New York politicians, with their easy access to the media, consistently dream about their prospects for national office. In 1964, former Mayor Robert Wagner thought he might be the Vice Presidential nominee, a position that went to Hubert Humphrey. Former Mayor John Lindsay made an ill-fated run for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Former Queens Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro ran as Walter Mondale's V.P. candidate in their failed 1984 bid. Mario Cuomo encouraged speculation about his Presidential plans when he almost filed papers to run in the 1992 New Hampshire primary. Even former Staten Island Congresswomen Susan Molinari, the keynote speaker at the 1996 Republican National Convention, thought she might be tapped for the Vice Presidential nomination. And current New York Governor George Pataki campaigned across the nation for George W. Bush, in part to gain exposure among Republican Party heavyweights.

Clearly there is no limit to the ambitions of New York politicians, and yet there is also no future for them in national office. The same can be said for politicians from Massachusetts. Not only has the nation's population shifted to the South and West, the cultural values of the Northeast and New England are increasingly driven by a zest for secular over spiritual values, and commercialism over community, that the rest of the nation considers offensive and threatening.

With the exception of Herbert Hoover, every President from Rutherford Hayes to Roosevelt was from the Northeast or Ohio. In fact, Ohio was once the principal source of Presidential candidates, not just a decisive source of electoral votes. But in the past half-century, California and Texas have produced the most Presidential candidates: Nixon started out as a Congressman and Senator from California, before being selected as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in 1952. Nixon did move to New York after he lost his 1962 bid to be governor of California, but his political team was largely drawn from California (Robert Finch, Murray Chotiner, H.R. Haldeman), and he established a summer White House in San Clemente, Calif. Texas Senator L.B.J. was chosen by John Kennedy to be his Vice Presidential nominee in 1960 in order to deliver Texas to the Democratic ticket; he went on to trounce Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Two-term California Governor Ronald Reagan won in 1980 and 1984, while George Herbert Walker Bush, the son of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, moved to Texas-where he failed in two bids for the Senate but won a House seat and established his business connections-before serving as Reagan's Vice President and defeating Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for the Presidency in 1988. His son, George Walker Bush, served as governor of Texas before defeating Al Gore in 2000.

Only two Democrats have won the Presidency since 1976: Jimmy Carter, a governor of Georgia, who defeated Gerald Ford, a Michigan Congressman who was appointed to the Vice Presidency after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign from office; and Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, who in 1992 defeated the first President Bush (with Ross Perot taking almost 20 percent of the vote) and then won re-election in 1996, when he ran against Bob Dole, a Senator from Kansas.

What's striking is that Americans have consistently rejected candidates from the Northeast, regardless of political party. Governor Tom Dewey of New York lost in 1944 and 1948; other notable Republicans, such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and former Pennsylvania Governor Bill Scranton, sought but failed to get the Republican nomination. The only New Yorker to hold national office in recent decades was Rockefeller. His Presidential aspirations were consistently rejected by the Republican Party, but he was chosen by Ford to be his Vice President, then dumped from the ticket in favor of Bob Dole in the 1976 election.

In recent years, the only New Yorkers to be put on the Republican ticket were former Congressmen from the Buffalo–Western New York area: Bill Miller in 1964 and Jack Kemp in 1996. And Buffalo is culturally and economically tied more to the industrial Midwest than to the Northeast. The last Massachusetts politician to be nominated on a Republican ticket was Henry Cabot Lodge, who ran with Nixon in 1960.

Even the Democrats have realized that the Northeast and New England are poor incubators for Presidential candidates. Ed Muskie, Paul Tsongas, Ted Kennedy, Bill Bradley and, more recently, Howard Dean were all unable to compete successfully for the Democratic Presidential nomination. And the failure of Mike Dukakis in 1988 should have been a warning that success in Massachusetts politics does not transfer to the national level. John Kerry, like Mr. Dukakis, was too cerebral and too liberal, values that are compatible with Massachusetts but not with the rest of the nation.

Al Gore presented himself as a Southerner, but he didn't even win his home state, since he was correctly perceived as someone raised in Washington, D.C.'s Fairfax Hotel and educated at Harvard. Though elected to the House and Senate from Tennessee, Mr. Gore was more a product of Washington society than of the South.

