprived New Yorkers of power for up to 24 hours and reportedly cost the city $1 billion in lost revenue.

Mr. Miller believed that the Bloomberg administration wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the city’s need to produce new sources of energy, the sources said. They added that Mr. Miller also felt that the administration had failed to devote enough attention and resources to developing an energy policy.

Mr. Miller also came to believe that energy policy couldn’t be formulated out of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, sources said. He felt that the goals of the E.D.C., which seeks to spur the city’s economy, weren’t always in sync with the quest for sound energy policy, the sources said.

“He felt the city’s energy policy wasn’t going anywhere,” said one person who discussed the matter with Mr. Miller.

Under former Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, the city had an energy-policy office, and its director had real weight within the government. Mr. Miller, however, apparently felt that he wasn’t accorded the power and access his predecessors had.

Mr. Miller declined to comment on any aspect of this story.

Mr. Doctoroff rejected the suggestion that City Hall has not given energy policy its due. “We think we’ve been very actively supportive of in-city generation,” he said, adding that the city was backing a number of plans to either expand existing plants or build new ones. “Nothing that occurred during the blackout is due to any failure on the city’s part. The question going forward is: What are the right polices to insure that we have an adequate energy supply to respond to our growing needs?”

The city’s policy, which was released after Mr. Miller’s departure, emphasized the re-powering of existing plants over building new ones, saying that it would be more friendly to the environment and would eliminate the politically fraught process of finding sites for new plants.

Mr. Doctoroff also denied that the E.D.C.’s goals were overshadowing energy policy. “We think E.D.C. is the right place to formulate energy policy,” he said. “Our new energy team is hard at work coming up with ways to insure that the city’s needs will be met in the future.”

Mr. Doctoroff declined to elaborate on Mr. Miller’s departure. But City Hall sources maintained that the administration had been unhappy with his work. “We presented his policy to the Mayor,” one official said, “but he rejected it due to lack of substance.”

Energy Point Man

As the city’s point man on energy policy for several years, Mr. Miller was charged with ensuring that New York’s power supply met the needs of businesses and residents. Under Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Miller has testified on behalf of the administration before the City Council and has represented the Mayor at private-sector energy conferences. In those settings, he has been a consistent advocate of building new power plants within the city.

The immediate dispute which led to Mr. Miller’s departure highlights a broader debate over a perennial urban dilemma: how to supply power to a dense population that is ever hungry for more power, but is opposed to the construction of new power plants and transmission lines.

Mr. Bloomberg has been struggling to address that problem since taking office in January of 2002. He has repeatedly talked about an urgent need to build more plants in New York City to prevent blackouts. At the same time, many prospective projects have dragged on because of opposition from community groups, or fear among investors who are reluctant to subject themselves to the uncertain process of gaining approval in the first place.

In his quest for a sound energy policy, Mr. Bloomberg has been grappling with another problem: Many of the difficulties the city faces are beyond the control of municipal government. Although the city can help or hinder the siting and construction of power plants and transmission lines, the power system comes mostly under the purview of state and federal entities, and is affected by issues over which the Mayor’s office has little control.

“The drawback to action at the local level is that a lot of these [energy] grids are regional, so you’re not going to be able to do that much to fix it at the state and local level,” said James Lewis, director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The situation has become even more complicated in recent years as New York, under the initiative of Governor Pataki, deregulated the energy industry and put the operation of its plants in private hands. One result is that it has become less clear than ever who exactly is accountable for such vital matters as the security of the generating stations and transmission lines, and the expensive upkeep of the distribution network. Another result is that it is arguably more difficult now than it has ever been to build new plants.

All of these factors have conspired to make the task of Mr. Miller--and now that of his successor, Gil Quinones--nearly impossible.

“Making energy policy in New York City is a much more complicated task than anywhere else in the world, because of the sheer demands on the grid and because of the density of the population,” said Assemblyman Michael Gianaris, who recently introduced a bill to improve security at New York’s power plants. “I’m hopeful that because of what we’ve just experienced, everyone is now aware of the priority we have to place on dealing with these issues.”

“Bruce said, very openly, that if Rudy Giuliani wants it, he’ll be the Republican Party’s Vice Presidential nominee in 2004,” the operative told The Observer. “And he said that he thinks Giuliani is going to be running in 2008 for President.”

Mr. Teitelbaum has been airing that prediction in political circles for the past several weeks. Of course, the idea might come as a surprise to incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney, whose heart problems have led to speculation that he won’t join President Bush on the ticket in 2004. But Mr. Teitelbaum is not the only friend of Mr. Giuliani talking up the Mayor’s national prospects.

“Do I think he would want to be Vice President? I feel he would like that,” said Howard Koeppel, a wealthy car dealer and close friend of Mr. Giuliani.

“I don’t think Rudy would want to work for the administration if he were offered a cabinet position,” he added. “I think he wants to run something. There have been a lot of Vice Presidents that became Presidents. It would be an opportunity to go to the next level.”

A mere six months after Mr. Giuliani left City Hall, there are increasing signs that he is seeking to ride his post–Sept. 11 popularity all the way to the White House. Even as his allies boost his prospects among insiders, Mr. Giuliani has launched an open-ended national campaign, building a base in the Republican Party by stumping for candidates across the country and becoming one of the most effusive advocates for Mr. Bush. At the same time, he has been maintaining a tireless schedule of public appearances to keep alive memories of the World Trade Center attack--and, by extension, of his own role in guiding the city out of the crisis.

Mr. Giuliani has become a unique figure in American politics. He is at once a national shrink, ministering to the country’s trauma and stress (“The anger, and the resolution of anger, is something people have to confront,” he noted recently), a management guru (his firm, Giuliani Partners, is getting solicitations from across the country) and an all-purpose G.O.P. fund-raising draw (his constant stumping has made him into one of the nation’s most visible Republicans).

“The national party has to make room for this guy,” said Rick Davis, a prominent Republican strategist. “The doors of the party were shut to Rudy for the last 10 years of his career. But he is now the guy who probably has the biggest impact of anyone on a campaign when he goes in to help.”

Mr. Teitelbaum didn’t return calls for comment.

The flatbed truck for Mr. Giuliani’s traveling act is, of course, his performance on and after Sept. 11, which instantly transformed him from a lame-duck Mayor with a turbulent private life into an international celebrity. Since leaving office, Mr. Giuliani has discussed his performance under fire before scores, if not hundreds, of audiences. It’s a subject he never tires of addressing. It figures prominently in speeches and in commercials for Republican candidates across the country.

At times, Mr. Giuliani actively encourages people to keep the tragedy alive in their memories: In a recent interview, for instance, he urged audiences to watch an upcoming HBO documentary on the attacks--a documentary that was not only his idea, but also features images of him striding through the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers.

“Not forgetting it means not forgetting what actually happened,” he said, “as opposed to some highly euphemistic version of it.”

Mr. Giuliani also sprinkled references to his performance on Sept. 11 throughout a speech he recently gave to a crowd of 4,000 cadets at West Point. As the crowd repeatedly interrupted with standing ovations, Mr. Giuliani said: “It’s a war that started in my city. You have to finish this war …. I see the same thing I used to see in my firefighters and police officers in you. You really do remind me of them--the exact same dedication, the exact same spirit.”

