On the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, Councilman and Democratic mayoral contender Tony Avella competed for attention from a modest flow of passersby with the son of district attorney candidate Leslie Crocker Snyder.

Mr. Avella, who had just returned from a lunch break at home in Queens, said things were going “all right.”

A moment later, a bald man marched up to the lamppost next to Mr. Avella and tore down posters for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Mr. Avella looked at the rest of the signs stapled around the pole, and said, “It’s illegal to put up signs anyway. Plus, I can’t afford any.”

Mr. Avella said he hoped that many people would make the same calculation that he did, that there was no way on earth the polite but unthreatening Bill Thompson could beat Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But he didn’t sound all that optimistic.

He did, however, warm to the topic of the Working Families Party, the increasingly powerful labor-backed entity that has become the talk of the relatively small percentage of New Yorkers closely following the races for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, City Council and Manhattan district attorney.

“It’s clearly wrong,” said Mr. Avella, who was not endorsed by the WFP. “It’s a way to get around the campaign finance laws.”

He was referring in particular to the party’s neat, game-changing trick of founding a for-profit field-operations arm, backed by union money and staffed by union operatives, that candidates—most notably comptroller candidate Bill de Blasio—could then “hire” to organize and get out the vote. It has been a way for the party to avoid the restrictions of the city’s campaign finance rules by directly coordinating with candidates they endorse, providing field services, possibly at cut-rate prices subsidized by their union donors, and basically supplying a shadow campaign for their political friends.

The low turnout guaranteed by the suspenseless mayoral primary at the top of the ticket would only magnify the advantage of whichever candidates could count on the party’s ability to knock on thousands of doors to identify supporters and then pull them to the polls on primary day.

Eric Gioia, a councilman for Queens who is running for public advocate against Mr. de Blasio and front-runner Mark Green, and trails both men in the polls, has made the WFP field operation his eleventh-hour campaign issue.

Another citywide candidate said—on background, for fear of offending the WFP before knowing how the primary would turn out—that a state senator had been scared out of endorsing the candidate’s campaign when the WFP threatened a primary.

“They are the new political machine,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant who is working for comptroller candidate David Weprin, who also happens not to be endorsed by the Working Families Party.

ON THE LEAFY corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, where the green garbage cans bear the name of Councilman Bill de Blasio, the candidate and his wife did some primary-morning campaigning in front of a church that had temporarily been converted into a polling place. A dozen volunteers, including Mr. de Blasio’s brother and cousin, hoisted placards at the passing cars and parents jogging behind their strollers. As his supporters solicited interest, Mr. de Blasio, who has a basketball player’s stature and taste in pinstriped suits, joked at the “spontaneous outbursts of popular energy.”

“Can’t hold them back, Bill,” said his spokesman, Matt Wing, playing along.

“Matt, I told you to hold down these public outpourings of support.”

When a Times photographer he had been waiting for showed up to take pictures, the volunteers formed a “Bill de Bla-Si-O”–chanting corridor that the candidate and his wife walked through as though newly married.

Mr. de Blasio doesn’t look like a machine guy. He lives in brownstone Brooklyn, and his wedding was an interracial affair in Prospect Park presided over by a gay, interdenominational pair of ministers. He is a former pro-Sandinista academic and Dinkins staffer and he managed Hillary Clinton’s first Senate campaign. The New York Times editorial board loves him. He has an unthreatening beard.

But ask him or his campaign about the work being done for them by the WFP’s for-profit arm—the innocuously named Data and Field Services—and things get tricky.

On primary day, Mr. Wing refused to say where the canvassers were knocking on doors. And in the days leading up to the primary, the WFP declined to provide details about what the company would be doing, explaining that the de Blasio campaign asked them not to make the information available.

In a phone interview on the eve of election day, Mr. de Blasio tried to play down the importance of the WFP for his campaign, saying it was “reductionist” to boil all of his support down to the party, and argued that he had a broad coalition that included endorsements from elected officials, The New York Times and unions. 

“I think there is a little bit of mythology going on about the WFP,” he said.

But Mr. de Blasio also acknowledged that he stood to benefit from the services of DFS. “They are very efficient at finding out who is voting and then reaching those voters repeatedly,” he said, though he insisted that he paid market rate for those services and blamed the now widely held suspicion that he perhaps hadn’t on mudslinging opponents. The party, obviously, also stood to gain from his winning.

“They have a lot of influence,” he said, “and if they keep electing good people they will keep getting more influential.”

According to Dan Cantor, the executive director of the WFP, that moment may have already arrived.

Citing their success in influencing the agenda in Albany, Mr. Cantor, said that the party had accreted power slowly over the years, and that it only seemed like they had come to prominence overnight.

Nevertheless, he added, “we’re definitely stronger,” and, “I think we’re definitely up a couple of notches.”

Mr. Cantor said that the party believed passionately in its agenda, and was not interested in making excuses for the tactics it pursued to get its candidates into office. “We’re idealistic and pragmatic at the same time,” he said. “And that’s a good combination.”

Inside the church–turned–polling station, Mr. de Blasio pulled the black plastic curtain closed at the polling booth, and election workers laughed at the sight of Mr. de Blasio’s head, which, because of his height, poked out above the stall.

“There’s no privacy,” Mr. de Blasio shouted, probably joking.

DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES without WFP support, even well-established politicians like David Yassky, who hired high-powered political consultant Josh Isay, and whose palm card points out newspaper endorsements and tributes from former boss Chuck Schumer, were running operations that seemed homespun and quaint by comparison. 

In Brooklyn Heights on primary morning, Mr. Yassky walked out his local polling place with his wife and daughter and said to a volunteer, “All right. What’s the response so far?”

She said she hadn’t gotten much response at all.

“All right,” he answered flatly. “Keep working.”

