The bigger problem is that the state Republican establishment can’t even get the feud thing right. For connoisseurs of political combat, the battles between party stalwarts are little more than political pigtail-pulling. The real thing is less petty, more film noir. And it takes a bunch of young G.O.P. Gothamites to get it right. To wit: Here in New York City, two Republican houses—each alike in dignity? That depends on whom you ask—have been fighting over turf, title and patrimony for more than a decade.

The two factions share one name—the New York Young Republican Club, Inc.—and one logo: a bald eagle grasping a lightning bolt. Each club claims around 500 members, ages 18 to 40, and meets once a month on a Thursday, supplementing the monthly gatherings with a calendar of speakers and social events. Both groups say that they were founded in 1911, and both claim the mantle of America’s Oldest Young Republican Club.

Thankfully, there’s a bit of shorthand that observers use to tell the two clubs apart: One is affiliated with the state and county arms of the Republican Party, and the other is not. Not surprisingly, however, past and present officials of both clubs cast that distinction in slightly different terms.

“Their group was founded in 1991. They’re now claiming to be us, basically,” said Robert Hornack, who, at 40 years old (“I’m in the process of aging out,” he explained) is the not-particularly-young chairman of the New York Young Republican Club, which is not affiliated with the state and county party. “We’re more ideological; we don’t bend as easily on matters of convenience,” he added. “They take their marching orders from the party leadership: Whatever the party says, goes.”

Thomas Robert Stevens, an attorney and past president of Mr. Hornack’s club, suggested that his former rivals are legally, if not morally, in error. “They got the color of authority by getting recognized by the formal structure of the state, but they don’t have the legal authority,” he said, referring to the other club’s use of the club name and logo. Mr. Stevens added that during his tenure, he and his colleagues often referred to the other group as the “puppet club.” Or, in more sinister tones, as the “puppet regime.”

That doesn’t make Dennis Cariello, the president of the affiliated club, very happy. “I dispute that, and I take great offense to it,” he said. Barbs aside, however, Mr. Cariello would rather be diplomatic than disparaging. “I never say a bad word about them. It’s my hope that they’ll still join us,” he said.

It’s baffling to see New York’s young Republicans so Balkanized. Shouldn’t the party’s next generation of partisans—young, energetic and vastly outnumbered in the city—begin their political lives on common ground?

Alas, their resentment is hereditary. The history of the two clubs reads like Hitchcock on acid, complete with an attempted frame-up for murder, a private detective, an episode on Phil Donahue’s talk show and even a bit of … dwarf bowling.

In the beginning, there was peace. The city’s first Young Republican Club was an effort at like-minded community, founded by 32 enterprising young men in 1911, with an inaugural dinner at which President William Howard Taft was the guest of honor. Over the following decades, the club built a roster and deepened its political influence, seeing dividends in the 1940’s, when several onetime club members were elected to prominent offices, including Jacob K. Javits and Thomas E. Dewey.

The seeds of acrimony were sown a few decades later, when the club’s former president, John V. Lindsay, ran for a second term as New York’s Mayor in 1969. Originally elected as a Republican, Mr. Lindsay lost the 1969 party primary to State Senator John Marchi of Staten Island. Lindsay ran on the Liberal Party line and won. His acolytes in the New York Young Republican Club stood behind him, failing to support Mr. Marchi, the party’s nominee. Republican elders were furious with the young whippersnappers, eventually leading to a schism between the club and the official G.O.P organization.

But the real break came in 1991, according to Mr. Stevens, who served as the unified club’s president from 1982 to 1988. At that time, the club had begun to splinter between young Republicans who sought a return to the official party, and a group led by Mr. Stevens, which favored the status quo. In the background, resentment simmered over Mr. Stevens’ public profile, which included an appearance on Donahue, during which he argued the merits of male virginity and touted his role as a leader of New York’s Young Republicans.

The rival factions wound up splitting into two separate clubs, one affiliated with the official party and the other independent.

The sharpest knives came out several years later. In 1993, after Mr. Stevens had been reinstated as president of the independent club, he was charged with conspiring to kill a leader of the rival group. Federal prosecutors had tapes of Mr. Stevens talking to a presumptive hit man— part of the deal involved laundering money through the bank account of his Young Republican club.

Mr. Stevens said he was framed by members of the other club, who had arranged his introduction to what turned out to be a phony hit man. To learn the truth, he said, he had hired a private investigator and began playing along with them.

The charges were dropped in 1994. Mr. Stevens had already moved on by that point. Earlier that year, he’d been making unlikely news as the legal counsel to Baird Jones. Mr. Jones, a Manhattan impresario and self-proclaimed king of the urban avant-garde, was fighting for his legal right to run dwarf-bowling events in bars.

Mr. Stevens’ tenure as president of the nonaffiliated Young Republican Club ended in 1998. In 2003, he left the G.O.P. altogether to become a devout Libertarian. Still, he sighed, “it would be wonderful if the two clubs got together and make peace.”

Three years ago, they tried. Leaders of the two clubs were negotiating a merger, but the agreement broke down. Officials from both sides remain tight-lipped about the details.

Name Tags, Anyone?

So nowadays, how can an armchair activist tell the two clubs apart?

Among some party officials, Mr. Hornack’s nonaffiliated club has earned a reputation as a conservative band of Republican renegades. Tempers have flared over that club’s endorsements, which included Herman Badillo rather than Michael Bloomberg for Mayor in 2001.

“The Hornack group, I guess, are considered the bad boys of the Young Republican Clubs by the establishment, because they’re very activist,” suggested Assemblyman Patrick Manning, a dark-horse candidate in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Mr. Manning added that, while Mr. Hornack’s group “treated me like family,” the state-affiliated club hasn’t returned his phone calls, even though it recently hosted one of his rivals, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, for an evening at the Harvard Club.

Mr. Cariello, the president of the state-affiliated club, bristles at the idea of an ideological distinction between the clubs and said that his organization welcomes Republicans of all stripes. “While perhaps the market can bear two Young Republican Clubs, I think we’d be much stronger if we were working in unison,” he told The Observer.

They’d also bicker less. In 2004, members of the affiliated club were welcomed as volunteers for the Republican National Convention. According to Mr. Hornack, his group was denied access. They watched the opening night from the depths of an Irish pub in Brooklyn and, later that week, held court in a Manhattan hotel.

Even minor slights can inflame tensions between the two clubs. During her recent campaign for City Council, Democrat Jessica Lappin sent out a mailer attacking her opponent, Republican Joel Zinberg, with a quote from Mr. Hornack. The quote, which was pulled from a political blog, accused Mr. Zinberg of cloaking his Republican affiliation to deceive voters, attributing that sentiment to “Robert Hornack, Chairman, NY Young Republican Club.” Needless to say, the state-affiliated Young Republicans were not pleased.

Considering the clubs’ contentious past, such squabbles seem petty, but they still bewilder a new generation of G.O.P. partisans.

“The story of the two Young Republican Clubs in New York reminds me of the story of the two Jews in Kabul after America invaded Afghanistan,” mused Karol Sheinin, a local blogger and Republican activist who attends both clubs’ events.

“The story came out that there were only two Jews living in Kabul, and they hated each other and wouldn’t walk on the same side of the street,” she continued. “There’s like 12 Republicans in New York. How come we can’t get along?”

The bigger problem is that the state Republican establishment can’t even get the feud thing right. For connoisseurs of political combat, the battles between party stalwarts are little more than political pigtail-pulling. The real thing is less petty, more film noir. And it takes a bunch of young G.O.P. Gothamites to get it right. To wit: Here in New York City, two Republican houses—each alike in dignity? That depends on whom you ask—have been fighting over turf, title and patrimony for more than a decade.

The two factions share one name—the New York Young Republican Club, Inc.—and one logo: a bald eagle grasping a lightning bolt. Each club claims around 500 members, ages 18 to 40, and meets once a month on a Thursday, supplementing the monthly gatherings with a calendar of speakers and social events. Both groups say that they were founded in 1911, and both claim the mantle of America’s Oldest Young Republican Club.

Thankfully, there’s a bit of shorthand that observers use to tell the two clubs apart: One is affiliated with the state and county arms of the Republican Party, and the other is not. Not surprisingly, however, past and present officials of both clubs cast that distinction in slightly different terms.

“Their group was founded in 1991. They’re now claiming to be us, basically,” said Robert Hornack, who, at 40 years old (“I’m in the process of aging out,” he explained) is the not-particularly-young chairman of the New York Young Republican Club, which is not affiliated with the state and county party. “We’re more ideological; we don’t bend as easily on matters of convenience,” he added. “They take their marching orders from the party leadership: Whatever the party says, goes.”

Thomas Robert Stevens, an attorney and past president of Mr. Hornack’s club, suggested that his former rivals are legally, if not morally, in error. “They got the color of authority by getting recognized by the formal structure of the state, but they don’t have the legal authority,” he said, referring to the other club’s use of the club name and logo. Mr. Stevens added that during his tenure, he and his colleagues often referred to the other group as the “puppet club.” Or, in more sinister tones, as the “puppet regime.”