Sept. 11 has given Mr. Giuliani the material he needs to bond with the national electorate. His performances after the attacks also produced newfound popularity and fund-raising clout that have allowed him to mend his relationship with national G.O.P. leaders and build up chits with Republicans all over the country. Mr. Giuliani has made no similar effort to build up a base throughout New York State--a fact that strongly suggests that whatever ambitions he has are national in scope.

None of this has escaped the notice of allies of another New Yorker with national ambitions, Governor George Pataki. It’s no secret that Mr. Pataki, who has had a tortured relationship with the former Mayor, views a strong showing in this fall’s gubernatorial election as critical if he is to become a national figure. If Mr. Cheney opts out of a re-election campaign, Mr. Pataki and Mr. Giuliani would be rivals to replace him.

Small wonder, then, that Mr. Pataki’s allies are not about to go along with the Rudy-for-Veep boomlet. “Rudy Giuliani will never be viable nationally,” said Ed Hayes, a supporter of Mr. Pataki. “He may have been good after Sept. 11, but with his marriages and his girlfriend, the Republican right would never buy into him. I actually think Rudy Giuliani would be offensive to them.”

Bush Backer

But Mr. Giuliani’s personal problems seemed far from the minds of attendees at a recent event in Altamonte Springs, Fla. Mr. Giuliani was there for a ceremony at which the state’s biggest firefighters’ union was endorsing the re-election campaign of Governor Jeb Bush. Were it not for the enormous “Bush ’02” signs plastered all over the room, one would have thought that the event’s honoree was Mr. Giuliani himself.

As Mr. Giuliani and Governor Bush strode up to a podium in the packed room, an honor guard greeted the two men. Applause from the assembled firefighters and emergency workers washed over the former Mayor. Florida’s top officials jockeyed to get within camera range of Mr. Giuliani. And Governor Bush’s Washington consultant, Mike Murphy, directed a cameraman and sound crew to capture his client’s appearance with the former Mayor, presumably for use in the Governor’s campaign commercials.

The local reporters seemed at least as preoccupied with Mr. Giuliani’s prospects as with those of Mr. Bush. At one point, they asked the former Mayor what his future held.

“I take the future with a much broader and more fatalistic attitude now,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Whatever happens will happen.”

Governor Bush was less circumspect, suggesting that he was prepared to do his part to help Mr. Giuliani.

“Mayor,” he said, “we don’t have an income tax [in Florida], and there are a lot of New Yorkers here. I’ll be your campaign manager.”

The big unknown is whether Mr. Giuliani’s remarkable celebrity will actually translate into political support for him in the future. For starters, Mr. Giuliani’s liberal positions on social issues, while a boon to him in New York City, will make him anathema to much of the Republican base whose support he would need to be nationally viable. And social conservatives at the national level may be less accepting of his highly public extramarital relationship than New Yorkers have been.

What’s more, every view the national audience has seen of Mr. Giuliani has been through the lens of Sept. 11, through the haze of smoke and fear produced by the attacks. Their first intimate look at Mr. Giuliani came on Sept. 11, as well as from countless fawning minute-by-minute accounts of Mr. Giuliani’s performance in the hours after the disaster. Even his exit interview with Barbara Walters was held against the backdrop of Ground Zero.

The national audience hasn’t yet had its close-up of his less flattering side. “People across the country have seen Giuliani’s toughness put to good use,” said veteran New York consultant Norman Adler. “But they’ve never seen it put to use in the obnoxious way that many New Yorkers have.”

Then there’s the fact that before President Bush would ever invite Mr. Giuliani to join his administration in any capacity whatsoever, he’d have to be willing to overlook the help that the Mayor provided to Mr. Bush’s toughest primary opponent of the 2000 Presidential election--Senator John McCain. And Mr. Giuliani would face stiff competition to fill any vacancy from the likes of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, or even Mr. Pataki, both of whom enjoy much closer personal relationships with the President.

Meanwhile, Mr. Giuliani is plowing ahead with his exhausting schedule. Soon he’ll be playing a leading role in bringing the Republican National Convention to New York, which will grant him another opportunity to extol the performance of New York in the wake of the attacks. And he’s continuing to stump for Republican candidates for every office imaginable, in the process building up a collection of I.O.U.’s that may be without equal in a few years’ time.

“No Republican in the country is a more potent political and fund-raising draw at the moment than Rudy Giuliani, and that includes the President,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant who has worked for both Mr. Giuliani and the Republican National Committee. “Right now, he’s just seen as this strong leader who rises to challenges--everything the Republicans want to be.

“We had an assignment process,” said Bernard Spitzer, Eliot’s father, a real-estate developer. “We would go around the table, and one of the three children would be asked to raise a topic for discussion.”

Three decades later, the pressure is still on Eliot Spitzer, the State Attorney General who is an overwhelming favorite to win re-election to a second term next month.

“Would I like him to become President? Of course,” said the elder Mr. Spitzer. “I’d love to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

And would the Attorney General himself like to be President?

“I think he would,” the elder Mr. Spitzer said. “It’s his very nature.”

It’s in Mr. Spitzer’s nature to be ambitious--both for his office and for himself. He has transformed the Attorney General’s office from a sleepy patronage mill with little institutional power into the scourge of corrupt business leaders, producing headlines across the country. By using the Attorney General’s office to wage a one-man assault on Wall Street--he has launched investigations into Wall Street firms for misleading investors, targeted banks for predatory lending and gone after gun manufacturers for the proliferation of bullets--Mr. Spitzer is turning himself into the Tom Dewey of the 21st century.

Dewey used his success in busting rackets in the 1930’s to become a three-term Governor and launch two unsuccessful bids for President, in 1940 and 1948. Mr. Spitzer is no doubt hoping that his career follows a similar trajectory--although he’d clearly prefer not to be remembered for blowing an election, as Dewey did against Harry Truman in ’48. He won’t talk about it, but he is almost certainly running for Governor in 2006--provided, of course, that the current Democratic candidate, Carl McCall, loses to the incumbent, George Pataki--and his main selling point is likely to be his aggressive prosecution of Wall Street executives.

Parlaying prosecutorial success into political conquest is hardly new in New York. Dewey did it, as did Rudolph Giuliani, who busted mobsters and hauled Wall Streeters away in handcuffs before winning City Hall in 1993. The difference is that Mr. Spitzer, by riding the anti-corporate boomlet with astonishing success, has turned himself into a national story in just a few years. Fortune magazine dubbed him “The Enforcer” and put him on the cover in late summer. Publications in lands as far away as Singapore have been running profiles of him.

Mr. Spitzer’s paid consultants are already touting him for higher office. “There is no question that Eliot Spitzer is positioned to run for another office, because of the high profile of the cases he has taken on,” said former Bronx Assemblyman Roberto Ramirez, who advises Mr. Spitzer. “I think that there’s really not anyone else in state politics right now that is viewed as such a natural candidate.”

So how far does Mr. Spitzer hope to go?