At the green market by the Borough Hall subway stop, he said he would reserve judgment on the importance of the WFP endorsement until after the primary, and said whatever they did in the field was fine with him “as long as they played by the rules.” It was the strength of the message, and not those getting the message out, that mattered, he said, stopping to eat a free sample of a sliced apple. His phone rang.

“Josh!” Mr. Yassky said as he walked over to a parked bicycle, upon which he hung his coat. “On the West Side, I felt that people were coming in to vote for me.”

The family then proceeded to sample tomatoes and peaches. They didn’t engage many more voters, most of whom simply walked by them as if they were statues of forgotten statesmen. His spokesman, Danny Kanner, said Mr. Yassky would be heading back to the campaign office, where he’d be his “own personal phone bank.” He said he didn’t know how many people were working in the phone banks for rival comptroller candidate John Liu, who was endorsed by the WFP, but, unlike Mr. de Blasio, didn’t formally hire the ostensibly separate field-ops arm. 

Mr. Kanner didn’t accuse Mr. Liu of doing anything illegal in his relationship with the WFP. But, he added on second thought, it was a shame the press hadn’t looked into it more vigorously.

jhorowitz@observer.com

When I asked de Blasio’s spokesman Matt Wing where his vaunted field operation was canvassing today, he refused to say.

The Working Families Party, whose for-profit arm, Data and Field Services, is doing de Blasio’s field work, also refused over the last few days to say where the canvassing would be happening, or to provide any details about what they'd be doing. They explained that the de Blasio campaign, which hired DFS, had asked that they not make the information publicly available.

A year later, Mr. Weiner—who presented himself, convincingly, as a skinny, Brooklyn-bred, stickball-playing warrior for middle-class New Yorkers—was still hammering the same theme, telling reporters that New York City “seems controlled by the elite and the powerful.”

The message, that working people trying to raise families were having an inordinately hard time in Michael Bloomberg’s New York, was a potent one.

Then Mr. Weiner disappeared, taking with him all hope of forcing the mayor into a vigorous debate about middle-class issues.

He complained, in a New York Times op-ed explaining a decision to abort his candidacy, about the ability of “billionaires to swamp middle-class candidates” with paid advertising. And that was that. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Mr. Weiner’s prediction has played out with chilling precision.

In the campaign, we now have likable, unintimidating Comptroller Bill Thompson, who’s lumbering toward an almost certain primary victory on Sept. 15 over Councilman Tony Avella. He has barely induced the mayor’s high-priced campaign machine to acknowledge his existence, let alone to engage in a substantive debate about housing, and transportation, and general affordability.

Mr. Thompson has pointed out, almost pleadingly, that the mayor’s attention to explicitly middle-class issues is a new development, but he has gained little traction. More remarkably, Mr. Thompson—son of a judge, born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, career public servant—has been unable to prevent the free-spending mayor from portraying himself as the middle-class candidate in the race.

At the moment, New Yorkers are watching a new campaign ad for Mr. Bloomberg currently in heavy rotation on seemingly every television channel, depicting a mayor who works for the “benefit of middle-class families” just like the one he comes from.

“The middle-class issue is clearly his greatest vulnerability,” said Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future and the co-author of the February study “Reviving the Middle Class Dream in NYC.” “You can grasp that just by looking at his campaign materials. He has become the middle-class candidate, which is kind of funny because he certainly hasn’t been the mayor of the middle class.”

WHILE THE BLOOMBERG dministration has introduced programs, many effective, to improve the lot of poor New Yorkers, and while the mayor has unapologetically articulated the point of view of rich people, the middle class has never quite been his thing.

Mr. Bloomberg’s first seven state of the city speeches, between 2002 and 2008, mentioned the middle class a total of five times. This year, with Mr. Weiner expected to run, he mentioned the middle class twice, once in relation to job creation to “pay good wages and strengthen the middle class” and then again in the context of building communities with affordable housing, character and parks that are “attractive to the middle class.”

The Bloomberg campaign’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, who played a major role in bouncing Mr. Weiner, said that the mayor’s new focus on the middle class was a result of the economic downturn.

“We were not in a worldwide recession until fairly recently, and a lot of the pain that people are feeling now is a consequence of that,” he said. “And it’s important to speak to that, there’s no question about it.”

Mr. Wolfson said he didn’t know what the race would have been like if Mr. Weiner had been the opponent. Of Mr. Thompson’s campaign, he said, coolly, “I think a lot of the criticism from the comptroller has been fairly predictable.”

Unhindered by any effective criticism, Mr. Wolfson and his colleagues have sought to build the mayor’s middle-class bona fides by placing him in a series of middle-class settings.

They have had him go on a “Five Borough Better Transit Tour”; promote his “Five Borough Economic Opportunity Plan”; and visit campaign offices in the outer boroughs. Mr. Bloomberg has spoken passionately and advertised comprehensively about how progress in city schools helps middle-class families, and about how he knows how tough it is to be a struggling entrepreneur.

On Aug. 24, Mr. Bloomberg’s motorcade passed by heavily trafficked loading docks, a Western Beef (“We Know the Neighborhood”), beer distributors and body-work stations, and over the sludge of Newton Creek, to visit a sanitation depot in Maspeth. As the smell of garbage wafted all around him, Mr. Bloomberg, dressed in a black suit and gold tie, inspected one of the city’s new fleet of lithium ion electronic Cooper Mini cars, which patrol streets seeking pot holes, graffiti and other quality-of-life blight.

He peered through the passenger side window, with a half-dozen photographers shooting him from the other side of the car, and made a halting motion toward the handle. He was literally trying to fit in.

“He’s going to get in,” one of the photographers said, with genuine surprise.

Mr. Bloomberg descended into the bucket seat as if it were a tub of cold water and, running his fingers over the steering wheel, his cuff links flashing, declared, “Pretty fancy.”

After the event, Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, the mayor’s political right hand, took one of the electric cars out for a spin. (“Zero to sixty in eight seconds!” he said.) Mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser took another.