That doesn’t make Dennis Cariello, the president of the affiliated club, very happy. “I dispute that, and I take great offense to it,” he said. Barbs aside, however, Mr. Cariello would rather be diplomatic than disparaging. “I never say a bad word about them. It’s my hope that they’ll still join us,” he said.

It’s baffling to see New York’s young Republicans so Balkanized. Shouldn’t the party’s next generation of partisans—young, energetic and vastly outnumbered in the city—begin their political lives on common ground?

Alas, their resentment is hereditary. The history of the two clubs reads like Hitchcock on acid, complete with an attempted frame-up for murder, a private detective, an episode on Phil Donahue’s talk show and even a bit of … dwarf bowling.

In the beginning, there was peace. The city’s first Young Republican Club was an effort at like-minded community, founded by 32 enterprising young men in 1911, with an inaugural dinner at which President William Howard Taft was the guest of honor. Over the following decades, the club built a roster and deepened its political influence, seeing dividends in the 1940’s, when several onetime club members were elected to prominent offices, including Jacob K. Javits and Thomas E. Dewey.

The seeds of acrimony were sown a few decades later, when the club’s former president, John V. Lindsay, ran for a second term as New York’s Mayor in 1969. Originally elected as a Republican, Mr. Lindsay lost the 1969 party primary to State Senator John Marchi of Staten Island. Lindsay ran on the Liberal Party line and won. His acolytes in the New York Young Republican Club stood behind him, failing to support Mr. Marchi, the party’s nominee. Republican elders were furious with the young whippersnappers, eventually leading to a schism between the club and the official G.O.P organization.

But the real break came in 1991, according to Mr. Stevens, who served as the unified club’s president from 1982 to 1988. At that time, the club had begun to splinter between young Republicans who sought a return to the official party, and a group led by Mr. Stevens, which favored the status quo. In the background, resentment simmered over Mr. Stevens’ public profile, which included an appearance on Donahue, during which he argued the merits of male virginity and touted his role as a leader of New York’s Young Republicans.

The rival factions wound up splitting into two separate clubs, one affiliated with the official party and the other independent.

The sharpest knives came out several years later. In 1993, after Mr. Stevens had been reinstated as president of the independent club, he was charged with conspiring to kill a leader of the rival group. Federal prosecutors had tapes of Mr. Stevens talking to a presumptive hit man— part of the deal involved laundering money through the bank account of his Young Republican club.

Mr. Stevens said he was framed by members of the other club, who had arranged his introduction to what turned out to be a phony hit man. To learn the truth, he said, he had hired a private investigator and began playing along with them.

The charges were dropped in 1994. Mr. Stevens had already moved on by that point. Earlier that year, he’d been making unlikely news as the legal counsel to Baird Jones. Mr. Jones, a Manhattan impresario and self-proclaimed king of the urban avant-garde, was fighting for his legal right to run dwarf-bowling events in bars.

Mr. Stevens’ tenure as president of the nonaffiliated Young Republican Club ended in 1998. In 2003, he left the G.O.P. altogether to become a devout Libertarian. Still, he sighed, “it would be wonderful if the two clubs got together and make peace.”

Three years ago, they tried. Leaders of the two clubs were negotiating a merger, but the agreement broke down. Officials from both sides remain tight-lipped about the details.

Name Tags, Anyone?

So nowadays, how can an armchair activist tell the two clubs apart?

Among some party officials, Mr. Hornack’s nonaffiliated club has earned a reputation as a conservative band of Republican renegades. Tempers have flared over that club’s endorsements, which included Herman Badillo rather than Michael Bloomberg for Mayor in 2001.

“The Hornack group, I guess, are considered the bad boys of the Young Republican Clubs by the establishment, because they’re very activist,” suggested Assemblyman Patrick Manning, a dark-horse candidate in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Mr. Manning added that, while Mr. Hornack’s group “treated me like family,” the state-affiliated club hasn’t returned his phone calls, even though it recently hosted one of his rivals, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, for an evening at the Harvard Club.

Mr. Cariello, the president of the state-affiliated club, bristles at the idea of an ideological distinction between the clubs and said that his organization welcomes Republicans of all stripes. “While perhaps the market can bear two Young Republican Clubs, I think we’d be much stronger if we were working in unison,” he told The Observer.

They’d also bicker less. In 2004, members of the affiliated club were welcomed as volunteers for the Republican National Convention. According to Mr. Hornack, his group was denied access. They watched the opening night from the depths of an Irish pub in Brooklyn and, later that week, held court in a Manhattan hotel.

Even minor slights can inflame tensions between the two clubs. During her recent campaign for City Council, Democrat Jessica Lappin sent out a mailer attacking her opponent, Republican Joel Zinberg, with a quote from Mr. Hornack. The quote, which was pulled from a political blog, accused Mr. Zinberg of cloaking his Republican affiliation to deceive voters, attributing that sentiment to “Robert Hornack, Chairman, NY Young Republican Club.” Needless to say, the state-affiliated Young Republicans were not pleased.

Considering the clubs’ contentious past, such squabbles seem petty, but they still bewilder a new generation of G.O.P. partisans.

“The story of the two Young Republican Clubs in New York reminds me of the story of the two Jews in Kabul after America invaded Afghanistan,” mused Karol Sheinin, a local blogger and Republican activist who attends both clubs’ events.

“The story came out that there were only two Jews living in Kabul, and they hated each other and wouldn’t walk on the same side of the street,” she continued. “There’s like 12 Republicans in New York. How come we can’t get along?”

“They were having a sack race for these Sri Lankan children who had been orphaned only weeks before by the tsunami, and I made the mistake of kind of offhandedly saying to Joe, ‘I could beat you,’” Mr. Israel recounted. “And Joe—he’s a nice guy but also is competitive—took me up on my offer. So there we were, in the middle of Sri Lanka, surrounded by dozens of orphans, having a sack race. And he beat me bad.”

Built like a linebacker, Mr. Crowley, a 43-year-old Irish-American from Woodside, would make a formidable foe in most picnic games. But his spontaneous sack racing, said Mr. Israel, demonstrated more than just athletic prowess: It typified the gregarious, affable personality that has earned Mr. Crowley the affection of many of his colleagues in Congress.

Mr. Crowley will soon find out just how many. Over the past 10 months, he has been campaigning to become vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, bagging supporters like Mr. Israel. The post, the fourth-ranking office in the party’s caucus, was originally slated to open up next November, but it became open earlier after the caucus chairman, Robert Menendez, was appointed to succeed Governor-elect Jon Corzine as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey. House Democrats voted unanimously to replace Mr. Menendez with their current vice chairman, Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat. That created the vacancy which Mr. Crowley would like to fill.

A vote on the post is scheduled for Feb. 1, when Congress reconvenes from the holiday recess. With the finish line suddenly in sight, Mr. Crowley has taken a solid lead. And he will continue to campaign, he said on Dec. 19. He squeezed in some stump time even as the House was meeting into the wee hours on Sunday night to discuss $40 billion in proposed budget cuts.

“There was a lot of discussion, a lot of talks going on,” he said. “You know, people are around waiting for bills to come up, and we’re sitting around—that type of thing,” he said.

Though caucus members will vote by secret ballot, that hasn’t stopped Mr. Crowley and his two opponents—Representatives Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and John Larson of Connecticut—from waging energetic campaigns, touting their credentials and marshalling public pledges of support from their colleagues. So far, Mr. Crowley is leading the way with 63 pledges. His backers include all of his Democratic colleagues from New York and a majority of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of 35 moderate to conservative Democrats. Meanwhile, Ms. Schakowsky has garnered 52 pledges and seems headed for a runoff with Mr. Crowley, while Mr. Larson is trailing, with 18 public pledges.

While ideology may play some role in the final outcome, observers of the race say that it’s more of a popularity contest, based on pals rather than policy.

“Anybody who ran for office as a student knows what that’s like,” laughed Amy Walter, who analyzes House elections for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “You know, pigeonholing kids in the cafeteria, making sure that you talk to all the sporty kids and the math kids.

“If it went purely on ideology,” she added, “then Schakowsky would be the favorite, because this is a majority liberal caucus.”

A Real Showman

Mr. Crowley has always been a crowd-pleaser. Before he arrived in Washington in 1998 as the handpicked successor of his mentor, former Congressman and current Queens County chairman Thomas Manton, he was a well-liked state legislator in Albany. He served there as a State Assemblyman for 12 years and was known for both his affable nature and his guitar chops in a legislative ensemble called the Budget Blues Boys. Now, say his colleagues, he’s counted among the more amiable members of Congress, apt to characterize floor debates with corresponding lyrics from the Who.

To the extent that ideology does play a role, the race resembles a minor referendum on diverging Democratic ideologies, with Mr. Crowley as a standard-bearer for the party’s more conservative pro-business faction.