“Let me just say this: In this business, as in so many, things can change enormously quickly,” Mr. Spitzer said in an interview at his downtown office. “And as someone who has seen that happen to people, the last thing I would let myself do is worry about things distant, down the road. If I focus on doing the job and continuing to do it effectively, then we’ll see what happens down the road.”

Laying the Groundwork

Despite the requisite denials, Mr. Spitzer is already laying the groundwork for a likely gubernatorial run in 2006. Although he’s leading by at least 40 points in the polls over his Republican opponent, Judge Dora Irizarry, he is using the race as an occasion to stockpile huge amounts of campaign cash. And he is using that cash to build up chits with the state Democratic Party. Two weeks ago, Mr. Spitzer wrote a check for $70,000 to the state party to help its slate of candidates, and handed the McCall campaign another $30,000.

His fund-raisers--who need to persuade donors that Mr. Spitzer needs money even though there’s little chance he’ll lose on Election Day--are not-so-subtly reminding big contributors that he will almost certainly be running for Governor in 2006, despite Mr. Spitzer’s vocal support for Mr. McCall.

“The fund-raisers say he’s going to be our candidate for Governor in 2006,” one major New York donor said. “It comes up--never directly, but it comes up.”

As part of his shadow campaign for Governor, Mr. Spitzer has been logging an extraordinary amount of political stops around the state, attending functions with whatever local county organization will let him through the door. And he’s not doing this because he’s sweating about Judge Irrizary. On a recent morning, Senator Hillary Clinton was the guest of honor at the Broome County Jefferson Day breakfast. When Mrs. Clinton swept into the room, surrounded by aides and bodyguards, the crowd began snapping pictures with their disposable cameras. Over in the corner, quietly eating eggs with the locals, was Mr. Spitzer. He’d already been there for an hour, and he acted as if he’d been doing it every day since he took office in 1998. Clearly, Mr. Spitzer is determined to do what both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer did--get elected to statewide office (and not Attorney General, naturally) by spending huge amounts of time in traditionally Republican upstate New York.

Former Mayor Ed Koch, an early supporter, put it succinctly: “He’s running for Governor.”

Mr. Spitzer first began winning wide attention when he was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan under Robert Morgenthau. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, he won headlines by busting mobsters who had infiltrated the trucking industry. A 1992 New York Times Magazine story on his efforts featured what would become a standard in Mr. Spitzer’s repertoire: a picture of a tough-looking Eliot Spitzer, this time glaring at readers from the rear-view mirror of a garbage truck.

Two years later, Mr. Spitzer spent $4 million of his own money to run for Attorney General. He came in fourth in a field of four Democrats.

Mr. Spitzer learned a lesson that guides him to this day: “You’ve got to work hard in this business,” he said. “If you’re not exhausted, you’re doing something wrong. You gotta push, or things won’t happen.”

Mr. Spitzer started to push, and things started to happen. Preparing to run in 1998, he worked hard upstate, doing a ton of traveling and politicking in obscure counties. The work paid off when he won a resounding victory at the Democratic Rural Conference, an upstate convention of party leaders, putting him on the political map for good.

Mr. Spitzer’s image now is such that many political observers have forgotten just how vicious the 1998 race really was. In addition to running a fiercely negative campaign, Mr. Spitzer further infuriated his opponents by spreading his family wealth with abandon to win the support of upstate politicians. At the state party’s nominating convention, one of his opponents, Attorney General Oliver Koppell, spent most of his time stalking around the hall in a rage, barely restraining himself from assaulting Mr. Spitzer.

And in a remarkable moment just before Mr. Spitzer won the bitterly contested nomination, another opponent, Evan Davis, withdrew from the race and called a hasty press conference to denounce Mr. Spitzer for “buying the election.”

Mr. Spitzer wound up defeating incumbent Dennis Vacco in the general election, albeit after weeks of recounts.

Once in office, Mr. Spitzer immediately began making the most of his new post. He issued a blizzard of press releases detailing legal actions unprecedented in their scope and audacity. And if his activism wasn’t raising his profile fast enough, he quickly developed a penchant for headline-grabbing statements on a variety of issues.

Takes On Rudy

He called Mr. Giuliani a “dictator” for his unbending attitude on police brutality and compared him to Savonarola, the demagogic medieval monk who demanded that his fellow Florentines change their evil ways. (Mr. Spitzer wasn’t being original; the late Murray Kempton made the same comparison years before, noting, as he surely would, that the monk eventually was burned at the stake for committing heresy.) And in one startling outburst, as he addressed a forum hosted by the Reverend Al Sharpton, the highest-ranking attorney in New York State declared that the U.S. Supreme Court was “intellectually and morally bankrupt” because of its verdict in the 2000 Presidential recount.

“I think there’s a fine line between being impetuous and being forceful,” Mr. Spitzer said in the interview. “Hopefully, I fall on the right side of that line. But I hope I have a reputation for speaking my mind.”

That outspokenness has been put to good use--not only in distinguishing himself with the public, but within the Democratic Party as well. Earlier this year, for example, Mr. Spitzer set himself apart from the herd of party officials who endorsed Comptroller Carl McCall early in his primary contest against Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Spitzer not only endorsed the Comptroller, but attacked “fence-sitters” for letting down the party’s first-ever black gubernatorial nominee.

“He did a brilliant thing by getting out front with Carl McCall,” said Democratic consultant Richard Schrader. “He showed guts when a lot of Democrats were waiting to see how the race would turn out. It certainly helps him with party leaders who are supporting McCall, and it will also help him within the African-American community, a voting block that was crucial to him in 1998.”

Since taking office, Mr. Spitzer has also excelled at another indispensable political skill: raising money. His fund-raising has been as aggressive as his politicking. He has raised money from an impressive array of donors, drawing heavily on connections from his privileged background. Such was Mr. Spitzer’s unique position that his crackdown on Wall Street led to speculation that his campaign treasury would languish as he alienated friends.

Mr. Spitzer professes to be unconcerned. “You can’t think about that,” he said. “I’m sure there are many potential donors who may look at what I’ve done and say, ‘Gee, he’s hurt my company or industry.’ On the other hand, there are hopefully thousands of people who say, ‘You know, I’m going to vote for this guy because he stood up for what was right.’”

But the fact that Mr. Spitzer is now Wall Street’s most fearsome figure may not put a damper on his fund-raising at all. It may actually be helping. His opponents accuse him of taking money from law firms that are representing companies under investigation by his office.

Republicans are hoping to seize on Mr. Spitzer’s fund-raising to blemish his reputation as a moral crusader. Ms. Irizarry, his Republican opponent, recently sent out a press release pointing out that Mr. Spitzer has taken more than $10,000 in donations from lawyers representing Global Crossing since the Attorney General’s office announced that they were requesting information on the firm last spring.

“We don’t as a rule exclude lawyers representing clients with matters before the A.G.’s office from contributing to the campaign,” said Cindy Darrison, Mr. Spitzer’s campaign manager. “Just about every law firm has some client matter before the office.”

Ms. Irizarry, in an interview with The Observer, also charged that Mr. Spitzer is headline-grabbing at the expense of his constituents, that he has failed to hire a sufficiently diverse staff, and that the Attorney General’s office during his term has focused on the wrong things. Not that anyone is listening, of course.