In the lot behind the depot, Donald Bub a 46-year-old Freon specialist and registered Democrat who had just arrived to work and was taking tools out of his jeep, said that Mr. Bloomberg was all right by him.

“He’s trying to help,” said Mr. Bub.

He said he understood that a lot of the promises Bloomberg has recently made owed their origin to the election season. “But if he can straighten out the economy, that’s good for the middle class,” he said. “Plus, I’d rather have him than someone I don’t know.”

ON SEPT. 3, Mr. Bloomberg’s SUV drove past miles of deer crossings to Arthur Kill Road, the last exit in New York on the southern tip of Staten Island, to march in a homecoming for the team of local middle-schoolers who reached the semifinals of the Little League World Series.

As he took off his suit jacket to march behind the police band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” among kids wearing uniforms that read Pizzo, Rapaglia, Morisano, Zarrella and Vitale, a 61-year-old retired court officer from Tottenville named Harold Jones watched disapprovingly from a lawn chair on the side of the street.

“His promises just fall on deaf ears with middle-class families here,” said Mr. Jones, who complained about the mayor’s increasing of property taxes and water bills. “He’s been rich for so long, he doesn’t understand us. He should give somebody else a shot, but I’m not crazy about Thompson.”

City Councilman Jimmy Oddo, marching a few feet behind the mayor, with a wooden baseball bat resting on his shoulder, said, “There was a lot of antipathy on Staten Island to his administration after the property tax votes. But look at him, when he comes here, he’s treated like a conquering hero.”

Actually, they treat him like an alien. But they have determined that he is an alien they must live with. At times, Mr. Bloomberg marched alone, and he looked absolutely flummoxed when Mr. Oddo pinched his stomach, approving of his weight loss.

“Four more years,” someone yelled from the sidewalk.

“Four more hours,” Mr. Bloomberg replied.

At the end of the parade route, Mr. Bloomberg and seemingly every official in Staten Island gathered around a stage raised above a remarkably manicured ball field.

The mayor listened to Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro say, “I’m telling you this, he’s a good friend of Staten Island. I shouldn’t say this, but let’s keep him there.”

At the podium, Mr. Bloomberg praised the bored-looking young ballplayers. He stepped down and chatted with former Congressman Vito Fossella.

“He’s out here practically every three days,” Mr. Fossella said afterward.

Apparently, in this election, that’s good enough.

Hassan Nemazee, a former finance chair for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and a finance chair for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York with attempting to defraud Citigroup out of $74 million. He now faces up to 30 years in prison, according to Reuters.  

He was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport this morning on the way to Rome, where he has a home and, according to several sources, was angling for a posting as the United States ambassador. Nemazee, who is 59, nearly became the U.S. ambassador to Argentina under Bill Clinton, for whom he also bundled, but did not make it through the vetting process.

The arrest comes several months after Steven Rattner, a friend of Nemazee and also a major bundler to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, became the target of scrutiny when his name surfaced in relation to an apparent kickback scheme involving access to New York’s pension fund.

But while the Rattner business caused a stir among other top-tier donors—Rattner was not charged with any crime--Nemazee’s arrest is a seismic event.

“I just don’t know what to say--I find it almost incomprehensible,” said Alan Patricof, a finance co-chair on the Clinton 2008 campaign and a friend of Nemazee.  “I don’t know what’s happening in this world.”

Patricof said that Nemazee was a major force in Democratic politics, and had been in their home in Rome. He said he admired Nemazee as a person, a Democrat and a fund-raiser.  

“He was one of those guys who delivered,” Patricof said. “He was always very refined and polite. I feel terrible”

Another influential New York fund-raiser said, “Everyone is like ‘Oh my god, oh my god.’”

The arrest was announced by Preet Bharara,  the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara recently left his job as senior legal aide to Chuck Schumer, who was close to Nemazee and was a recipient of his donations.

Nemazee is also a major contributor to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and her supporters have cited him as the most influential bundler in her corner in her attempts to freeze out competition in a Democratic primary.

Prosecutors allege that Nemazee, the chairman and chief executive of Nemazee Capital, used fraudulent and forged documents suggesting he had hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to obtain up to $74 million in loans from Citigroup’s banking unit.

Nemazee did not return calls made to his cell phone or office.

According to Reuters, Nemazee’s attorney is Marc Mukasey, the son of Michael Mukasey and a partner at the firm Bracewell and Giuliani. He leads the white collar crime division there.

The stunning victories of Mr. Schumer and Mr. Spitzer are now the stuff of local political lore. But those campaigns also heralded the arrival of the three unknown operatives who would become the consultant kings of New York. (These days, if you’re an A-list politician, you’re almost certainly employing at least one of them.)

"I wouldn’t advise running without them," said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who has employed both Mr. Isay and Mr. Pollock. "They are rewriting once again how to get elected in New York City. Right now they are the best."

"The three of us obviously occupy space in lots of campaigns," said Mr. Pollock. "People are looking to our firms to be the leading voices."

But the three men, all Jewish, all vaguely nerdy, all Democrats—though of varying degrees of liberality—have distinct personalities, expertise and, more often than not, clients.

Mr. Isay, 39, whose increasingly reclusive behavior has come to remind many insiders of his shabbily dressed former consultant-mentor Hank Morris, is widely considered the most effective media consultant in town.

Mr. Wolfson, 42, a strategist who also comes with his own package of quirks—a fear of flying, obsessions with baseball statistics and indie rock, a near-fatalistic approach to campaigns—is the most sought-after communications guy.

Mr. Pollock, 37, a likable, natural entrepreneur—and a onetime protégé of Republican consultant Frank Luntz, even though he is arguably the most progressive of the three—does polling for the top Democrats in the state.

They all work for different firms, but their careers paths in New York have repeatedly converged and parted, sometimes dramatically, and sometimes in very personal ways.