Mr. Crowley, for example, was one of 73 Democrats who joined with Republicans to vote in favor of a controversial bankruptcy bill last spring. The bill, which limits debt relief and was favored by the financial-services industry, marked the broadest overhaul of American bankruptcy code in more than 25 years. Its passage pointed up a deep fissure in the House Democratic leadership, with Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a close ally of Mr. Crowley, leading support for the bill, which was passionately opposed by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, a close ally of Ms. Schakowsky. Arguing against the bill on the floor of the House, Ms. Pelosi said it “would bind hardworking and honest Americans to credit-card companies and other lenders as modern-day indentured servants.”

Viewed through that lens, the race for vice chair shapes up as a bruising battle of surrogates, a grudge match pitting the moderate Hoyer-Crowley Democrats against their more liberal (read: Pelosi-Schakowsky) brethren.

But not everyone is buying those ideological implications.

“We’re a party of strong individuals and we have disagreements in different areas, but overall I feel he’ll be an outstanding leader for the Democratic caucus, for New York and for the country,” asserted Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who is supporting Mr. Crowley from the more liberal end of the Congressional spectrum. “I don’t think it’s fair to call him anyone’s surrogate. People say that, but I think he’s his own person.”

Mr. Crowley has been lauded as a powerful fund-raiser and was selected by Ms. Pelosi to serve as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Business Council. He bristles at attempts to label him as ideologically conservative.

“On the scale of things, if you take me out of New York City, I’m a very progressive person. Whether it’s on choice, or on gay rights or gun control, I’m in the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” he said.

In 1999, when Hillary Clinton attended a fund-raiser for Mr. Crowley at the Plaza hotel, abortion-rights activists and the Congressman’s political opponents berated the then First Lady, accusing her of selling out to support a candidate that they considered pro-life.

Mr. Crowley rejects the pro-life label. Although he voted in favor of a 2003 bill prohibiting late-term abortions, he said that he supports Roe v. Wade. “I think there’s been a ­real positive movement in the Congressman’s views over the past seven years,” said Chris McCannell, Mr. Crowley’s chief of staff, to which the Congressman added: “I’ve matured.”

The landscape of his district has also changed. When his predecessor, Mr. Manton, was in Congress, the district was mostly in Queens and included a sliver of the Bronx. In recent years, however, redistricting has mixed in a larger slice of the Bronx, stretching from Co-op City to the Botanical Gardens. The Bronx now comprises more than half of the district.

Though Mr. Crowley has fended off political primaries in the past, an increasingly varied constituency could complicate his efforts to lock down support for his leadership campaign. It’s been suggested that when Mr. Manton retires from his post as Queens County chairman, Mr. Crowley might attempt to succeed him in an effort to shore up his base and protect his future. Publicly at least, Mr. Crowley won’t speculate that far ahead, and he says that he expects his 72-year-old mentor to stick around for a while. For now, he’d rather limit his focus on the vote for vice chair in February, promoting himself as a team player who can work with a broad spectrum of legislators.

“Over the last seven years, what I’ve been working on—whether I’ve been doing it knowingly or just instinctively—has been as a uniter, as a person who can unite my district in many respects, but also here in D.C., bring people together,” he said.

And it’s not the first time he’s embraced that conciliatory role. Back in 1999, Mr. Crowley attended a bipartisan Congressional retreat in Hershey, Penn., which was aimed at restoring civility in the wake of Bill Clinton’s bitter impeachment trial. There, he hit a similar theme, albeit more bluntly. “I hope by the end of this weekend, I can lay a big Hershey’s kiss on a Republican,” the Congressman said. “Preferably a female.”

“They were having a sack race for these Sri Lankan children who had been orphaned only weeks before by the tsunami, and I made the mistake of kind of offhandedly saying to Joe, ‘I could beat you,’” Mr. Israel recounted. “And Joe—he’s a nice guy but also is competitive—took me up on my offer. So there we were, in the middle of Sri Lanka, surrounded by dozens of orphans, having a sack race. And he beat me bad.”

Built like a linebacker, Mr. Crowley, a 43-year-old Irish-American from Woodside, would make a formidable foe in most picnic games. But his spontaneous sack racing, said Mr. Israel, demonstrated more than just athletic prowess: It typified the gregarious, affable personality that has earned Mr. Crowley the affection of many of his colleagues in Congress.

Mr. Crowley will soon find out just how many. Over the past 10 months, he has been campaigning to become vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, bagging supporters like Mr. Israel. The post, the fourth-ranking office in the party’s caucus, was originally slated to open up next November, but it became open earlier after the caucus chairman, Robert Menendez, was appointed to succeed Governor-elect Jon Corzine as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey. House Democrats voted unanimously to replace Mr. Menendez with their current vice chairman, Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat. That created the vacancy which Mr. Crowley would like to fill.

A vote on the post is scheduled for Feb. 1, when Congress reconvenes from the holiday recess. With the finish line suddenly in sight, Mr. Crowley has taken a solid lead. And he will continue to campaign, he said on Dec. 19. He squeezed in some stump time even as the House was meeting into the wee hours on Sunday night to discuss $40 billion in proposed budget cuts.

“There was a lot of discussion, a lot of talks going on,” he said. “You know, people are around waiting for bills to come up, and we’re sitting around—that type of thing,” he said.

Though caucus members will vote by secret ballot, that hasn’t stopped Mr. Crowley and his two opponents—Representatives Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and John Larson of Connecticut—from waging energetic campaigns, touting their credentials and marshalling public pledges of support from their colleagues. So far, Mr. Crowley is leading the way with 63 pledges. His backers include all of his Democratic colleagues from New York and a majority of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of 35 moderate to conservative Democrats. Meanwhile, Ms. Schakowsky has garnered 52 pledges and seems headed for a runoff with Mr. Crowley, while Mr. Larson is trailing, with 18 public pledges.

While ideology may play some role in the final outcome, observers of the race say that it’s more of a popularity contest, based on pals rather than policy.

“Anybody who ran for office as a student knows what that’s like,” laughed Amy Walter, who analyzes House elections for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “You know, pigeonholing kids in the cafeteria, making sure that you talk to all the sporty kids and the math kids.

“If it went purely on ideology,” she added, “then Schakowsky would be the favorite, because this is a majority liberal caucus.”

A Real Showman

Mr. Crowley has always been a crowd-pleaser. Before he arrived in Washington in 1998 as the handpicked successor of his mentor, former Congressman and current Queens County chairman Thomas Manton, he was a well-liked state legislator in Albany. He served there as a State Assemblyman for 12 years and was known for both his affable nature and his guitar chops in a legislative ensemble called the Budget Blues Boys. Now, say his colleagues, he’s counted among the more amiable members of Congress, apt to characterize floor debates with corresponding lyrics from the Who.

To the extent that ideology does play a role, the race resembles a minor referendum on diverging Democratic ideologies, with Mr. Crowley as a standard-bearer for the party’s more conservative pro-business faction.

Mr. Crowley, for example, was one of 73 Democrats who joined with Republicans to vote in favor of a controversial bankruptcy bill last spring. The bill, which limits debt relief and was favored by the financial-services industry, marked the broadest overhaul of American bankruptcy code in more than 25 years. Its passage pointed up a deep fissure in the House Democratic leadership, with Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a close ally of Mr. Crowley, leading support for the bill, which was passionately opposed by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, a close ally of Ms. Schakowsky. Arguing against the bill on the floor of the House, Ms. Pelosi said it “would bind hardworking and honest Americans to credit-card companies and other lenders as modern-day indentured servants.”

Viewed through that lens, the race for vice chair shapes up as a bruising battle of surrogates, a grudge match pitting the moderate Hoyer-Crowley Democrats against their more liberal (read: Pelosi-Schakowsky) brethren.

But not everyone is buying those ideological implications.

“We’re a party of strong individuals and we have disagreements in different areas, but overall I feel he’ll be an outstanding leader for the Democratic caucus, for New York and for the country,” asserted Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who is supporting Mr. Crowley from the more liberal end of the Congressional spectrum. “I don’t think it’s fair to call him anyone’s surrogate. People say that, but I think he’s his own person.”

Mr. Crowley has been lauded as a powerful fund-raiser and was selected by Ms. Pelosi to serve as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Business Council. He bristles at attempts to label him as ideologically conservative.

“On the scale of things, if you take me out of New York City, I’m a very progressive person. Whether it’s on choice, or on gay rights or gun control, I’m in the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” he said.

In 1999, when Hillary Clinton attended a fund-raiser for Mr. Crowley at the Plaza hotel, abortion-rights activists and the Congressman’s political opponents berated the then First Lady, accusing her of selling out to support a candidate that they considered pro-life.

Mr. Crowley rejects the pro-life label. Although he voted in favor of a 2003 bill prohibiting late-term abortions, he said that he supports Roe v. Wade. “I think there’s been a ­real positive movement in the Congressman’s views over the past seven years,” said Chris McCannell, Mr. Crowley’s chief of staff, to which the Congressman added: “I’ve matured.”

The landscape of his district has also changed. When his predecessor, Mr. Manton, was in Congress, the district was mostly in Queens and included a sliver of the Bronx. In recent years, however, redistricting has mixed in a larger slice of the Bronx, stretching from Co-op City to the Botanical Gardens. The Bronx now comprises more than half of the district.