After all, Mr. Spitzer is almost certainly on his way to the most lopsided victory of all of this year’s statewide races, with the only real question being: What’s next?

“He wants to be Governor, for sure,” said City Council member Eric Gioia, who helped run Al Gore’s New York operation in 2000. “Any Governor of New York is automatically on the short list for President. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the back of his mind, he thinks that in 10 or 20 years the White House is a legitimate and obtainable goal.

“We might end up not endorsing anybody,” Mr. Rivera told The Observer, in his first interview about this year’s Mayoral race. Asked if he was leaning toward any one candidate, Mr. Rivera said: “This is a very big career move for four people who have been our friends, so it’s very hard. If you asked Dennis Rivera what his preference is for now, it’s no endorsement …. You maintain your friendship with everybody-and you don’t harm anybody.”

Mr. Rivera also told The Observer that he has forged an informal alliance with Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, the head of District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal employees’ union. According to Mr. Rivera, the three labor leaders have informally agreed to try to come together behind one candidate. If, that is, they support any one candidate at all: In their discussions, Mr. Rivera said, the trio also considered the possibility of sitting out the race altogether.

“We would be a formidable team,” Mr. Rivera observed of the possible pan-labor alliance. “The question here is, how do we make this happen? We have basically talked about the merits of each one of the candidates. One of the options that is available to us is the option of no endorsement-and that’s being discussed.”

The wooing of Mr. Rivera has made for some compelling backstage drama in a race thus far short on entertaining political theatrics. Public Advocate Mark Green, City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, City Council Speaker Peter Vallone and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer have all met with Mr. Rivera to plead their cases. And that’s not all: According to sources, businessman Michael Bloomberg, who is considering a Mayoral campaign on the Republican line, recently asked for a meeting to discuss his potential candidacy. Mr. Rivera reportedly has agreed to the meeting, though he would neither confirm nor deny it.

Adding to the intrigue and tension, the members of Mr. Rivera’s inner circle have scattered loyalties and alliances. Ken Sunshine, the public-relations consultant who represents Leonardo DiCaprio and Barbra Streisand, is a longtime close friend and supporter of Mr. Green. Bill Lynch, the veteran Democratic strategist and longtime ally of Mr. Rivera, is supporting Mr. Ferrer. And Jennifer Cunningham, a top aide to Mr. Rivera, has quietly been making the case for Mr. Hevesi.

“It is fair to say that each and every one of my friends tells me something different about what to do every day of the week,” Mr. Rivera said. “It’s very confusing, you know.”

Mr. Rivera’s self-professed confusion, as it happens, has its advantages. He readily acknowledged that sitting out the primary could prove to be the most practical course: “You maintain your friendships,” he said, “and at the same time you are free to make a decision either in a runoff or in the general election.” (There’s a strong possibility that the four-way Democratic primary will end with no candidate winning 40 percent or more of the vote, forcing a runoff between the two top vote-getters.)

Mr. Rivera, who runs the 210,000-member Local 1199 and the 150,000-member Service Employees International Union, is no stranger to such unabashed pragmatism. He quite happily enrages Democrats by cutting deals with Republicans if the moment moves him. In the 1997 Mayoral campaign, he declined to offer up the union’s customary endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Ms. Messinger, as he negotiated a pay raise for the union’s home-care workers from incumbent Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

And last year, when Mr. Rivera was waging a fierce campaign to win approval of a bill granting health-care coverage to some uninsured New Yorkers, State Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno, the Legislature’s top Republican, invited Mr. Rivera upstate to talk things over. Mr. Rivera, a college dropout who, in his youth, was once jailed for spitting at a hospital boss, spent a weekend riding horses on Mr. Bruno’s farm. In the end, Mr. Bruno supported the plan, in an extraordinary deal that seemed contrary to the majority leader’s conservative philosophy. At the time, Mr. Rivera described him as a “wonderful human being.”

“Nobody should assume anything about Dennis,” Mr. Sunshine said. “He will always do what he thinks is right for the union, and his record proves that.”

The record also shows that he is a force to be reckoned with in a tough citywide election. He gives his chosen candidate more money, donates more ground troops and has a more sophisticated outreach operation than any other union leader. From the union’s midtown headquarters, cyber-organizers can, with the click of a mouse, identify every union member in any election district in the state.

If Mr. Rivera and the other labor leaders unite, they will change the dynamic of a Mayoral free-for-all. The unions’ formidable get-out-the-vote operation was a key to Hillary Clinton’s stunning victory over Rick Lazio in last year’s Senate race, as well as to the outcomes of a score of local races around the state. Representing a combined total of 500,000 members--though not all members live in the five boroughs--Mr. Rivera, Mr. Saunders and Ms. Weingarten could very well decide who ascends the steps of City Hall in January 2002.

Setback for Ferrer?

Given all this clout, Mr. Rivera’s noncommittal talk amounts to a setback for one candidate in particular: Mr. Ferrer. Many political insiders have long believed that Mr. Rivera would throw his backing behind the Bronx borough president, a longtime friend. But, when asked about the perception of their alliance, Mr. Rivera told The Observer: “From a very personal point of view, the whole idea of having Fernando Ferrer as Mayor would make me incredibly proud as a Puerto Rican …. But the issue here is, the decision has to be made by all of our colleagues …. I am not an island. We have all our colleagues, and their opinions are very important.”

Adding to the complexity and tension--and potentially complicating any efforts to forge a pan-labor bloc--are Mr. Hevesi’s efforts to make inroads with Ms. Weingarten. Several weeks ago, the New York Post sent shock waves through the city’s political establishment by reporting that Ms. Weingarten was pushing Mr. Rivera and Mr. Saunders to back Mr. Hevesi.

Mr. Rivera was coy about his private conversations with Ms. Weingarten. Asked directly whether she had urged him to back Mr. Hevesi, he replied: “If that’s the case, she has never told me that. She said, ‘This is very hard.’ And it is hard.”

Mr. Rivera did acknowledge, however, that Mr. Hevesi’s chief strategist, Hank Morris, had been working overtime to win his support. According to Mr. Rivera, Mr. Morris told him that he should ignore the polls showing Mr. Hevesi in last place. He pointed out that Mr. Schumer (another Morris client) trailed badly before beating Alfonse D’Amato in 1998, and that Mr. Hevesi staged a comeback victory over Elizabeth Holtzman in 1993.

In the end, Mr. Rivera’s dilemma is a reflection of recent developments in New York Democratic politics: Labor is reemerging as a force after eight years of Republican rule, and the old coalition that brought David Dinkins to power in 1989 has fractured.

The victories of Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton, who relied heavily on union-sponsored voter-turnout drives, reenergized the unions’ political operations at a time when pundits were predicting record-low voter turnout among minorities in 1998 and 2000.

But even as labor reawakens after a spate of scandals in the mid-1990’s, there is no presumed leader for the Dinkins coalition, a loosely bound amalgam of labor, minorities and Manhattan liberals. Nor is it clear whether that coalition will resurrect itself in any identifiable form or coalesce around any particular candidate.

The disarray is most neatly reflected by the fact that many of Mr. Rivera’s closest allies and friends--Mr. Lynch, Mr. Sunshine and a host of others--are all old Dinkins hands. Now they find their loyalties divided among four candidates--as does Mr. Rivera himself.