Mr. Isay and Mr. Wolfson, in particular, have been actors in a quiet feud—or, more accurately, holders of a meticulously observed grudge—for nearly seven years. Once best friends, they don’t speak. Neither do their families. And while there are signs of a thaw, thanks in part to the magical power of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s billions to bring them together in the same office of his reelection campaign, Mr. Pollock has essentially taken Mr. Wolfson’s place as Mr. Isay’s best political pal. Now it is those two who eat at each other’s houses. Now it is their wives who work out together.

But the real competition between the three consultants, is, of course, for business.

Name any major officeholder in recent years, and chances are they have at one time or another employed the firms of some or all of the three consultants.

Mr. Isay, a former chief of staff to Mr. Schumer, runs Knickerbocker SKD, which he founded in 2002 and made a fortune from after scoring Mr. Bloomberg as a client. They also have counted among their clients Mr. Stringer; District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; a handful of City Council candidates; and unions, including the powerful 1199 SEIU. Mr. Isay did campaign mail for Barack Obama in New Hampshire and North Carolina during the general election. In 2006, he worked on Joe Lieberman’s general election in Connecticut, and in 2008 made television spots for Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. This year, his firm counts as clients Manhattan district attorney candidate Leslie Crocker Snyder (who Mr. Isay’s former client, Mr. Morgenthau, despises) and comptroller candidate David Yassky, whom Mr. Isay helped crush in a 2006 bid for Congress when he worked for Yvette Clarke, now a representative.

"He’s an enormous asset to any campaign," Mr. Yassky said.

When he loses, the intense Mr. Isay loses hard.

Like, for example, when he ran Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous 2002 campaign. These days, multiple sources familiar with their relationship say, the two can’t stand each other and would never work together again. (Mr. Isay says the relationship has improved. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Mr. Isay has hired seasoned labor operative Jennifer Cunningham, who is considered a close ally of Mr. Cuomo.)

And the increasingly distant attitude of Mr. Isay, a former press secretary, toward the members of the media was decidedly not helpful during his botched public rollout of Caroline Kennedy as a candidate to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate.

The Senate seat has been bad luck for Mr. Isay altogether. News that he was informally advising Mr. Stringer and Carolyn Maloney during the posing phase of their ultimately aborted primary challenges resulted in his former boss, Mr. Schumer, a supporter of Kirsten Gillibrand, brushing him back.

Mr. Wolfson is a partner at the Washington-based firm the Glover Park Group. The firm has lost a significant amount of its influence in New York. It has closed its entire creative department, and senior partner Gigi Georges has reduced her client workload as she does a public policy fellowship at Harvard. But in the city, Mr. Wolfson still matters, and several insiders expect him to start something on his own. Over a recent lunch at Nobu, though, where he knew the menu well enough to order without looking at it, he insisted that he’s staying put.

"If I were a candidate, I would hire Jef to do polling, Josh to do media," said Mr. Wolfson. It went without saying that Mr. Wolfson would hire himself to do the communications.

Mr. Wolfson served as communications director for Hillary Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns. During the selection process to replace Mrs. Clinton in the Senate after she left to become secretary of state, he informally advised and promoted Ms. Gillibrand, whom he helped elect to Congress in 2006. Glover Park will work on the reelection campaign of Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who is expected to run for attorney general when Mr. Cuomo runs for governor. Mr. Wolfson’s only official business now is a $40,000-a-month-before-bonuses gig as communications director for Mr. Bloomberg’s reelection campaign. (The fee is paid to Blizzard Communications, Glover Park’s campaign arm.)

Mr. Pollock’s Global Strategy Group, which has generally thrived on business outside of the Schumer and Clinton orbit, has recovered from the inglorious departure of Mr. Spitzer by acting as an adviser and pollster to Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Cuomo, who may also use Global if he runs for governor.

Mr. Pollock worked for Freddy Ferrer in the last two mayoral elections, and in the presidential campaign, his firm worked for John Edwards. His firm now counts Mr. De Blasio, Ms. Katz and Manhattan district attorney candidate Cy Vance Jr. as clients. Global has never advised Israeli leaders but they are active in South America. Mr. Pollock was once hired to modernize government polling practices in Kazakhstan.

Sometimes the three compete. Often, they overlap.

In 2003, Mr. Pollock and Mr. Wolfson worked together on the effort to kill a referendum in favor of nonpartisan elections in New York. In 2006, they both found themselves being screamed at by Rahm Emanuel, who was urging them, forcefully, to do more to get Ms. Gillibrand elected to the House.

Mr. Pollock and Mr. Isay have worked together for Mr. Stringer, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and several other candidates and unions.

But the most astounding thing, for many political insiders in the city, is that Mr. Isay and Mr. Wolfson are now working together, sometimes in the same closed office, for Mr. Bloomberg.

"We talked about it," said Bradley Tusk, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign manager, referring to a conversation he had with Mr. Isay before bringing on Mr. Wolfson. He said that Mr. Isay told him, "You’d much rather have Howard working with you than against you."

At one time, it seemed only natural that the two would go into business together.

Mr. Isay, an Upper East Side native, was Mr. Schumer’s chief of staff on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Wolfson worked as a press secretary for Representative Nita Lowey. Mr. Isay dated a friend of Mr. Wolfson’s. The two sports fans (Isay, Mets; Wolfson, Yankees) talked on the phone all the time.

They bonded even further when Mr. Isay, who was Mr. Schumer’s campaign manager, called on his friend to come aboard Mr. Schumer’s 1998 Senate campaign as communications director.

"He gave me a huge opportunity," said Mr. Wolfson. "We had a lot of fun on that campaign."

In the end, Mr. Schumer outmaneuvered fellow Democrats with more famous names (Green, Ferraro) and beat Al D’Amato, a Republican institution, to get to the Senate, where he is now the most powerful legislator the state has seen in a generation. Mr. Wolfson went back to the Hill, as Ms. Lowey was expected to run for Senate herself. But when Mrs. Clinton entered New York politics with the force of a rare comet, Mr. Wolfson attached himself to her, and became one of the most trusted aides in her 2000 Senate campaign.