The best decision that George Herbert Walker Bush ever made was to move to Texas. Though Mr. Bush's father was a Wall Street investment banker who was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut, his son moved to Texas, where he established the political and financial ties that have nurtured his own and his son's careers.

Politicians learn how to communicate with voters early in their careers, when they discover what it takes to satisfy interest groups and what positions drive voters to the polls. A successful politician from the Northeast, regardless of party, faces intense pressures from groups supporting abortion, gay rights, gun control and minority rights.

Compare this with the Midwest or the South, where voters want to cut taxes, protect the right to bear arms and reduce the regulation of business.

It's striking that so much attention is now being given to the Presidential aspirations of two New York politicians: former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton. Mr. Giuliani, who brought crime down dramatically, was also a supporter of gay rights and pro-choice policies. Since Sept. 11, 2001, he has acquired a new political persona as "America's Mayor" and as a leader in the fight against terrorism. Although Mr. Giuliani's speech to the Republican National Convention was very well received, it is not clear whether his early positions will be acceptable to voters nationwide. And to succeed beyond New York, Senator Clinton will need to overcome conservative attempts to label her an ultra-liberal, despite her pro-military votes on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

New York is the nation's financial and cultural capital, and Massachusetts is home to the nation's leading colleges and universities, but these states are poor breeding grounds for nationally ambitious politicians. The values that are essential for success on the East Coast-intellect over faith, fashion over tradition and career over family-are precisely those that the nation's voters reject.

Mitchell Moss is Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

The pictures from Times Square told the story not simply of the re-creation of a famous patch of Manhattan real estate, but the re-creation of the city itself. What better place, after all, to celebrate the transition from the industrial age to the information age?

Even as the city marked the new millennium, Mayor Giuliani was announcing that more than 80,000 new jobs had been created in the city in 1999, a remarkable figure. It's hard to remember that just 10 years ago, the city was losing thousands of jobs every year, apartments were going unsold on Manhattan's West Side, and there was no new office construction in midtown Manhattan. When President Bush launched the Gulf War in 1990, the Dow Jones industrial average was almost 9,000 points less than it is today, and a charming house in the historic district of Sag Harbor could be bought for less than $250,000.

New York, a city built around a great natural harbor, was once the nation's leading industrial city. Only 50 years ago, more than a million people worked in the city's thousands of manufacturing plants. Today, manufacturing accounts for fewer than 250,000 jobs in the city. Cargo shipping, which long ago migrated from the Manhattan and Brooklyn shores to Port Elizabeth and Port Newark in New Jersey, has been superseded by underwater cables, satellites and microwave systems that allow information to move in, through and out of the city, quietly, invisibly and rapidly. Over the past two decades, New York's leading firms in book publishing, banking, television broadcasting and accounting have been taken over, merged and transformed into a new group of information producers that now define our economy: Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc., NBC, News Corporation, Condé Nast, Bertelsmann A.G., Bloomberg L.P., Reuters, KMPG, Deloitte Touche, along with lots of new firms such as Starmedia Network, Oxygen.com and Earthweb Network.

The city is undergoing a tremendous transformation, the likes of which we haven't seen since the early and mid-19th century, when the Erie Canal turned the city into the nation's commercial center and waves of immigrant groups transformed the population base. The same dynamics are at work in the 21st century, and the changes they will bring about may make the New York of 1990 unrecognizable to a New Yorker born in 2050.

The transition has been under way for some time, but certain events remind us of just how dramatically the city is changing. Just in time for the turn of the century, Consolidated Edison announced that it would shut down its old power plants on the East Side waterfront and sell the property to residential and commercial developers. The symbolism could not have been less subtle: New York's old industrial waterfront, which once housed factories, rail yards and power generators, is giving way to parks, recreation centers and housing to support Manhattan's information-age work force. New York, which spent most of the last 50 years trying in vain to link its citizens to its 578 miles of waterfront, finally is letting go of its industrial waterfront. The Con Edison sale and the continuing construction of the Hudson River Park indicate that New Yorkers are no longer willing to let the city wallow in the remnants of its industrial past.