Though Mr. Crowley has fended off political primaries in the past, an increasingly varied constituency could complicate his efforts to lock down support for his leadership campaign. It’s been suggested that when Mr. Manton retires from his post as Queens County chairman, Mr. Crowley might attempt to succeed him in an effort to shore up his base and protect his future. Publicly at least, Mr. Crowley won’t speculate that far ahead, and he says that he expects his 72-year-old mentor to stick around for a while. For now, he’d rather limit his focus on the vote for vice chair in February, promoting himself as a team player who can work with a broad spectrum of legislators.

“Over the last seven years, what I’ve been working on—whether I’ve been doing it knowingly or just instinctively—has been as a uniter, as a person who can unite my district in many respects, but also here in D.C., bring people together,” he said.

And it’s not the first time he’s embraced that conciliatory role. Back in 1999, Mr. Crowley attended a bipartisan Congressional retreat in Hershey, Penn., which was aimed at restoring civility in the wake of Bill Clinton’s bitter impeachment trial. There, he hit a similar theme, albeit more bluntly. “I hope by the end of this weekend, I can lay a big Hershey’s kiss on a Republican,” the Congressman said. “Preferably a female.”

“This is 11 in the morning, and I’ve got to tell you, knowing that it was too early for smothered pork and cheese grits made it taste much better,” Mr. Weld recalled. He described his meeting with Mr. Daniels—the two men are running for the Republican nomination for Governor—with equal relish.

“It was probably the best, most relaxed sit-down I’ve ever had with Randy,” Mr. Weld said. “Perhaps it was the setting—the food was really good.”

A few months ago, when Mr. Weld seemed poised to leap into the waiting arms of the state Republican Party, such a jovial, schmoozy meeting between gubernatorial hopefuls might have raised a few eyebrows. But now, pork in the morning is the least of his indignities: Over the past month, contention has enveloped the state Republican Party, and Mr. Weld, the party establishment’s favorite, has found himself begging for the support of every grumpy upstate-county chairman.

Mr. Weld has fallen into a widening gap in the state Republican Party, between his patron—lame-duck Governor George Pataki—and the ascendant Senate Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno. In the past, the Republican Party has been able to use its muscle to clear the field for its chosen candidate. This year, three other Republicans—former Assembly Minority Leader John Faso, State Assemblyman Patrick Manning and Mr. Daniels—have refused to step aside for Mr. Weld, and a fourth likely candidate, Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano, is weighing a run. To the discomfort of Mr. Weld’s supporters, Mr. Bruno has been leaving the field wide open and hinting that a mystery candidate may still enter the race and push Mr. Weld aside.

Mr. Bruno had held out hope that Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who had already blanketed the city and its suburbs with a slick and successful television campaign for his own re-election—would be his candidate for Governor. But the Mayor has finally convinced him that it’s not an option. “Mike has pretty firmly closed the lid,” Mr. Bruno conceded in an interview. But he is still holding out hope that a better candidate will emerge—hardly a vote of confidence for Mr. Weld, Mr. Golisano or the others.

“You know, there’s one fellow—and I’d say the chances of him running are probably less than 50 percent—but if he elected to run, the guy … would run right to the top of the list,” he told The Observer. “Our lives are strange, and timing in life is everything in politics—and you don’t know who’s sitting right there now pondering the potential of a run.”

Thanks for clearing that up, Senator!

For the moment, Mr. Weld still leads the pack, garnering 43.2 percent of a weighted vote of Republican county chairmen on Monday. But several key chairs with heavy votes—including those of Westchester, Suffolk, Nassau and Queens counties—either abstained from voting or didn’t attend the meeting. Together, their silence amounted to 44 percent of the weighted vote, which may, in part, be a testament to the work of Mr. Bruno, who had lobbied to postpone the meeting. The next official effort to settle a nominee before the September primaries will come at a G.O.P. convention this May.

“I think there’s still opportunity leading up to that point to build consensus. I mean, clearly, four to one—the majority of the chairs yesterday—were behind Governor Weld,” said Ryan Moses, executive director of the state Republican Party. “I think that moving forward, we’ll get some of the people who weren’t there, and some of the people who abstained will make their voices known, and then we’ll have even more clarity.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Weld’s distant runner-up, John Faso, who took 10.8 percent of the weighted vote, tried to spin the news from Albany. In a press statement following the Dec. 12 meeting, he touted the fact that 23 chairs had voted for him and 23 for Mr. Weld and declared the contest a tie. Pushing it one step further, he said in the release: “I am enormously grateful for today’s victory.”

The state Republican chairman, Stephen J. Minarik, scoffed at Mr. Faso’s math. “It’s sort of like saying that in the Presidential election, Delaware has the same number of electoral votes as Texas. It’s not really the reality,” said Mr. Minarik. He added that the vote had sounded a clear note of confidence for Mr. Weld, adding, “I think Bill Weld’s the best candidate, and we need the party to move on.”

Robert Ryan, a spokesman for candidate Randy Daniels, disagreed. He said that absences and abstentions made the vote in Albany more of a washout than a Weld-fest.

“The silence was deafening,” he told The Observer. “A loud and clear message was sent to the party, and to the leadership of the party, that there was a process that has been good over the years, and that process is a primary.”

Victory Denied?

Michael Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party, agreed that Mr. Weld hadn’t been a clear-cut winner. “Some major counties didn’t even participate, so I think it really depends what Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk do here. If those three counties went for Faso, then I guess Bill Weld would have a real problem, wouldn’t he?” Mr. Long said. “Weld was supposed to be the anointed candidate. I guess that didn’t work out. So if anyone lost yesterday, I think that Weld certainly didn’t win yesterday.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Faso—who had been telling the press for weeks that he would easily win the vote of the county chairs—softened his tone of victory by the day after the meeting.

“I think we’re going to have to have a rumble here over the next few months heading into the party convention and into a primary, and it’s a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Do we want to continue veering left so our policies are indistinguishable from the Democrats?” he asked. Moments later, he concluded, “I think that’s the overall message out of that meeting yesterday: There’s no consensus.”

Mr. Faso also said he’d raised around $40,000 at his first fund-raiser, which followed Monday’s vote at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany.

Mr. Weld and his rivals can at least take solace in looking one line down the ticket, to the Senate race, and knowing that it could be worse. Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, at first the party’s favorite, has moved from weakness to weakness. A friend, Michael Edelman, wrote on a Westchester political site on Dec. 12 that she had been “flattered, cajoled, and essentially snookered” into the race.

“It’s been like throwing a deer down a well,” said one Republican insider of the effect of Ms. Pirro’s performance on any attempt to challenge Mrs. Clinton. But he did see an upside for Mr. Weld, who has been dodging accusations that he mismanaged a trade school during his time in the private sector. “The best thing that’s happened to Weld is the Pirro implosion—there are only so many column inches.”

“This is 11 in the morning, and I’ve got to tell you, knowing that it was too early for smothered pork and cheese grits made it taste much better,” Mr. Weld recalled. He described his meeting with Mr. Daniels—the two men are running for the Republican nomination for Governor—with equal relish.

“It was probably the best, most relaxed sit-down I’ve ever had with Randy,” Mr. Weld said. “Perhaps it was the setting—the food was really good.”

A few months ago, when Mr. Weld seemed poised to leap into the waiting arms of the state Republican Party, such a jovial, schmoozy meeting between gubernatorial hopefuls might have raised a few eyebrows. But now, pork in the morning is the least of his indignities: Over the past month, contention has enveloped the state Republican Party, and Mr. Weld, the party establishment’s favorite, has found himself begging for the support of every grumpy upstate-county chairman.

Mr. Weld has fallen into a widening gap in the state Republican Party, between his patron—lame-duck Governor George Pataki—and the ascendant Senate Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno. In the past, the Republican Party has been able to use its muscle to clear the field for its chosen candidate. This year, three other Republicans—former Assembly Minority Leader John Faso, State Assemblyman Patrick Manning and Mr. Daniels—have refused to step aside for Mr. Weld, and a fourth likely candidate, Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano, is weighing a run. To the discomfort of Mr. Weld’s supporters, Mr. Bruno has been leaving the field wide open and hinting that a mystery candidate may still enter the race and push Mr. Weld aside.

Mr. Bruno had held out hope that Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who had already blanketed the city and its suburbs with a slick and successful television campaign for his own re-election—would be his candidate for Governor. But the Mayor has finally convinced him that it’s not an option. “Mike has pretty firmly closed the lid,” Mr. Bruno conceded in an interview. But he is still holding out hope that a better candidate will emerge—hardly a vote of confidence for Mr. Weld, Mr. Golisano or the others.

“You know, there’s one fellow—and I’d say the chances of him running are probably less than 50 percent—but if he elected to run, the guy … would run right to the top of the list,” he told The Observer. “Our lives are strange, and timing in life is everything in politics—and you don’t know who’s sitting right there now pondering the potential of a run.”