With so much experience under their belts, Mr. Wolfson and Mr. Isay often discussed going into business together, though they never had any formal arrangement.

In January 2000, Mr. Isay left Mr. Schumer’s office for a brief stint as the Silicon Alley lobbyist for the Web advertising firm DoubleClick. In early 2001, Mr. Wolfson joined the DCCC as its executive director. In the spring of 2001, Mr. Isay returned to politics to work with his mentor, Hank Morris, on Alan Hevesi’s 2001 race for mayor.

Then, an opportunity presented itself.

With a governor’s race on the horizon, Andrew Cuomo, fresh off a résumé-building stint as Bill Clinton’s director of housing and urban development, wanted to run, and he was hungry for talent.

He called Dan Klores, a public-relations man who was an old friend and drinking buddy. Much of the exploratory work for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign was done within Mr. Klores’ Park Avenue South offices, where Mr. Cuomo said he wanted to put together an aggressive, battle-tested campaign team. Jonathan Prince, who had worked in the Clinton White House and knew Mr. Cuomo from his time at HUD, signed on. He suggested his friend Mr. Wolfson, an idea Mr. Cuomo liked.

According to several people involved with the negotiations, Mr. Wolfson was torn. He told Mr. Klores and Mr. Cuomo that his original plan had been to go into business with Mr. Isay, whom they did not know well. Most people involved at the time remember that Mr. Wolfson suggested to Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Klores and Mr. Prince that they meet with Mr. Isay. Mr. Wolfson ultimately decided to return to Washington and the DCCC. Mr. Isay, according to several sources, also expressed his reluctance about joining the firm.

Soon after, though, an incredulous Mr. Wolfson caught wind that Mr. Isay, unbeknownst to him, had decided to go for it after all. He became a founding partner of the firm of Isay, Klores, Prince, with the intention of working as campaign manager for Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. Wolfson called Mr. Isay to see if the rumors were true.

They were.

Mr. Wolfson told Mr. Isay that they would never speak again.

And for a very long time, they didn’t. The two men were married within days of each other in June 2002—Mr. Isay to Cathie Levine, a former Schumer operative and a publicist at ABC News, and Mr. Wolfson to Terri McCullough, now the chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—but they didn’t attend each other’s weddings. Their wives didn’t speak. Their friends got caught in the crossfire.

For an elite circle of consultants and political insiders, the feud has provided an unmissable subplot to many of the city’s races. One consultant said that it was a cross between a "soap opera and the Bloods and Crips."

"It’s ancient history," said Mr. Wolfson. "I’m thrilled to be able to work with him now. For my part, I certainly regret what happened, and if I could do it differently, I would, and I blame myself."

"I regret what happened and wish that we could get back the years that we were not friends," said Mr. Isay. "But we have a long time to make up for it, starting with this campaign, and I know that we both want to."

As it turned out, the Cuomo campaign was an unmitigated disaster, and the new firm quickly disbanded. Mr. Prince became more interested in John Edwards, for whose 2004 presidential campaign he played a key role. Mr. Klores, bitten by the film bug, began concentrating on making documentaries. Mr. Isay stayed, and he suffered for it.

Despite having been frozen out of important decision-making relatively early on, his burgeoning reputation as a political tactician took a serious hit.

He started over. Partnering with Micah Lasher, then a 20-year-old senior at N.Y.U. who had done field work for Mr. Cuomo during the campaign, he formed Knickerbocker Partners, and started calling prospective candidates all over the city and state.

Their first client, Ken Bishop, who was running for Congress, was referred to them by, of all people, Mr. Wolfson at the DCCC.

(Several people with knowledge of the feud viewed the help as a peace offering. It didn’t work.)

Then, in 2005, they landed Mr. Bloomberg as a client. Since then, Mr. Isay’s firm has become one of the biggest in town.

Also, Mr. Isay changed.

As a young consultant, he was sociable and talkative and emotional. (His mother was the author of Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents.) Now he’s reluctant to speak the press, on the record or off. He has quit smoking and lost weight. He eats salads.

Raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, where his father owned pharmacies and his mother was a lawyer, Mr. Pollock interned for Representative Charlie Rangel when he was in high school, and then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he enrolled in a class taught by the Republican operative Frank Luntz called Candidates, Consultants and Campaigns. (He now teaches a similar course at Columbia University.)

After class, Mr. Luntz and his best students would go to drink at Smokey Joe’s, a bar where Mr. Luntz, an Oxford-trained debater, would argue just about any side of any issue with them. At 2 a.m., when the bar closed, Mr. Luntz and his acolytes would head to the local IHOP, where they’d talk about polling. Mr. Luntz always ordered himself a steak.

Mr. Pollock was enthralled.

In 1992, as a senior in college, Mr. Pollock and other students accompanied Mr. Luntz to the New Hampshire primaries. During the campaign, Mr. Pollock was hoping his mentor would set him up with a job with Bob Shrum, a guest lecturer at the campaign class and a Democratic legend, but was instead farmed out to work as a pollster for Ross Perot. Mr. Perot dropped out, and Mr. Pollock finished school. After graduation, he took a job with Mr. Luntz, with the understanding he not work on any Republican campaigns.

In 1993, Mr. Luntz worked on Rudy Giuliani’s campaign with David Garth, the city’s most successful and powerful consultant. After Mr. Luntz wrote the "Contract With America" with Newt Gingrich, Mr. Pollock left the firm and started doing more work back in New York with Mr. Garth, and moved in with his girlfriend, Deborah Brown, at Columbia University.

There, he started his own firm, called Strategic Research Team. (The stationary he had printed read "Stragetic Research Team." He was the team’s only member.)