“This is all so incestuous, in the sense that each and every one of us are friends and colleagues,” Mr. Rivera said. “It’s like a family trying to make a decision.”

He added: “If we see consensus around a candidate, then we will endorse. If not, then we won’t.”

Clad in a T-shirt and black slacks, the exuberant 33-year-old politician was walking several steps behind neighborhood City Council member Diana Reyna, who was in the midst of a tight re-election fight and was asking the building's elderly residents for their votes on Primary Day, Sept. 9. Lugging a pile of brochures, Mr. Miller knocked on doors and implored the building's elderly residents-some of whom came to the door in their pajamas-to support his colleague.

"I'm here with my friend Diana Reyna," he told one elderly voter. "She's a terrific person," he enthused to another. "We gotta work, work, work," he informed a woman who had opened her door a crack and was peering at him with a bewildered expression. "You gotta pull out the vote in this building, O.K.?"

At the close of each encounter, Mr. Miller took care to hand his listener a business card as he discreetly introduced himself: "I'm Gifford Miller, Speaker of the City Council."

Over the past several weeks, Mr. Miller has quietly spent scores of hours doing political grunt work for incumbent Council members facing re-election fights in special off-year primaries throughout the city. He has shaken hands at subway stops at 7 a.m., knocked on hundreds of doors throughout the five boroughs, and worked local street fairs on behalf of embattled candidates. Mr. Miller's stated reason for devoting himself to such lowly political chores is that he wants to build loyalty among members of his Democratic Party conference, thus making himself a more effective Speaker.

But all these extracurricular activities have another purpose: They are a key part of Gifford Miller's shadow campaign for Mayor in 2005.

Mr. Miller, a native of the Upper East Side who won election to his neighborhood's Council seat in the mid-1990's and was the surprise winner of a chaotic race for Speaker in 2002, has never run for citywide office. And he is well aware that he has no chance of being competitive in the 2005 Mayoral race if he doesn't figure out a way of raising his profile in the outer boroughs. By constantly campaigning on behalf of Council members in neighborhoods far from the Upper East Side, Mr. Miller is hoping that Council members may later return the favor by turning out votes for him in their districts should he run for Mayor. At the same time, he's seizing an opportunity to shake the hands of Democratic leaders and ordinary voters all over the city.

"Miller's No. 1 obstacle is that he doesn't have a persona outside Manhattan," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant and informal adviser to City Comptroller Bill Thompson, another potential Mayoral candidate in 2005. "He's never held citywide or even countywide elected office. So he's using his appearances with Council members to build relationships with outer-borough voters. It's a smart strategy."

It's also a strategy that Mr. Miller has employed before. In the late 1990's, when the young Upper East Side Council member was plotting his ascension to Speaker, he logged hundreds of hours campaigning alongside other City Council members and even created a mini-machine to raise money for them. This created a pro-Miller faction on the Council which, in turn, carried him to victory in 2002, when term limits ended former Council Speaker Peter Vallone's reign and forced a new Speaker's race.

Now Mr. Miller is at it again.

Mr. Miller and his advisers won't discuss his Mayoral ambitions, although many political observers are convinced that the Speaker will run for Mayor in 2005, if only because term limits will end his tenure that year. Asked whether his efforts on behalf of other Council members could serve a future bid for the Mayor's office, Mr. Miller was careful to point out that being an effective Speaker was his top priority. But he added: "That said, there's no denying that my abilities as a City Council Speaker will help with any opportunities that may arise down the road."

City Council member Eric Gioia of Queens, a supporter of Mr. Miller, was a bit more direct. "He's successfully putting together a grass-roots infrastructure which could serve as a field operation for any citywide race," Mr. Gioia said. "By campaigning across the city for different candidates, he's getting to know the terrain. And that kind of knowledge is invaluable."

The Speaker is doing plenty of other things that seem designed to lay the groundwork for a potential Mayoral run in 2005. He is carefully crafting an image as a consensus-builder who is collaborating with Mayor Michael Bloomberg on a number of initiatives designed to steer the city through tough times. At the same time, he has boosted his appeal to city Democrats by undertaking a number of high-profile political attacks on distant Republican targets, lambasting Governor George Pataki and the Bush administration for shortchanging the city. And he is forging links to various members of the city's civic and cultural elite, holding private discussions about the city's future with business and real-estate leaders.

Town-Hall Meetings

Mr. Miller's advisers have also been discussing the possibility of holding a series of town-hall-style meetings this fall, in which the Speaker would go out and answer questions in various communities around the city. (Such an initiative would fill a vacuum of sorts that has been left by Mr. Bloomberg, who is suffering from the perception that he is not interested in connecting with ordinary New Yorkers.) And Mr. Miller is going to lengths to court members of the media. He and his aides recently held a barbecue for the media in the backyard of his Upper East Side duplex, where reporters and editors watched Mr. Miller grilling burgers and hot dogs as he discussed the technical difficulties of cooking meat over an open fire.

While Mr. Miller's efforts are likely to raise his profile, it remains to be seen whether he'll be able to retain the loyalty of his Council members in the Democratic primary of 2005. Mr. Miller's predecessor, for one, well knows that individual members are quick to abandon the Speaker when he undertakes to win a promotion to Mayor. When Mr. Vallone ran for Mayor in 2001, many of his members deserted him and supported his opponents instead. (After running a lackluster campaign, Mr. Vallone finished third in the Democratic primary.) If a minority candidate such as Mr. Thompson or former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer runs in 2005, individual Council members may find that the tug of racial or borough-based loyalties may outweigh any lingering desire to repay Mr. Miller for his support.

"His help doesn't necessarily translate itself into members supporting him for Mayor," said Joseph Strasburg, a landlord lobbyist who was Mr. Vallone's chief of staff for six years. "He may be supporting members in the Bronx now, but what if Ferrer decides to be a candidate? Do Bronx Council members support Gifford? I'm not sure that holds true."

For the time being, Mr. Miller has been doing what he can to help those members hang onto their seats. It's a task that comes naturally to the Speaker, who exhibits an almost geeky enthusiasm for low-level political work.

Campaigning in Bushwick alongside Ms. Reyna, for instance, Mr. Miller seemed the picture of contentment, even though he was missing a chance to spend the afternoon in his season seat at Yankee Stadium, where the home team was playing the final game of a crucial series against the Boston Red Sox. As he strolled up and down the hallways of the senior center there, he took extra care to hand-write a little note on each piece of literature before shoving it under the doors of people who weren't home.

On each brochure, Mr. Miller wrote: "Sorry I missed you. Diana."

on power.

But now, for the first time, the Mayor's reform plan is coming under attack from one of his own appointees to the Charter Revision Commission, which is studying ways to overhaul the city's electoral system.

In an interview with The Observer , Bill Lynch, a deputy mayor under David Dinkins, charged that the charter-revision process is deeply flawed, and said that the commission isn't interested in pursuing genuine electoral reform.

"The commission isn't serious about real change," said Mr. Lynch, who is one of nine members of the panel. "The commission hasn't done the necessary research. It hasn't given this the time it should have. And it hasn't seriously thought about all the different ways they could increase voter participation. That's why I don't think the commission is serious."