Thanks for clearing that up, Senator!

For the moment, Mr. Weld still leads the pack, garnering 43.2 percent of a weighted vote of Republican county chairmen on Monday. But several key chairs with heavy votes—including those of Westchester, Suffolk, Nassau and Queens counties—either abstained from voting or didn’t attend the meeting. Together, their silence amounted to 44 percent of the weighted vote, which may, in part, be a testament to the work of Mr. Bruno, who had lobbied to postpone the meeting. The next official effort to settle a nominee before the September primaries will come at a G.O.P. convention this May.

“I think there’s still opportunity leading up to that point to build consensus. I mean, clearly, four to one—the majority of the chairs yesterday—were behind Governor Weld,” said Ryan Moses, executive director of the state Republican Party. “I think that moving forward, we’ll get some of the people who weren’t there, and some of the people who abstained will make their voices known, and then we’ll have even more clarity.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Weld’s distant runner-up, John Faso, who took 10.8 percent of the weighted vote, tried to spin the news from Albany. In a press statement following the Dec. 12 meeting, he touted the fact that 23 chairs had voted for him and 23 for Mr. Weld and declared the contest a tie. Pushing it one step further, he said in the release: “I am enormously grateful for today’s victory.”

The state Republican chairman, Stephen J. Minarik, scoffed at Mr. Faso’s math. “It’s sort of like saying that in the Presidential election, Delaware has the same number of electoral votes as Texas. It’s not really the reality,” said Mr. Minarik. He added that the vote had sounded a clear note of confidence for Mr. Weld, adding, “I think Bill Weld’s the best candidate, and we need the party to move on.”

Robert Ryan, a spokesman for candidate Randy Daniels, disagreed. He said that absences and abstentions made the vote in Albany more of a washout than a Weld-fest.

“The silence was deafening,” he told The Observer. “A loud and clear message was sent to the party, and to the leadership of the party, that there was a process that has been good over the years, and that process is a primary.”

Victory Denied?

Michael Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party, agreed that Mr. Weld hadn’t been a clear-cut winner. “Some major counties didn’t even participate, so I think it really depends what Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk do here. If those three counties went for Faso, then I guess Bill Weld would have a real problem, wouldn’t he?” Mr. Long said. “Weld was supposed to be the anointed candidate. I guess that didn’t work out. So if anyone lost yesterday, I think that Weld certainly didn’t win yesterday.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Faso—who had been telling the press for weeks that he would easily win the vote of the county chairs—softened his tone of victory by the day after the meeting.

“I think we’re going to have to have a rumble here over the next few months heading into the party convention and into a primary, and it’s a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Do we want to continue veering left so our policies are indistinguishable from the Democrats?” he asked. Moments later, he concluded, “I think that’s the overall message out of that meeting yesterday: There’s no consensus.”

Mr. Faso also said he’d raised around $40,000 at his first fund-raiser, which followed Monday’s vote at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany.

Mr. Weld and his rivals can at least take solace in looking one line down the ticket, to the Senate race, and knowing that it could be worse. Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, at first the party’s favorite, has moved from weakness to weakness. A friend, Michael Edelman, wrote on a Westchester political site on Dec. 12 that she had been “flattered, cajoled, and essentially snookered” into the race.

“It’s been like throwing a deer down a well,” said one Republican insider of the effect of Ms. Pirro’s performance on any attempt to challenge Mrs. Clinton. But he did see an upside for Mr. Weld, who has been dodging accusations that he mismanaged a trade school during his time in the private sector. “The best thing that’s happened to Weld is the Pirro implosion—there are only so many column inches.”

Lifting his libretto from Man of La Mancha, Mr. Faso cast himself as Don Quixote and crooned a parody of “The Impossible Dream” at an annual dinner sponsored by the Albany press corps. His song was a paean to the unreachable Speaker’s seat, rendered somewhat unintelligible when he bungled parts of the script. The next day, Mr. Faso’s performance was panned by reporters—they’d been more impressed by a Star Wars skit that featured the Governor as Obi-Wan Pataki.

Now that he’s campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial nod, Mr. Faso, 53, is still trying to edge his way into the spotlight. But men with bigger names and fatter wallets have cast a shadow across his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld basks in the attention of his biggest backer, Republican State Committee chairman Stephen Minarik, and is also believed to be George Pataki’s tacit pick. Tom Golisano, the Rochester billionaire and perennial Independence Party candidate, is the favorite of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and is expected to enter the Republican race in January.

On Dec. 12, the state’s 62 Republican county chairmen are scheduled to convene in Albany and vote on consensus nominees for statewide office. Mr. Bruno has asked Mr. Minarik to postpone the vote but, as of press time, it was still on the calendar. Meanwhile, the very public spat between Mr. Bruno and Mr. Minarik over nominees has disgusted rank-and-file Republicans, who believe that their leaders are bowling for dollars while the party burns.

Keeping a respectful distance from the fray, Mr. Faso has so far refused to hit back, even after Mr. Minarik said that he “lives in la-la land.” Talking to The Observer on Dec. 5, Mr. Faso reiterated an earlier response: He has never been to la-la land but might consider a visit. “If there were any voters there, I’d be making a trip very soon,” he said with a laugh.

Indeed, Mr. Faso been making a lot of trips lately, tirelessly canvassing the state and trying to build a grass-roots base that money can’t buy.

“No one gets these things handed to them,” he said of the Republican nod. “You have to earn them.” But what about Mr. Weld and Mr. Golisano, both of whom, some would argue, are getting the silver-platter treatment?

“I don’t want to be the pundit or the prognosticator,” Mr. Faso replied. “I’m just out there talking about what my vision is for the state.”

Glitterati notwithstanding, Mr. Faso is in some ways the most qualified candidate in the Republican field, which also includes former Secretary of State Randy Daniels and Assemblyman Pat Manning. Only Mr. Faso has come within a whisker of winning statewide office in New York. In 2002, when he ran for State Comptroller with meager party support, little was expected of him. But Mr. Faso raised $7.5 million and lost with dignity to the overwhelming favorite, Democrat Alan Hevesi, by just 3 percent.

For the sake of party unity, Mr. Faso has also made the ultimate chivalrous sacrifice. In 1994, at the behest of Republican officials, he fell on his sword and gave up a vigorous campaign for State Comptroller so that Herb London, who had been jousting with gubernatorial candidate George Pataki for the Conservative Party line, could run for Comptroller instead.

“It’s water over the dam. I’m not resentful about that,” he said of Mr. London’s candidacy, which ended in defeat to H. Carl McCall. “The only regret is that, in ’94, I probably would have been elected; ’94 was a year when Republicans did very well in New York State and across the country. But I have no regrets.”

With martyrdom on his résumé, Mr. Faso should have earned some chits with state Republicans that he could cash in 2006. But cash, suggest party officials, is exactly Mr. Faso’s problem. On Nov. 30, Mr. Weld’s kickoff fund-raiser—a $1,000-per-head affair in the rooftop ballroom of the St. Regis Hotel—generated a reported $1.5 million in donations. Mr. Faso’s first fund-raiser, scheduled for Dec. 12 after the state committee vote, will be a more modest affair, with tickets starting at $150 apiece, at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany. Still, Mr. Faso said he has what it takes to go toe-to-toe with his opponents, and he’s prepared to raise $40 million to $50 million to run for Governor. He added that, since mid-September, he has already banked around $1 million.

Michael Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party, argued that the wealth gap isn’t everything. “I think he’d be an articulate spokesman for conservative Republican values,” he said of Mr. Faso. “I don’t believe that elections are totally about money. It’s about principles.”

So, four years after his dignified defeat at the hands of Mr. Hevesi, Mr. Faso is running again. He hasn’t officially announced his candidacy yet, but he has hired a staff and is campaigning wholeheartedly. He says he expects to win the Republican vote on Dec. 12 and also expects to be the Conservative nominee; in all his dogged glory, he has the hallmarks of a real contender. Still, the question looms large: Will he become the Don Quixote of state Republican politics?

“Clearly, the party leadership is looking for money and name, and the two guys with money and name are Golisano and Weld,” said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. “A guy like Faso, who is sort of an established institutional player who’s put in his dues, is sort of lost in that mix. It’s unfortunate that this gazillionaire era we’re entering into could freeze out a candidate like Faso in the very early stages.”

And there’s more than money in the mix. Republican leaders are concerned that, as New York becomes a deeper shade of blue, only a socially liberal candidate can prevail statewide. Mr. Faso disagrees. “I think that philosophy is what’s led to the Conservative and Republican base of the state, and left us in a position where we look like we have no philosophy,” he said.

An Extreme Case?

Mr. Faso has, in the past, been tarred as a right-wing extremist. During a 2002 interview with the Albany Times Union, Mr. Hevesi said of his opponent: “He’s a smart guy and very presentable, but he also believes Louis XIV was excessively liberal.”

Mr. Faso, who opposes late-term abortion and supports strengthening parental-notification laws, also left a lasting impression on the abortion-rights group NARAL, which bitterly opposed his candidacy in 2002.