He had a single client, which he inherited from Mr. Luntz: Pedro Rossello, the Puerto Rican governor. In 1995, as he polled for Mr. Rossello’s re-election campaign, he was introduced to John Silvan, who also had business in Puerto Rico and who had started Global Strategy Group in the rent-controlled Washington Square Village apartment of his recently deceased grandmother. The two businesses merged.

They were successful right away, helping Bill Murphy, a candidate for district attorney in Staten Island, defeat beloved Republican Guy Molinari. They helped elect Carolyn McCarthy to the House, and in 1997, they started getting business from Freddy Ferrer.

Then in 1998, Mr. Pollock’s last-minute polls correctly predicted that Mr. Spitzer would beat Dennis Vacco by about a single percentage point.

"At that point, we certainly became a much more well-known commodity," said Mr. Pollock.

These days, Mr. Pollock’s firm has a local and national presence. Through a merger with consultant Harrison Hickman, they worked on John Edwards’ 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. They have polled for Chet Culver in Iowa and, recently, for Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. They have also been at the vanguard of the Democratic retaking of Albany, first with Mr. Spitzer, and now that he is gone, with Mr. Cuomo, who hired Global for his 2006 attorney general’s race.

"I used to say, ‘Andrew, you are winning by 25 points,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s not enough.’"

On a personal level, Mr. Pollock is now close to Mr. Isay. They take their kids to synagogue together. Their wives climb steps and exercise together in the morning along Riverside Park. Their children play together.

At Mr. Pollock’s birthday party a couple of years ago, Mr. Isay stood up and made a surprise announcement. His family intended to move just down the block from Mr. Pollock on the Upper West Side.

"What a wonderful friend and wonderful family," Mr. Isay said. "And we’re going to be neighbors."

For many Democrats, these times call for bolder government regulation to correct years of unchecked business practices harmful to the economy, climate and public health. And so, for Governor David Paterson, the titular head of New York's Democratic Party, there was no better time to notify the press corps of an order empowering his staff to roll back such regulation than 2:36 p.m. on a summer Friday.

Late Friday afternoon is the political magic hour for distributing inconvenient or unpopular information. Press offices hope the news will slip through the cracks or vanish into the ether of weekend editions and never reach the eyes of Monday readers. It is the oldest trick in the book. If you have bad news, best to tell reporters about it when their thoughts are drifting toward weekend plans, and when weekend readers are more likely distracted from their papers or Google alerts.

Mr. Paterson's executive order did not go entirely unnoticed. Environmental and good-government groups expressed dismay that the governor, who the day before had delighted them by proposing ambitious targets for reducing New York's carbon emissions, had quietly signed and announced Executive Order 25, which critics have long characterized as a threat to New York's laws to protect health, environment and safety.

"This is one of those Friday afternoon bombshells they like to send out," Laura Haight of the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told the Albany Times Union.

The story ran on Saturday.  

Or maybe it’s just that the heat gets to them. But in recent days, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his political allies have been talking a lot about their lack of locks.

It started, at 9:25 a.m. on July 14, when Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who has endorsed Mr. Bloomberg and thinks of him as a mentor, tweeted this inane piece of political consulting.

“My advice 4 Bloomberg reelection: [Washington mayor Adrian] Fenty and I both have liberated scalps. If Mike shaves his head, the young, hip vote is his: victory assured.”

Then Sunday, Aug. 9, on Meet the Press, David Gregory, who has a mane of corn silk above his head, apparently forgot the small matter of the $100 million Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend to beat a candidate who few New Yorkers think can win anyway, and asked him, “So, Mayor, you can make news here. Will you shave your head for reelection?”

“Let me equivocate on that and, and duck the issue,” Mr. Bloomberg responded. “But I think—my hair is falling out at sufficient rate that I won’t have to shave it. It’s going to be gone.”

The next morning, Mr. Bloomberg appeared at the Patrick Henry Preparatory School on East 103 Street with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and other city officials.

Mr. Klein, whose pate is tan and oval-shaped and free of even a strand of hair on top, was speaking about the success of the mayor’s education policy when he looked at education activist Laurence Harvey, who wears his abundant hair in an astronaut-helmet-size afro.

“I’m also happy to have Larry Harvey here,” said Mr. Klein, who then paused and looked at the head of Mr. Harvey, 45. 

“That’s quite a head of hair, Larry,” said Mr. Klein.

“You wish you had it,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who stood to Mr. Klein’s left.

“The way I see it, life balances out,” said Mr. Klein, philosophically. He then addressed Mr. Harvey. “Between the two of us, we have two heads of hair.”

“Cory Booker yesterday asked me to shave my head,” Mr. Bloomberg said to Mr. Klein. “And you would not have much of a problem with that.”

Then they continued the press conference.

Mr. Bloomberg is trying to keep up the appearance of a mayoral candidate in a real race throughout one of the soggiest, least eventful and politically anticlimactic summers in memory. He’s wearing goofy clothes, speaking Medford, Mass.–accented Spanish and Twittering his random musings.

And, in an extraordinary display of commitment to retail campaigning, according to his aides, he’s eating pizza on a regular basis. 

“Eating pizza on the campaign trail is a time-honored New York tradition,” said Howard Wolfson, the communications director of the Bloomberg campaign, deadpan. “And this mayor’s working it.”

While Mr. Bloomberg faces decidedly unworrying opposition from Comptroller Bill Thompson, who rarely sticks his head out of the basements of city Democratic clubs for fear of Mr. Bloomberg’s aggressive campaign team whacking him, the mayor is trying very hard to go through the motions with a straight face.

Except when he can’t.

Like before the Pakistan Day Parade on Aug. 2, when he posed with local Pakistani dignitaries in a shirt that he would usually not be caught dead in, and winked knowingly at the laughing reporters before heading out to march in the rain. Or on Aug. 7, when several participants of a city volunteer program ran up to him and asked him to pose for a picture.

“Picture! Picture!” Mr. Bloomberg said, with sarcastic theatricality, as he obliged.