Mr. Lynch said that he would write a minority report detailing his objections, and would submit the report alongside the commission's recommendations when they are made public later this month.

Mr. Lynch's dissent could seriously complicate Mr. Bloomberg's hopes of realizing one of his most important initiatives-one that is central to the Mayor's efforts to be seen as an independent reformer unencumbered by ties to local party organizations.

Indeed, Mr. Lynch's objections come at a sensitive moment for the Mayor. Mr. Bloomberg, whose poll numbers are at historic lows, can ill afford to lose the protracted, high-profile fight that will be waged over nonpartisan elections.

What's more, Mr. Lynch's attack comes at a moment when it looked as if the commission was close to reaching agreement on a proposal that would scrap party primaries in favor of two rounds of elections, the first of which would be open to any and all candidates, regardless of party affiliation. The two leading vote-getters would then face off in a final contest.

But that emerging consensus is likely to be tested by Mr. Lynch's dissent. His minority report, which is intended as a counterpoint to the commission's expected recommendations, could induce other members to break with the rest of the group when the commission votes on its recommendations on Aug. 25. (Its final recommendations could be placed before voters in November.)

"If my concerns are not addressed, I am likely to vote 'no' on the proposals," said Mr. Lynch, who is also a top Democratic party operative.

While the immediate impact of Mr. Lynch's dissent remains uncertain-one "no" vote wouldn't single-handedly stop the commission from agreeing on a package of reforms-at a minimum it constitutes a blow to the commission's credibility. Many political observers believe that the appointment of Mr. Lynch, who is African-American, was intended in part to insulate the commission from accusations that nonpartisan elections marginalize minority candidates. That argument has been made by Congressmen Charles Rangel, a black Democrat from Harlem, and Jose Serrano, a Latino Democrat from the Bronx, among others. Mr. Lynch's dissent could mean that the commission will no longer be shielded from such attacks.

A Rallying Cry

Mr. Lynch's criticisms are also certain to provide a rallying point for opponents of nonpartisan elections. In recent weeks, Democratic Party officials have been arguing that nonpartisan elections-which are common in other cities-harm minority candidates and confuse voters.

"The fact that one of his own commissioners is defecting is the first crack in the dam," said City Council member Eric Gioia of Queens, an opponent of the changes. "When your hand-picked committee begins to disagree with you publicly, it begs the question, 'How good an idea can this be?'"

Alan Gartner, executive director of the Charter Revision Commission, took issue with Mr. Lynch's critique. "It is puzzling that a commissioner should declare that he's going to write a minority report when we've reached no final decisions," he said. "He's reaching a conclusion before the game is over."

Still, Mr. Lynch offered multiple criticisms of the commission. He thinks that members are moving far too quickly on what could be a momentous decision with far-reaching implications for the city. In that regard, he drew an unflattering comparison between today's commission and one that was put together in the late 1980's, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Board of Estimate violated the principle of "one person, one vote." That commission created the position of Public Advocate, gave new administrative powers to the borough presidents, and mandated nonpartisan special elections to fill vacancies on the City Council and in the Mayor's office.

"In 1989, there was across-the-board participation from people at all levels of government," Mr. Lynch said. "That commission took two years to reach a consensus. Ours has taken less than six months. People say that most of the research has already been done by other commissions who have recommended nonpartisan elections in the past. But I argue that it was done by somebody else-not this commission."

Mr. Lynch also said that the commission had been too willing to change course in the middle of the process. In an apparent effort to fend off critics who said that he was proposing changes to facilitate his re-election, Mr. Bloomberg surprised the political world recently by publicly suggesting that his changes take effect in 2009-that is, after Mr. Bloomberg finishes his second term, if he wins one. He also suggested that candidates be allowed to include party labels-chiefly for identification purposes-along with their names on the ballot. The commission, which is supposed to be independent of the Mayor, promptly began discussing the two changes-a move that critics say makes the commission look as if it's simply there to rubber-stamp Mr. Bloomberg's wishes.

"We never did any research about those proposals," Mr. Lynch said. "There was never any public testimony about them. Those recommendations came out of left field."

Finally, Mr. Lynch said he was dismayed that the commission didn't appear to be giving serious consideration to several ideas that would help realize its stated goal of opening up the electoral process to disenfranchised voters.

"There's no doubt that the system needs to be changed so that there can be more voter participation," Mr. Lynch said. "But there's no proof that nonpartisan elections alone will accomplish that. There are other ways that have proven more successful, like same-day voter registration, voting rights for non-citizens, and allowing voters to cast their vote on more than one day, not just on Election Day. Those three items are very important to me, because they represent real change." (The most radical of these ideas, non-citizen voting in municipal elections, is currently in place in five municipalities in Maryland.)

"The leadership and staff of the commission have basically been saying that some of these items take state legislation, and therefore will take too long," Mr. Lynch continued. "But if we weren't trying to rush this process, we could get these real changes through."

But Mr. Gartner argues that nonpartisan elections would be a victory for New Yorkers. "I don't want to in any way minimize [Mr. Lynch's] suggestions or the importance of those changes," he said. "On the other hand, nonpartisan elections in and of themselves would be an enormous gain for democracy in New York City. Fifty out of 51 of the 2001 Council races were won by a margin of victory of over 10 percent. That's not an electoral system-it rivals elections in the former Soviet Union."

The group, which includes a number of former high-ranking officials in Republican and Democratic Presidential administrations, made the accusation in an amicus brief filed in federal court in New York on July 30. The brief concerns the legal plight of Mr. Padilla, whose case has attracted international attention since he was arrested in Chicago for his alleged role in an Al Qaeda plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil.

Mr. Padilla, who has been held incommunicado in a naval brig since June, hasn't been formally charged with a crime and has been denied access to a lawyer. The Bush administration's conduct poses an urgent threat to the Constitution and to the rule of law, the brief's signers say.

"This is an extraordinary case," Harold R. Tyler Jr., a former federal judge and longtime Republican who was brought in by President Gerald Ford to clean up the Justice Department after Watergate, told The Observer . "We have in this country something called habeas corpus, which guarantees that a person who is held incommunicado has to be produced in a court. The people in the government seem to have forgotten that. They should charge this man if they've got something against him. And they should give him right to counsel. These are all constitutional rights."

Mr. Tyler, who as deputy attorney general under Mr. Ford was also an important mentor to a young prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1970's, continued: "I have been a longtime Republican, but I'm a disenchanted Republican in this case."

The brief assails the Bush administration's handling of the Padilla case in blunt terms, describing it as "one of the gravest threats to the rule of law, and to the liberty our Constitution enshrines, that this nation has ever faced." A copy of the brief, which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, was obtained by The Observer .

Mr. Padilla, who was designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush in June, is being held in a military jail in South Carolina indefinitely. Because of the fundamental constitutional questions at the heart of the case, his situation has been loudly debated by pundits and elected officials, and a range of legal groups on the left and the right have weighed in with a half-dozen briefs on his behalf.