“New Yorkers need to understand—and at the end of this campaign, will know—that John Faso is a threat to women’s health,” said Bob Jaffe, the deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, on Dec. 6. Mr. Jaffe also pointed to a transcript of Assembly floor remarks from April 10, 1987, which his organization still has on file. During that session, Mr. Faso described Roe v. Wade as a “black mark upon this country.”

As he prepares for his latest campaign, Mr. Faso said that the legal status of abortion in New York—at least in the broadest sense—“is not going to change, no matter who gets elected.” Taking that as the status quo, he would rather concentrate on his platform’s pocketbook issues, in particular making the state more fiscally competitive by cutting local taxes and bringing jobs back to New York.

But when it comes to fiscal matters, Mr. Faso’s opponents have questioned whether his current role as a registered lobbyist could compromise his ability to govern. Mr. Faso replies that he has no conflict of interest. In fact, he added, he has lobbied Congress on behalf of the state and the M.T.A. for federal transportation funding.

“Look, I’m a big boy—I understand the environment in which we operate,” he said. “Everyone is subject to having their business and professional lives opened up to scrutiny, and I anticipate that. But I also am not ashamed of anything.” He added that he had done “little, if any, lobbying of the state legislature,” and that his lobbying had maintained a federal focus.

Right now, the most important kind of lobbying for Mr. Faso and his competitors involves winning the hearts and minds of New York Republicans.

Among members of the party’s state committee, Mr. Faso named Onondonga County chairman Robert Smith among his strongest supporters. Mr. Smith, who spoke with The Observer on Dec. 5, said he’s still making up his mind. Though he considers Mr. Faso and Mr. Daniels to be “the two most credible candidates,” he added: “I honest to God don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.”

Lifting his libretto from Man of La Mancha, Mr. Faso cast himself as Don Quixote and crooned a parody of “The Impossible Dream” at an annual dinner sponsored by the Albany press corps. His song was a paean to the unreachable Speaker’s seat, rendered somewhat unintelligible when he bungled parts of the script. The next day, Mr. Faso’s performance was panned by reporters—they’d been more impressed by a Star Wars skit that featured the Governor as Obi-Wan Pataki.

Now that he’s campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial nod, Mr. Faso, 53, is still trying to edge his way into the spotlight. But men with bigger names and fatter wallets have cast a shadow across his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld basks in the attention of his biggest backer, Republican State Committee chairman Stephen Minarik, and is also believed to be George Pataki’s tacit pick. Tom Golisano, the Rochester billionaire and perennial Independence Party candidate, is the favorite of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and is expected to enter the Republican race in January.

On Dec. 12, the state’s 62 Republican county chairmen are scheduled to convene in Albany and vote on consensus nominees for statewide office. Mr. Bruno has asked Mr. Minarik to postpone the vote but, as of press time, it was still on the calendar. Meanwhile, the very public spat between Mr. Bruno and Mr. Minarik over nominees has disgusted rank-and-file Republicans, who believe that their leaders are bowling for dollars while the party burns.

Keeping a respectful distance from the fray, Mr. Faso has so far refused to hit back, even after Mr. Minarik said that he “lives in la-la land.” Talking to The Observer on Dec. 5, Mr. Faso reiterated an earlier response: He has never been to la-la land but might consider a visit. “If there were any voters there, I’d be making a trip very soon,” he said with a laugh.

Indeed, Mr. Faso been making a lot of trips lately, tirelessly canvassing the state and trying to build a grass-roots base that money can’t buy.

“No one gets these things handed to them,” he said of the Republican nod. “You have to earn them.” But what about Mr. Weld and Mr. Golisano, both of whom, some would argue, are getting the silver-platter treatment?

“I don’t want to be the pundit or the prognosticator,” Mr. Faso replied. “I’m just out there talking about what my vision is for the state.”

Glitterati notwithstanding, Mr. Faso is in some ways the most qualified candidate in the Republican field, which also includes former Secretary of State Randy Daniels and Assemblyman Pat Manning. Only Mr. Faso has come within a whisker of winning statewide office in New York. In 2002, when he ran for State Comptroller with meager party support, little was expected of him. But Mr. Faso raised $7.5 million and lost with dignity to the overwhelming favorite, Democrat Alan Hevesi, by just 3 percent.

For the sake of party unity, Mr. Faso has also made the ultimate chivalrous sacrifice. In 1994, at the behest of Republican officials, he fell on his sword and gave up a vigorous campaign for State Comptroller so that Herb London, who had been jousting with gubernatorial candidate George Pataki for the Conservative Party line, could run for Comptroller instead.

“It’s water over the dam. I’m not resentful about that,” he said of Mr. London’s candidacy, which ended in defeat to H. Carl McCall. “The only regret is that, in ’94, I probably would have been elected; ’94 was a year when Republicans did very well in New York State and across the country. But I have no regrets.”

With martyrdom on his résumé, Mr. Faso should have earned some chits with state Republicans that he could cash in 2006. But cash, suggest party officials, is exactly Mr. Faso’s problem. On Nov. 30, Mr. Weld’s kickoff fund-raiser—a $1,000-per-head affair in the rooftop ballroom of the St. Regis Hotel—generated a reported $1.5 million in donations. Mr. Faso’s first fund-raiser, scheduled for Dec. 12 after the state committee vote, will be a more modest affair, with tickets starting at $150 apiece, at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany. Still, Mr. Faso said he has what it takes to go toe-to-toe with his opponents, and he’s prepared to raise $40 million to $50 million to run for Governor. He added that, since mid-September, he has already banked around $1 million.

Michael Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party, argued that the wealth gap isn’t everything. “I think he’d be an articulate spokesman for conservative Republican values,” he said of Mr. Faso. “I don’t believe that elections are totally about money. It’s about principles.”

So, four years after his dignified defeat at the hands of Mr. Hevesi, Mr. Faso is running again. He hasn’t officially announced his candidacy yet, but he has hired a staff and is campaigning wholeheartedly. He says he expects to win the Republican vote on Dec. 12 and also expects to be the Conservative nominee; in all his dogged glory, he has the hallmarks of a real contender. Still, the question looms large: Will he become the Don Quixote of state Republican politics?

“Clearly, the party leadership is looking for money and name, and the two guys with money and name are Golisano and Weld,” said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. “A guy like Faso, who is sort of an established institutional player who’s put in his dues, is sort of lost in that mix. It’s unfortunate that this gazillionaire era we’re entering into could freeze out a candidate like Faso in the very early stages.”

And there’s more than money in the mix. Republican leaders are concerned that, as New York becomes a deeper shade of blue, only a socially liberal candidate can prevail statewide. Mr. Faso disagrees. “I think that philosophy is what’s led to the Conservative and Republican base of the state, and left us in a position where we look like we have no philosophy,” he said.

An Extreme Case?

Mr. Faso has, in the past, been tarred as a right-wing extremist. During a 2002 interview with the Albany Times Union, Mr. Hevesi said of his opponent: “He’s a smart guy and very presentable, but he also believes Louis XIV was excessively liberal.”

Mr. Faso, who opposes late-term abortion and supports strengthening parental-notification laws, also left a lasting impression on the abortion-rights group NARAL, which bitterly opposed his candidacy in 2002.

“New Yorkers need to understand—and at the end of this campaign, will know—that John Faso is a threat to women’s health,” said Bob Jaffe, the deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, on Dec. 6. Mr. Jaffe also pointed to a transcript of Assembly floor remarks from April 10, 1987, which his organization still has on file. During that session, Mr. Faso described Roe v. Wade as a “black mark upon this country.”

As he prepares for his latest campaign, Mr. Faso said that the legal status of abortion in New York—at least in the broadest sense—“is not going to change, no matter who gets elected.” Taking that as the status quo, he would rather concentrate on his platform’s pocketbook issues, in particular making the state more fiscally competitive by cutting local taxes and bringing jobs back to New York.

But when it comes to fiscal matters, Mr. Faso’s opponents have questioned whether his current role as a registered lobbyist could compromise his ability to govern. Mr. Faso replies that he has no conflict of interest. In fact, he added, he has lobbied Congress on behalf of the state and the M.T.A. for federal transportation funding.

“Look, I’m a big boy—I understand the environment in which we operate,” he said. “Everyone is subject to having their business and professional lives opened up to scrutiny, and I anticipate that. But I also am not ashamed of anything.” He added that he had done “little, if any, lobbying of the state legislature,” and that his lobbying had maintained a federal focus.

Right now, the most important kind of lobbying for Mr. Faso and his competitors involves winning the hearts and minds of New York Republicans.

Among members of the party’s state committee, Mr. Faso named Onondonga County chairman Robert Smith among his strongest supporters. Mr. Smith, who spoke with The Observer on Dec. 5, said he’s still making up his mind. Though he considers Mr. Faso and Mr. Daniels to be “the two most credible candidates,” he added: “I honest to God don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.”

“Albany’s my destination,” he told a reporter. “It’s where I want to be.”