Mr. Bloomberg’s summer schedule, packed with politically advantageous visits to schools and housing projects and parade routes all around the city, presents him with a daily challenge of avoiding the zoned-out look of a man bored out of his mind.

Sometimes he succeeds. Other times, he doesn’t.

ON AUG. 5, the morning he won recognition as half of one of the best-dressed couples in America, he was running late for an event at the Castle Hill houses in the Bronx. On site, before the mayor arrived, one veteran of the City Hall beat regaled younger reporters with stories of the reliably combative and colorful Rudy Giuliani.

Covering Mr. Bloomberg, the reporter said, was “deadly” in comparison. The younger reporters nodded.

The mayor, accompanied by his spokesman, Stu Loeser, showed up 45 minutes late, dressed sharply in a navy suit, a striped shirt with French collar and a blue-and-red spotted tie. He made his remarks about reducing the carbon footprint of the city’s vast housing program, ceded the podium to his housing commissioner, John Rhea, and proceeded to look bored. 

As Mr. Rhea spoke (“As I was saying, we have a broad plan”), the mayor tilted his head to the right and looked off at a narrow row of windows in the gym’s rafters. He compared notes with Councilwoman Annabelle Palma. When Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. spoke about “farms in the sky” with inner-city grandmas gardening on rooftops, he stared off, again, into the distance. Angelo Esposito, the senior vice president for Services and Technology at the New York Power Authority, spoke about how “185,000 refrigerators were removed.”  

Mr. Bloomberg came to life when a reporter asked for clarifications about the behavioral issues that led the inhabitants of the housing project to use up so much energy.

Margarita Lopez, an official at the housing authority and a friend of Mr. Bloomberg’s who once declared him an “honorary lesbian,” stepped forward and talked about the problem of 30-minute showers.

“That sounds nice,” Mr. Bloomberg murmured from behind. Ms. Lopez tried to continue, but so did Mr. Bloomberg.

“Ed Koch once suggested taking a shower with a friend, even,” said Mr. Bloomberg, as audience members started clapping and laughing. “That was during the time we had a drought and he thought it would save some water. What?”

“I imagine the mayor has it wrong,” Ms. Lopez tried.

“I think that that’s an easy question,” the mayor said, referring back to the almost-forgotten query from the reporter.

“I’m not going to answer that because Mayor Bloomberg is always provoking me to follow,” Ms. Lopez said.

WHILE MR. BLOOMBERG does his best to stay awake, his campaign has stirred from its announcement of slumber-inducing endorsements—Mayor Ed Koch; Middle Village Chamber of Commerce; Impacto Latin News; Peter Papanicolaou, president of the Cyprus Federation of America—to mount selective, bullying attacks on the mayor’s likely opponent, Mr. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson’s call on July 23 for a debate with Mr. Bloomberg went almost unnoticed, until the Bloomberg campaign’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, later responded, “Mr. Thompson should first debate himself,” and went on to list some apparently contradictory archival comments from the comptroller on education. 

After Mr. Thompson criticized the mayor’s education record in a blog contribution on the Huffington Post on July 28, and called for the firing of the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, Mr. Wolfson unleashed an attack on Mr. Thompson’s lackluster record when he ran the old Board of Education.

And the Bloomberg campaign provided the New York Post with video of a campaign event on July 29 in which Mr. Thompson was shown to have sat idly by as an attendee called City Council Speaker Christine Quinn a “whore” who could “kiss my ass.” 

On Aug. 6, Mr. Wolfson responded to a critical audit from Mr. Thompson’s office about the mayor’s housing policy by attacking the comptroller’s handling of city pension money.

The next day, Mr. Wolfson—who, like the mayor’s other top campaign aides, draws a lavish salary from a campaign budget that is likely to reach $100 million—pitilessly mocked Mr. Thompson’s failure to amass enough small donations to qualify for public matching funds, saying that it belied the comptroller’s claim of grass-roots support.

Contracting out the nasty stuff to his campaign has allowed Mr. Bloomberg to spend most of his time in public acting nice to people.

On Aug. 7, the same day Mr. Wolfson eviscerated Mr. Thompson, scores of kids in green “Camp Goodwill” shirts and orange “NYC service” shirts waited for the mayor on a playground at the South Jamaica Houses in Queens, with posters for 98.7 Kiss FM (“The Best Variety of Old School and Today’s R&B”) hanging on the jungle gym.

Mr. Bloomberg, wearing khakis, a leather-braided belt, a blue oxford and powder-blue socks above his loafers, gave pointers to one young volunteer in an orange shirt.

An aide came over and asked Mr. Bloomberg to wear a pin in support of the program.

“Let’s put a service pin on, absolutely,” he said, as an aide affixed an orange pin that read “Use Your BLANK for good” to the mayor.

“O.K. Let’s do it,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

On the hot playground, which smelled of the black rubber padding under the jungle gym, Mr. Bloomberg stood at a podium and said, “Forty years ago, America celebrated the summer of love.”

He continued, “This year we are going one step further with what we call the summer of service.”

He talked about how volunteers “are weeding, and spreading mulch and compost,” and then walked over to a patch of soil where he put on gardening gloves and dug a hole for a sedum plant.

“I had a vegetable garden” Mr. Bloomberg said as he turned over soil with two volunteers.

“Could you look up, sir, sir, could you look up?” asked one photographer. 

“He’s planting, he can’t look up,” said an advance person, Jamie Lee.

“Sir, could you look up, look up at us,” another photographer asked.  

“Put a little dirt underneath,” said Mr. Bloomberg, his head resolutely down.  

“That’s a nice plant,” said Ms. Lopez, who also attended the event.

Rising from his planted sedum, he offered the photographers a halfhearted thumbs up and walked to his SUV and climbed in.

“Nice socks!” said Ms. Lee.

“I’m going to the game tonight!” Mr. Bloomberg explained.