But this latest legal salvo is extraordinary for a number of reasons. Unlike other briefs, which were offered by groups that often weigh in on controversial issues, the signatories of this one are cautious legal professionals who tend to avoid public involvement in politically charged debates. What's more, several of the signatories charging the Bush administration with violating the Constitution are active members of the Republican establishment.

In addition to Mr. Tyler, another signatory is Philip Allen Lacovara, former president of the District of Columbia bar and former deputy solicitor general under President Nixon who became part of the Watergate prosecution team. Mr. Lacovara also donated money to George W. Bush's 2000 Presidential effort.

Other signatories have worked in various jobs in the U.S. national-security bureaucracy. Robert M. Pennoyer, for instance, is a well-known New York attorney who was a high-level official in the Department of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower.

"These are people who have served in government and who have very different points of view on a whole range of things," said Michael Posner, the executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which helped draft the brief. "But they are coming together in support of basic constitutional principles: the right to counsel, the right to be heard in court and the right to be charged with a crime."

Among the other prominent lawyers who attached their names to the brief are Abner J. Mikva, a former federal judge who was White House counsel for two years in the Clinton administration; former federal judges William Norris and H. Lee Sarokin; New York–based white-shoe lawyers Donald Francis Donovan, Robert Juceam, Robert Todd Lang and Barbara Paul Robinson; and internationally known human-rights lawyers William Zabel and R. Scott Greathead.

The group's decision to involve itself in the Padilla matter reflects growing alarm among legal observers of various ideological hues about the Bush administration's approach to the case. Among the organizations that have already filed briefs are left-leaning ones like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and right-leaning groups like the Cato Institute.

An Enemy Combatant

Mr. Padilla, who was born in Brooklyn and moved to Chicago at a young age, was arrested in May as he flew from Pakistan to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. He was subsequently flown east for questioning in connection with his alleged knowledge of an Al Qaeda plot to detonate a dirty bomb in New York.

In June, President Bush declared him an "enemy combatant," and he was taken from a New York cell to a naval brig in Charleston, where he's been held incommunicado ever since. He has not officially been charged with a specific crime and has had no contact with his New York–based lawyer, Donna Newman. In essence, he has vanished from the legal system.

Last year, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Padilla had a right to counsel and to a hearing in court. The government has appealed that decision, arguing that continued incarceration is justified because intelligence shows that Mr. Padilla met with senior Al Qaeda leaders. Arguments could be heard in New York as early as September. (The case, which has come to be known as Padilla v. Rumsfeld , is being heard in New York because Mr. Padilla was in the city in June when President Bush declared him an "enemy combatant.")

Enter the signatories of the latest brief.

Put in simple terms, they're arguing that the rule of law depends on the right of defendants seized on U.S. soil to defend themselves in a courtroom setting. By denying Mr. Padilla these fundamental rights, they continue, the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent that could grant the executive branch unchecked power and erode every citizen's constitutional rights.

"Throughout history, totalitarian regimes have attempted to justify their acts by designating individuals as 'enemies of the state' who were unworthy of any legal rights or protections," the brief reads. "These tactics are no less despicable, and perhaps even more so, when they occur in a country that purports to be governed by the rule of law."

The conditions of Mr. Padilla's detention, the brief adds, sets a precedent for "rule at the whim of the Executive" and "strikes at the core of the liberty our Constitution safeguards."

The conclusion: "Whatever he may have done, or planned to do, Padilla is an American citizen deprived of liberty. Whether the Executive likes it or not, the Constitution still applies to him."

With arguments on the case expected next month, the brief's signatories say the stakes are extraordinarily high.

"I've urged judges in more than a dozen countries with repressive regimes to stand up to their governments and insist that detainees are entitled to hearings and legal representation," said Mr. Greathead, the internationally known human-rights attorney. "I never thought I would see the day that I would be making these same arguments to my own government.

But the efforts of these preservationists have infuriated some of the city's business leaders, who see the plan for the new Jet Blue terminal as an important project that will solidify the discount airline's presence in the city and will help modernize J.F.K. airport.

At the center of the fight is the T.W.A. terminal, a soaring, modernist monument to air travel and to 1960's nostalgia that has remained empty for nearly two years. Jet Blue, in collaboration with the Port Authority, wants to build a $1 billion, state-of-the-art terminal just behind the old T.W.A. structure, a plan with broad support among New York business executives, who see it as a key to the city's future as an international business center.

But the Municipal Art Society, a century-old civic group, has been waging a furious lobbying campaign against the plan. They say that the new terminal will, in effect, ground Mr. Saarinen's architectural flight of fancy.

Although the proposed new terminal would leave the T.W.A. structure largely intact, the plan has upset preservationists because the old T.W.A. building would no longer function as a terminal. The new building would encircle the old one, obscuring the T.W.A. terminal's view of the runways from its famous floor-to-ceiling windows-a feature that, in the view of preservationists, helps give the older terminal its aesthetic lift.

"By eliminating use of the terminal, you're condemning the building to a slow death," said Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society. "This is one of the really significant buildings in the country, if not in the world, and it deserves a very thoughtful examination of its future."

The battle has intensified in recent weeks, because the Federal Aviation Administration is expected to issue a decision on the proposal as early as the first week of September. Both sides are aggressively making their feelings known to the F.A.A., and with the agency's decision fast approaching, passions are running high. The T.W.A. terminal's defenders have taken to comparing the plan to "cutting the arms off a baby," while the plan's proponents have been slamming the preservationists as architectural purists who are letting nostalgia stand in the way of growth and progress.

Business leaders argue that Jet Blue's expansion will spur growth in the struggling airline industry and facilitate cheap and easy transportation in and out of the city.

"The fact that the Municipal Art Society can delay a project like this with a marginal argument about historic preservation is one of the things that hampers our economy," said Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a group of business executives. "The city's future depends on its role as a center of international travel. What they are seeking is impractical and unreasonable."

In many ways, this fight is really an intergenerational clash between two visions of air travel, pitting nostalgia for a more glamorous era of jet travel against the 21st-century consumer's demand for cheap, no-frills flights.

Modern Monument

The T.W.A. terminal, which opened in the early 1960s, was a place where people went to watch planes take off and land, a monument to modernity where they sipped cocktails and contemplated the miracle of flight. It stands as an icon to the jet age, a throwback to a time when air travel embodied luxury, optimism and the newfound freedoms conferred by postwar advances in technology.

By contrast, the driving idea behind Jet Blue, which keeps prices down by stripping away luxuries, is that flying is a practical necessity of modern life and thus should be cheap and accessible. The rapid growth of Jet Blue-it began in 2000 with one plane at Kennedy and has since become the largest domestic carrier at J.F.K.-seems to suggest that people are embracing this less-than-glamorous view of air travel.

The proposal by the Port Authority and Jet Blue calls for construction of a vast new terminal that abuts the T.W.A. structure. It would have 26 gates and 1.5 million square feet-five times the size of the T.W.A. structure. The new terminal would be connected to the old one by two connector tubes that once linked the T.W.A. terminal to its gates. The old terminal would be converted to an as-yet-undetermined combination of shops, offices and conference centers. If approved by the F.A.A. in September, the new terminal will be open in 2007.