But the road from Louisville to Albany has been potholed with problems for Mr. Weld, who served as the chief executive officer at Decker College, a for-profit trade school in Kentucky, from January to October. Within days of Mr. Weld’s departure, federal agents raided Decker as part of an investigation into allegations of student-loan fraud. The school shut down on Oct. 21 and declared bankruptcy this month, stranding hundreds of low-income students.

Details of the school’s collapse have been leaking out of Louisville. The story has followed Mr. Weld to New York, offering fodder to his Republican rivals in the race to succeed Governor George Pataki, who has chosen not to run for a fourth term next year.

A Republican close to Tom Golisano, who expects the Rochester billionaire to enter the Governor’s race in January, told The Observer that Mr. Golisano wouldn’t hesitate to transform the Decker debacle into a potent sound bite.

“If a man can’t run a junior college, how is he going to run the Empire State?” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If it were merely a situation of him running against three under-funded candidates, he might be able to withstand the issue, but Golisano will put in hundreds of millions of dollars to put that on TV,” he said.

And should Mr. Weld pass unscarred through a Republican primary, others warned that he may have to watch out for Decker Democrats.

“Those in the Democratic Party will certainly use this against Mr. Weld and the Republican Party if he is picked as the nominee,” said Republican state Assemblyman Patrick Manning of upstate Columbia County. Mr. Manning is competing for the G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination against Mr. Weld, former Secretary of State Randy Daniels and former Assembly Minority Leader John Faso. The winner will likely face Democrat Eliot Spitzer, currently New York State Attorney General, in the 2006 general election.

“I look forward to hearing more about what Mr. Weld knew, and what he did about it, and what he’s going to do to right the wrong done to these poor kids,” Mr. Manning told The Observer.

Michael Long, state chairman of the Conservative Party, also frowned on Mr. Weld’s Decker entanglements. In recent days, Mr. Weld has been courting Conservative Party activists (“I’m a lifelong outdoorsman and gun owner,” beckoned one letter) who, by and large, have been skeptical of what they perceive as Mr. Weld’s liberal social values.

“I don’t think that helps him,” Mr. Long said of Decker’s collapse. “I think the buck stops with the guy who’s in charge.”

Mr. Weld knows that his Kentucky troubles make easy bait. But sitting in a conference room at his new Lexington Avenue campaign headquarters on Nov. 22, the 60-year-old ruddy-cheeked Mr. Weld looked relaxed and cheerful.

His suit (charcoal, with pink pinstripes) and his tie (thin, salmon-colored; a relic from the Andover Shop) were in stark contrast to his surroundings. Apart from some thumb-tacked photographs and a wall of recessed one-way mirrors, the room was mostly bare.

“We’re just moving in still,” he explained. “We’re moving in furniture as people are hired. We’re very cheap!” The observation mirrors, he later noted, were from a previous tenant who ran focus groups.

As for his Decker troubles, Mr. Weld said, “Any political opponent would be crazy not to try and use this stuff.”

Earlier, he’d assessed his time at Decker, and suggested that he could not have altered the school’s eventual fate.

“I think back over this whole year—what would I have done differently?—because, of course, it’s been a tragedy for the students and the employees and everybody,” he said. “And I can’t think of any action that I would have taken differently, except to forgo the opportunity to go down there in the first place.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Weld has scaled back his work in the private sector to focus on his campaign. He stepped down from his role as a principal at Leeds Weld & Co., a private-equity firm specializing in for-profit educational ventures, in early September to become a senior advisor. This month, the firm changed its name to Leeds Equity Partners. Mr. Weld explained that he and the firm’s other principal, Jeffrey Leeds, thought the name change was appropriate because “I’m in the middle of a knockdown drag-out battle for Governor against the sitting Attorney General.”

Leeds Weld & Co. was Mr. Weld’s original link to Decker College.

In January 2002, Leeds Weld & Co. made a $30 million investment in Franklin Career Services, which entitled the firm to a 20 percent interest in Decker College when it was later acquired by other Franklin shareholders. Mr. Weld also purchased stock in Decker in 2005, and estimates his own holdings at 4 percent.

Even before he headed to Louisville in January, Decker’s Kentucky owners referred to Mr. Weld as the school’s interim chief executive officer. “It was strictly for outside purposes,” Mr. Weld said of the preliminary role, which, he added, was not a paid position. That changed, however, when he formally became chief executive officer in January. The post paid $700,000 a year, but was designed to be temporary, Mr. Weld said. His chief duty was hiring talent to fill the school’s top management positions, he said, though that role broadened when Decker came into conflict with the U.S. Department of Education.

On Sept. 30, the Department revoked Decker’s access to federal financial aid, claiming the school owed the government $7.2 million in Title IV refunds, on behalf of students who had dropped out.

Mr. Weld argued that, on the other side of the ledger, the Department of Education actually owed Decker approximately $11 million in Title IV federal aid for new students. He said that, despite his own best efforts at negotiating, the department would not release the difference, a net $4 million, which would have been enough to keep Decker afloat.

As for allegations of systemic fraud at Decker, which have surfaced in ongoing investigations by the Kentucky Attorney General’s office and the F.B.I., Mr. Weld noted, “I’m just here to say that’s not consistent with anything I ever saw, or indeed even heard about.”

But even if these explanations de-claw Mr. Weld’s political adversaries, it may be hard for him to pacify angry students caught in the wreckage at Decker, many of whom have been telling their stories to The Louisville Courier-Journal.

“If he can’t handle his business at a school, how can he handle being a Governor?” asked Kamara Colin, 23, a former Decker student and a mother of three, who spoke with The Observer from her home in Corydon, Ind., on Nov. 28. Ms. Colin said she’d taken out a $7,000 loan to pay her way through an associate’s-degree program; when Decker collapsed, that investment became worthless. Still working to pay back the debt, and temporarily ineligible for further financial aid, Ms. Colin said she had to start her degree from scratch at National College in Louisville.

“None of my credits were any good,” Ms. Colin said, adding: “I’m pissed because I went for nothing.”

Of the final outcome for Decker’s 3,800 students, Mr. Weld said, “Nobody feels worse than I do about the fact that these students are stranded. Nobody tried harder than I did to avoid this scenario.”

Regardless of how the Decker investigations unfold, Mr. Weld is expected to mount a vigorous campaign.

Campaign Moves Ahead

“Bill Weld’s the best candidate for this job. He’s the only candidate who’s going to win the race,” said Stephen Minarik, chairman of the State Republican Committee and one of Mr. Weld’s biggest boosters. “He’s going to raise the resources. He’s got a proven track record of leadership in an executive position. He’s got a great record for the issues that impact upstate, in particular the job issue.”

Mr. Minarik has scheduled a Dec. 12 meeting for the 62 Republican County chairs in an attempt to agree on a consensus nominee. He hopes they’ll pick Mr. Weld. That meeting, however, may not materialize. State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno has asked that it be postponed, and is reportedly urging Mr. Golisano to challenge Mr. Weld.

Meanwhile, Mr. Minarik has named Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor George Pataki and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani—a longtime friend of Mr. Weld—as other likely supporters for the candidate. But none of them has publicly declared a preference, and early rumors that Mr. Giuliani planned to endorse Mr. Weld at a Nov. 30 fund-raiser may be unfounded. A source close to Mr. Giuliani who spoke with The Observer said the former Mayor did not have plans to attend Mr. Weld’s fund-raiser.

To his friends, Mr. Weld—known in Massachusetts as “Big Red”—is a Renaissance man. Following stints as a federal prosecutor and the governor of Massachusetts, the quirky, Harvard-trained classicist made a name for himself as a private-equity investor on Wall Street. He launched a minor literary career with his 1998 political thriller, Mackerel by Moonlight, and played himself during a cameo appearance in the film Traffic. Through it all, he found time to nourish his love of the outdoors. Near the entrance to his campaign headquarters, and displayed more prominently than his autographed pictures of President George W. Bush, is a photo of Mr. Weld hoisting a massive lake trout—a record-breaking 16 pounds, by his reckoning—from the upstate waters of the Ausable River.

Unpredictable and even goofy, Mr. Weld once leaped fully clothed into the Charles River to demonstrate how clean it was. He has a taste for classic rock, particularly the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.

To his detractors, however, Mr. Weld is a dilettante, easily enraptured but quick to lose focus. Critics point to his aborted second term as the governor of Massachusetts. After winning re-election overwhelmingly in 1994, Mr. Weld left his post in 1997 to unsuccessfully pursue an ambassadorship to Mexico. Assessing Mr. Weld’s trajectory after 1994, The Boston Globe editorialized that he’d “slid downhill afterward, enjoying the bumps like a giddy child on a silver snow disk.”

Another Massachusetts governor—the Democrat who preceded Mr. Weld in office—seemed to share this view.

“He’s not serious, is he?” asked Michael Dukakis, addressing his successor’s Empire State ambitions. “I mean, he got so bored around here that he quit, wanted to go to Mexico. What’s he going to do in Albany, if Boston was so boring?”

“Albany’s my destination,” he told a reporter. “It’s where I want to be.”