“BUENAS TARDES. Hoy celebramos el orgullo de ser Dominicano,” the mayor said.

Mr. Bloomberg was now speaking at a makeshift podium draped with a small Dominican flag on Aug. 9, before marching in the Dominican Day parade. Earlier that morning, he had been on Meet the Press. It had gone well.

He said what he had to say about the great Dominicans of New York, and then spoke about a fatal collision between a small plane and a helicopter two days before over the Hudson River.

A reporter asked him whether he thought Guillermo Linares, a former mayoral aide whose candidacy for a City Council seat ended because of a filing error, should be allowed to run.

“The rules are the rules,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who pushed for a change in term-limits rules so that he could run for a third term. Mr. Loeser immediately stopped scrolling his BlackBerry and looked up apprehensively.

“Just goes to show you have to follow the rules,” said Mr. Bloomberg. 

Then they started marching.

Mr. Loeser inserted yellow ear plugs. The mayor, escorted by the police, took his place of honor at the center of the parade’s front line, behind the police marching band and ahead of signs hoisted above the crowd that read “Fuera la Corrupcion.”

There was much pushing and pulling and shouting by the police.

A man ran over and handed Mr. Bloomberg a poster with his and other politicians’ name on it.

“Sylvia!” he called over to Sylvia Alvarez, who handles Spanish press for his reelection campaign. She couldn’t hear him amid the din and quickly walked ahead so as not to be trampled.

At 39th Street, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign videographer filmed people hollering, whistling, singing, picture-taking, Dominican-flag waving and I Heart D.R. T-shirt–wearing crowd as he briskly walked along the aluminum rails on the east side of Sixth Avenue. Mr. Bloomberg himself held a Dominican flag straight up over his head. The procession intermittently stopped to allow photographers to get pictures. On 46th Street, Mr. Bloomberg’s right hand was suddenly hoisted high above his head by a man wearing white linen pants and shirt. The mayor looked shocked.

The procession continued again, past 49th Street, where the digital red crawl wrapping around the News Corporation building read “‘Not survivable’ says Bloomberg.”

The parade went past Radio City Music Hall, where two campaign volunteers ran alongside the rails on the east and west sides of the avenue, distributing “Dominicans for Mike Bloomberg” signs, pulled from blue Mike Bloomberg NYC tote bags. An archipelago of sweaty marks started appearing on the front of Mr. Bloomberg’s blue sport’s shirt.

THE NEXT DAY, Mr. Bloomberg walked into the library of the Patrick Henry Preparatory School on East 103 Street to announce the end of social promotion in the fourth and sixth grades. He stopped at a desk by the door, upon which framed news clippings about his previous education announcements at the school were displayed. (“Mayor Gets School Reins,” read the June 13, 2002, Daily News. “Mike Takes School Reins,” read the June 13, 2002, New York Post.)

At a podium set up in front of colorful bookcases and hand-drawn posters of Charlotte’s Web and Madeline and picture books about Mars and Saturn, he heralded his own administration’s “impressive success.” Off to the side, Mr. Loeser shook his head disapprovingly at a book he was perusing called Business Leaders Who Built Financial Empires. The book included Ted Turner but not Michael Bloomberg.

During a lengthy question-and-answer period, a television reporter asked Mr. Bloomberg about Mr. Thompson’s accusations that homelessness had risen under the mayor’s watch.

“I’m not here to engage in a debate,” said Mr. Bloomberg,

That part of campaigning he had no use for.

Now that the field has been cleared of established Democratic challengers to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's nomination, the holdout members of the congressional delegation are going to be expressing their support for the senator, as Representative Eliot Engel just did.

Here's Engel's statement, which was sent out by Gillibrand's office, along with the endorsements of other legislators and officials.  

"Over the past seven months, Kirsten has brought a new, innovative approach to the new problems that New York families are facing in these tough economic times. She's fighting to make health care affordable, create new good-paying jobs and rebuild our economy for real, long-term strength. She's the voice and the partner that families in my district need in the U.S. Senate, and that's why I'm proud to endorse her campaign."

Bloomberg spoke at the Patrick Henry Preparatory School on East 103 street in front of children's books, his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the deputy mayor for education, Dennis Walcott (who he thanked for a "brief and thankfully uneventful" time as president of a temproary Board of Education). He said it would be "inconceivable" that his appointees on the educational panel would fail to support the plan.

After much touting of his record in improving test scores under his control, the mayor took questions on a wide variety of topics, though most concerned the fatal crash between a small plane and a helicopter above the Hudson River this weekend.

"I'm not going to pressure the FAA," said Bloomberg, a pilot himself, who repeatedly avoided placing blame for the crash on a lack of oversight by aviation agencies or an overflow of airtraffic. He said that the crash was a tragic accident, but pointed out that "a pilot's first responsibility is to see and avoid" and suggested the airspace above New York was not appropriate for inexperienced pilots because it required quick decisions and immediate communication with air traffic controllers.

Unprompted, Bloomberg concluded his lengthy presser by referring back to his remarks on Meet the Press, signaling that the Mayors Against Illegal Guns organization that he has spearheaded, and helped fund, would take further steps in its "fight against the NRA."

"We've been outgunned by the money and the lobbyists and the scare tactics of the NRA," said Bloomberg, adding that the group would make an effort to "match that level of spending."

Asked how much additional money he would personally put into the effort, Bloomberg said, "I don't have an answer to that, but a lot of people also have contributed and I'll get them to contribute too."

Asked whether that money would be directed toward a national media campaign or television advertisements, he said, "We don't know. We'll see down the road."

Bloomberg said that the NRA had been successful at "rolling" legislators and pointed at one loophole in particular that allowed gun dealers who lost their licenses for selling guns to criminals to continue selling in a different venue without background checks.  "It's like if you arrest somebody for dealing drugs and then they say wait a minute, I've got this inventory of crack. Let me go and sell it at the local playground."