A City Resurgent

There are many explanations for the city's impressive recovery from the economic doldrums of 1989-92. Republicans credit the dramatic improvements in public safety under the Giuliani administration. Democrats praise the tax increase and deficit reduction policies of the Bill Clinton-Alan Greenspan-Robert Rubin team, while others simply say the city's prosperity is linked to the rising stock market and the enormous profits generated by the financial services sector.

Fortunately, New York's renaissance is not the work of any one politician or public policy. The city is thriving because of our unique position as the global hub for information. New York's capacity to feed the world's growing appetite for information through voice, video and data systems has been and will continue to be the source of our economic strength in the next century. Advances in computer-based communications and the worldwide deregulation of media have eliminated the distinction between information and entertainment while raising the demand for both. In addition, a handful of global media organizations based in Manhattan is increasingly responsible for the information that is distributed around the world.

What's striking about New York is that the city's economic transformation has occurred without any infusion of Federal funds or the presence of a major science and engineering institution. In fact, the rise of the city's information economy has occurred without any major help from the state or Federal government. City Hall has been instrumental, however, in making it easy to convert old industrial buildings to high-tech activities and in providing tax incentives for developers who rewire and renovate old office buildings to accommodate the needs of small start-up firms.

What's especially striking has been the absence of a prestigious scientific institution to help shape and influence the city's information industry. While New York has an abundance of medical schools, it is notably weak in the applied sciences and engineering. Unlike Boston, which has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and California, which has Stanford University, New York's intellectual infrastructure is obsolete. Our educational institutions are still wedded to the welfare state. We produce an excess of social workers and therapists and too few computer scientists and programmers. (Admittedly, we do have first-rate schools of business and the arts, which have been essential to the rise of New York's information industry, providing graphic artists and designers as well as innovative entrepreneurs and creative financiers.)

The secret to New York's success has been its ability to harness its strengths in finance and entertainment to create new forms of electronic production and distribution. For example, when MTV was created in New York in the early 1980's, skeptics said nobody would watch music videos. Today, MTV is one of the city's best known companies, exporting its programs around the world and attracting hundreds of teenagers to its studio on Broadway.

The Bloomberg terminal, invented by Michael Bloomberg to deliver information instantaneously to investors and financial institutions that formerly had to rely on printed materials or stockbrokers, is another example of how New York has been a pioneer in information technology. With 100,000 Bloomberg terminals located around the world, Bloomberg L.P. has evolved into a financial information giant, with its own radio and television programs transmitted in seven languages. Bloomberg and MTV demonstrated the city's strengths in the new information-age economy.

Leftover Baggage?

One of the most persistent themes among technological forecasters is the belief that cities, in the words of George Gilder, "are leftover baggage from an industrial era." M.I.T.'s leading information guru, Nicholas Negroponte, has claimed that "the post-information age will remove the limits of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place, and specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible." Clearly, some of today's older cities are anachronisms, unable to compete in the new economy. But New York's revival is proof that there is no substitute for face-to-face exchanges, especially in an age of advanced telecommunications. That is New York's singular advantage over any other city in North America. The concentration of talent-whether in finance, fashion, advertising or media-makes Manhattan the most efficient place for those firms that depend on direct human interaction. In addition, as long as the rest of the nation consists of so-called "edge cities" with little opportunity for random exchanges among competitors and business associates, New York will maintain its unique advantages.

Simply put, that's why Manhattan has 2.4 million jobs; why 88 percent of the wages earned in New York City are earned in Manhattan, and why Manhattan has the largest concentration of college graduates residing on any island in the world. Information-based industries depend on interaction, to test ideas, to refine concepts, to develop new services. And Manhattan, with its rich mixture of bars, restaurants, gymnasiums and office buildings, makes it easy to stay in contact, through both planned and spontaneous meetings. That's why people are willing to commute such long distances to work in Manhattan, from Philadelphia, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The desire to be close to Manhattan has been a vital factor in reviving Brooklyn's middle-class neighborhoods, such as Park Slope, Fort Greene and Cobble Hill. It has also led to the influx of new residents into industrial areas such as Williamsburg, Red Hook and Long Island City. Ironically, the outer boroughs are becoming more, rather than less, important, as bedroom communities, an alternative to the inner ring of aging suburbs.