Jet Blue executives, who expect to fund around $400 million of the new proposal, maintain that a new terminal is the only way they can accommodate their future growth. They say they already have ordered a fleet of new planes and hope to be flying more than 200 flights out of J.F.K. each day by the end of the decade. Jet Blue currently flies out of another, separate terminal at Kennedy, unlike most domestic airlines, which fly out of LaGuardia Airport.

"We need a new terminal if we're going to continue to grow in New York," said David Neeleman, the founder and chief executive of Jet Blue. "We recognize that there's a lot of sensitivity in New York because of the tearing down of the old Penn Station. But no one's saying the T.W.A. terminal needs to be torn down, and we need a new facility that can handle our growing volume."

As part of an effort to get the F.A.A. to decline the new plan, the Municipal Art Society, with the help of noted airport architects, recently developed an alternative scheme that it maintains would save the structure's architectural sanctity. This plan calls for Jet Blue to move into the old structure and use it as a terminal. The society's proposal calls for excavating underneath the terminal to update baggage-handling and security systems. And to accommodate Jet Blue's growing fleet, the alternate plan would allow for the construction of a new, more modern gate system, which passengers would access through the old structure's two standing connector tubes.

But engineers at both the Port Authority and Jet Blue maintain that the society's alternative is impractical and unworkable. They say that there's no way the connector tubes can accommodate Jet Blue's flow of passengers, and add that the old terminal's system of runways is too cramped and outmoded to handle the rapid coming and going of Jet Blue's planes. They also reject the idea of digging under the old structure.

"You can't dig under the T.W.A. terminal," said Bill Dakota, the director of aviation for the Port Authority. "The water table at Kennedy is too high for that."

In the view of Port Authority and Jet Blue executives, the new terminal represents the best way of balancing the needs of a 21st-century airport with the desire to preserve a relic of a vanished aviation era.

"No airline has expressed an interest in moving into the T.W.A. terminal as it is now," Mr. Dakota said. "Instead of the terminal sitting empty, neglected and tired, the new plan will make it the subject of a massive effort to restore its former luster and preserve it as an architectural masterwork for the future."

But that's exactly where he's headed on Thursday, July 24. On that afternoon, Mr. Racicot, along with R.N.C. senior adviser Ed Gillespie, Governor George Pataki and other national and local G.O.P. luminaries, is planning to cut the ribbon on a new office that the Republicans are opening as part of a drive to get New York Latinos to vote for President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

The office, which is to be called the Hispanic Outreach Center, will be a downstate branch office of the New York Republican State Committee. Its function is to serve as a recruitment center for Latino voters in local elections, as well as to lure new voters for Mr. Bush in 2004.

But its existence is also symbolic, a part of a broader ongoing effort to retool the G.O.P.'s national image. The ribbon-cutting, which comes in the midst of a high-profile, four-day visit to New York City by national Republicans involved in planning the 2004 convention, is meant to convey a picture to the national audience of a Republican Party that's receptive to minorities and travels comfortably in the city's varied immigrant communities.

Mr. Bush himself has worked hard to appear friendly to minorities. He speaks Spanish at public events, has appointed Latinos, blacks and Asians to high-profile cabinet posts and recently embarked on a trip to Africa. With the convention coming to New York City in 2004, Republicans strategists have a huge opportunity to build on those efforts.

"A significant reason the Republicans decided to hold their convention in New York is that they wanted to project an inclusive image to the nation," said Rick Davis, a nationally known Republican consultant. "It contrasts strongly with the way the party presented itself at the 1996 convention [in San Diego], when Pat Robertson spoke and the party was seen as catering to the Christian Right. The 2000 convention in Philadelphia was really the very first effort to send a message that the party was interested in competing for Hispanics, Asians, blacks and other minorities. Now the challenge is, how do we do that without just finding the most artful Hispanic or black spokesman?"

The decision to hold the convention in New York City, Mr. Davis continued, was partly an answer to that question, adding: "The opening of the office in Washington Heights is a manifestation of this effort to redirect the party's image."

Of course, by aggressively reaching out to Latinos-a constituency with growing power-as well as other minorities, national Republicans are hoping to accomplish other goals. In particular, they want to force Democrats to invest resources in hanging onto voters that were once solidly in their corner.

As it seeks to craft a convention message with New York as its backdrop, the national party will be building on the successful efforts by the state G.O.P. to make inroads among Latino voters. New York's two top Republicans, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Pataki, both did surprisingly well among Latinos in their elections in 2001 and 2002.

Hence the new outreach office. According to sources familiar with the effort, the office will be on Dyckman Street, abutting the Harlem River Drive in Northern Manhattan. It will be manned for the foreseeable future by one full-time state G.O.P. employee, as well as other upstate Republican operatives who will lend time to the office as needed. The office is also going to be a kind of political pied-à-terre for state Republican chairman Sandy Treadwell, a place where he can run his operation whenever he's in the city with his staff.

"This is a voter-registration office that's meant to show that, in fact, we do care," said James Ortenzio, the chairman of the Manhattan G.O.P. "We find a consistency in values between national Republicans and Manhattan Hispanics. Why not build a chapel in the place where the marriage can occur?"

In addition to carrying out political chores like canvassing neighborhoods and registering new voters, the office is also expected to function as a kind of old-fashioned constituent-service center that provides aid to local residents who, in search of information or help, might otherwise have gone to the office of their local Democratic elected official. (There are no Republican legislators in Manhattan.)

"We're going to provide services to the community, and in the process let them know what the mind-set of the Republican Party really is," said Fernando Mateo, a prominent Latino activist who helped plan the office in discussions with high-level Republicans. "We want to make sure that people see the office as an alternate place for getting services and information."

Mr. Mateo also told The Observer that Karl Rove, the President's chief political adviser, had told him privately that Mr. Bush might pay a visit to Washington Heights during the convention in September of 2004. "Karl told me he's working on getting the President to come," he said.

Furious Dems

The new office has infuriated some Latino Democrats, who describe the initiative as a cynical exercise in image-making that is at odds with the party's policies.

"Remember when the Republicans were saying 'English only'?" said Roberto Ramirez, the former chairman of the Bronx Democratic Party who now hosts a Spanish-language radio show. "Well, now they're saying, ' Habla español '? This outreach is happening at a time when the war on terror is being used to erode immigrants' fundamental rights. It's happening at a time when Bush is challenging affirmative-action programs that benefit the very same people that this new office is supposed to recruit."

In the view of some national Democrats, the new office will represent an extension of the strategy that local and national Republicans have already used to great effect: to win over Hispanic voters by appearing to care about them.

"Republicans do not have a lot of issues where they agree with large numbers of Hispanics," said Sergio Bendixen, a Democratic consultant who has polled national Hispanic voters extensively on all sorts of issues. "So the strategy has been to basically say, 'We're your friends, we know you're there, you're important-if you ever need something, give us a call.' It's based on making immigrants feel they have access to the power structure. Republicans have had great success with this approach."

Some Republicans say this assessment isn't too far off the mark. As Republican consultant Scott Reed put it: "While the Washington Heights office is a great first initiative, it's only when the Republicans seriously focus on issues important to Latinos, like education, jobs and health care, that they will be able to succeed in capturing this emerging market."