But the road from Louisville to Albany has been potholed with problems for Mr. Weld, who served as the chief executive officer at Decker College, a for-profit trade school in Kentucky, from January to October. Within days of Mr. Weld’s departure, federal agents raided Decker as part of an investigation into allegations of student-loan fraud. The school shut down on Oct. 21 and declared bankruptcy this month, stranding hundreds of low-income students.

Details of the school’s collapse have been leaking out of Louisville. The story has followed Mr. Weld to New York, offering fodder to his Republican rivals in the race to succeed Governor George Pataki, who has chosen not to run for a fourth term next year.

A Republican close to Tom Golisano, who expects the Rochester billionaire to enter the Governor’s race in January, told The Observer that Mr. Golisano wouldn’t hesitate to transform the Decker debacle into a potent sound bite.

“If a man can’t run a junior college, how is he going to run the Empire State?” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If it were merely a situation of him running against three under-funded candidates, he might be able to withstand the issue, but Golisano will put in hundreds of millions of dollars to put that on TV,” he said.

And should Mr. Weld pass unscarred through a Republican primary, others warned that he may have to watch out for Decker Democrats.

“Those in the Democratic Party will certainly use this against Mr. Weld and the Republican Party if he is picked as the nominee,” said Republican state Assemblyman Patrick Manning of upstate Columbia County. Mr. Manning is competing for the G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination against Mr. Weld, former Secretary of State Randy Daniels and former Assembly Minority Leader John Faso. The winner will likely face Democrat Eliot Spitzer, currently New York State Attorney General, in the 2006 general election.

“I look forward to hearing more about what Mr. Weld knew, and what he did about it, and what he’s going to do to right the wrong done to these poor kids,” Mr. Manning told The Observer.

Michael Long, state chairman of the Conservative Party, also frowned on Mr. Weld’s Decker entanglements. In recent days, Mr. Weld has been courting Conservative Party activists (“I’m a lifelong outdoorsman and gun owner,” beckoned one letter) who, by and large, have been skeptical of what they perceive as Mr. Weld’s liberal social values.

“I don’t think that helps him,” Mr. Long said of Decker’s collapse. “I think the buck stops with the guy who’s in charge.”

Mr. Weld knows that his Kentucky troubles make easy bait. But sitting in a conference room at his new Lexington Avenue campaign headquarters on Nov. 22, the 60-year-old ruddy-cheeked Mr. Weld looked relaxed and cheerful.

His suit (charcoal, with pink pinstripes) and his tie (thin, salmon-colored; a relic from the Andover Shop) were in stark contrast to his surroundings. Apart from some thumb-tacked photographs and a wall of recessed one-way mirrors, the room was mostly bare.

“We’re just moving in still,” he explained. “We’re moving in furniture as people are hired. We’re very cheap!” The observation mirrors, he later noted, were from a previous tenant who ran focus groups.

As for his Decker troubles, Mr. Weld said, “Any political opponent would be crazy not to try and use this stuff.”

Earlier, he’d assessed his time at Decker, and suggested that he could not have altered the school’s eventual fate.

“I think back over this whole year—what would I have done differently?—because, of course, it’s been a tragedy for the students and the employees and everybody,” he said. “And I can’t think of any action that I would have taken differently, except to forgo the opportunity to go down there in the first place.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Weld has scaled back his work in the private sector to focus on his campaign. He stepped down from his role as a principal at Leeds Weld & Co., a private-equity firm specializing in for-profit educational ventures, in early September to become a senior advisor. This month, the firm changed its name to Leeds Equity Partners. Mr. Weld explained that he and the firm’s other principal, Jeffrey Leeds, thought the name change was appropriate because “I’m in the middle of a knockdown drag-out battle for Governor against the sitting Attorney General.”

Leeds Weld & Co. was Mr. Weld’s original link to Decker College.

In January 2002, Leeds Weld & Co. made a $30 million investment in Franklin Career Services, which entitled the firm to a 20 percent interest in Decker College when it was later acquired by other Franklin shareholders. Mr. Weld also purchased stock in Decker in 2005, and estimates his own holdings at 4 percent.

Even before he headed to Louisville in January, Decker’s Kentucky owners referred to Mr. Weld as the school’s interim chief executive officer. “It was strictly for outside purposes,” Mr. Weld said of the preliminary role, which, he added, was not a paid position. That changed, however, when he formally became chief executive officer in January. The post paid $700,000 a year, but was designed to be temporary, Mr. Weld said. His chief duty was hiring talent to fill the school’s top management positions, he said, though that role broadened when Decker came into conflict with the U.S. Department of Education.

On Sept. 30, the Department revoked Decker’s access to federal financial aid, claiming the school owed the government $7.2 million in Title IV refunds, on behalf of students who had dropped out.

Mr. Weld argued that, on the other side of the ledger, the Department of Education actually owed Decker approximately $11 million in Title IV federal aid for new students. He said that, despite his own best efforts at negotiating, the department would not release the difference, a net $4 million, which would have been enough to keep Decker afloat.

As for allegations of systemic fraud at Decker, which have surfaced in ongoing investigations by the Kentucky Attorney General’s office and the F.B.I., Mr. Weld noted, “I’m just here to say that’s not consistent with anything I ever saw, or indeed even heard about.”

But even if these explanations de-claw Mr. Weld’s political adversaries, it may be hard for him to pacify angry students caught in the wreckage at Decker, many of whom have been telling their stories to The Louisville Courier-Journal.

“If he can’t handle his business at a school, how can he handle being a Governor?” asked Kamara Colin, 23, a former Decker student and a mother of three, who spoke with The Observer from her home in Corydon, Ind., on Nov. 28. Ms. Colin said she’d taken out a $7,000 loan to pay her way through an associate’s-degree program; when Decker collapsed, that investment became worthless. Still working to pay back the debt, and temporarily ineligible for further financial aid, Ms. Colin said she had to start her degree from scratch at National College in Louisville.

“None of my credits were any good,” Ms. Colin said, adding: “I’m pissed because I went for nothing.”

Of the final outcome for Decker’s 3,800 students, Mr. Weld said, “Nobody feels worse than I do about the fact that these students are stranded. Nobody tried harder than I did to avoid this scenario.”

Regardless of how the Decker investigations unfold, Mr. Weld is expected to mount a vigorous campaign.

Campaign Moves Ahead

“Bill Weld’s the best candidate for this job. He’s the only candidate who’s going to win the race,” said Stephen Minarik, chairman of the State Republican Committee and one of Mr. Weld’s biggest boosters. “He’s going to raise the resources. He’s got a proven track record of leadership in an executive position. He’s got a great record for the issues that impact upstate, in particular the job issue.”

Mr. Minarik has scheduled a Dec. 12 meeting for the 62 Republican County chairs in an attempt to agree on a consensus nominee. He hopes they’ll pick Mr. Weld. That meeting, however, may not materialize. State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno has asked that it be postponed, and is reportedly urging Mr. Golisano to challenge Mr. Weld.

Meanwhile, Mr. Minarik has named Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor George Pataki and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani—a longtime friend of Mr. Weld—as other likely supporters for the candidate. But none of them has publicly declared a preference, and early rumors that Mr. Giuliani planned to endorse Mr. Weld at a Nov. 30 fund-raiser may be unfounded. A source close to Mr. Giuliani who spoke with The Observer said the former Mayor did not have plans to attend Mr. Weld’s fund-raiser.

To his friends, Mr. Weld—known in Massachusetts as “Big Red”—is a Renaissance man. Following stints as a federal prosecutor and the governor of Massachusetts, the quirky, Harvard-trained classicist made a name for himself as a private-equity investor on Wall Street. He launched a minor literary career with his 1998 political thriller, Mackerel by Moonlight, and played himself during a cameo appearance in the film Traffic. Through it all, he found time to nourish his love of the outdoors. Near the entrance to his campaign headquarters, and displayed more prominently than his autographed pictures of President George W. Bush, is a photo of Mr. Weld hoisting a massive lake trout—a record-breaking 16 pounds, by his reckoning—from the upstate waters of the Ausable River.

Unpredictable and even goofy, Mr. Weld once leaped fully clothed into the Charles River to demonstrate how clean it was. He has a taste for classic rock, particularly the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.

To his detractors, however, Mr. Weld is a dilettante, easily enraptured but quick to lose focus. Critics point to his aborted second term as the governor of Massachusetts. After winning re-election overwhelmingly in 1994, Mr. Weld left his post in 1997 to unsuccessfully pursue an ambassadorship to Mexico. Assessing Mr. Weld’s trajectory after 1994, The Boston Globe editorialized that he’d “slid downhill afterward, enjoying the bumps like a giddy child on a silver snow disk.”

Another Massachusetts governor—the Democrat who preceded Mr. Weld in office—seemed to share this view.

“He’s not serious, is he?” asked Michael Dukakis, addressing his successor’s Empire State ambitions. “I mean, he got so bored around here that he quit, wanted to go to Mexico. What’s he going to do in Albany, if Boston was so boring?”