Most important, approximately 35 percent of the city's population is foreign-born, and more than half the city's children are either foreign born or the children of foreign-born adults. According to the New York City Planning Department, half of the city's new immigrants from 1995 to 1999 are from Asia and Europe. With strong technical skills, these children will be the future work force for the city's new information-intensive industries.

Ever Upward!

There are plenty of cynics who are waiting for the stock market to collapse, for the Dow Jones to drop to 5,000, and for housing prices to crash. They believe that New York's boom is inextricably linked to financial markets, and therefore will end-painfully, predictably and soon. Certainly, the excessive enthusiasm for Internet stocks eventually will dampen, but there is no reason to believe that New York's future is tied to the Nasdaq or any other stock market index. The city's future is based on a broader and growing demand for information-to help understand the complex character of the world-and the desire for entertainment to escape from those complexities.

As long as New York continues to invent new ways for people to be informed and entertained, the city will flourish in the new century.

Most of the lucky young men who play baseball for a living in the Bronx reside in New Jersey. Almost half the fans who watch the young men live in the northern suburbs. The Yankees' principal owner, George Steinbrenner, lives in Tampa, Fla. And the visiting teams stay in Manhattan when they play a series with the Yankees.

Is there anyone who can explain what the Yankees do for the Bronx, except provide seasonal jobs for vendors, car jockeys and trinket hawkers? Anybody familiar with Yankee Stadium knows that fans don't tend to take strolls through the neighborhood before or after games. That's not a reflection on the neighborhood itself; it's just that the fans don't live there. They're in a hurry to get home. Maintaining the tradition of Yankee Stadium is a worthy goal, but why are Bronx politicians so amenable to renovating a building that is used an average of fewer than two days a week?

Consider the Bronx: More than 40 percent of the borough's adults over age 25 do not have a high school diploma, and 43 percent of the borough's children live in poverty. The Bronx has the city's highest unemployment rate. Clearly, housing, schools, job training and small businesses will do more to help Bronx residents than a baseball stadium surrounded by parking lots. Why don't Bronx politicians leverage their support for a renovated stadium with new public funds that might actually make a difference for their constituents?

And then there's the question of how much baseball really means, especially to the immigrants of the Bronx. Granted, many hail from Latin America, where baseball is popular. But America's national pastime pales in comparison to the immigrants' passion for soccer.

With the World Cup under way in France, it's worth remembering that soccer, not baseball, is the great global sport, and, in fact, it's vital to the city's continued role as the self-proclaimed capital of the world. Billions of people are caught up in the tournament in France, including the mosaic of immigrant groups that have revitalized neighborhoods in all five boroughs. And yet the city plans to build new minor-league baseball stadiums on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, instead of looking to the future and building soccer fields for the city's new immigrant population.

Any evaluation of the recreational needs of New York in the 21st century has to take soccer into account. If City Hall had the vision, it could foster soccer as the new urban pastime, perhaps fostering competitive rivalries between boroughs or neighborhoods similar to rivalries in Europe and South America.

Manhattan-based politicians may not realize it, but the city's soccer fields are filled to capacity and in desperate need of expansion. Ironically enough, around the country politicians recognize the increasing importance of soccer even in middle-class suburbs-that's where all those so-called "soccer moms" supposedly live. And yet here in multicultural New York, politicians still consider soccer to be a foreign game.

Let Him Spend It!

Eliot Spitzer, the 39-year-old lawyer seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for Attorney General, is being unfairly criticized for spending his own money in his quest for elective office. What's wrong with spending family money on a political campaign? The voters are fully capable of choosing candidates regardless of personal wealth-just look at the recent gubernatorial primaries in California, where millionaire Democrats Jane Harman and Al Checchi lost despite spending millions of their own money.

Actually, there is something endearing about a politician who doesn't have to beg for money or worry about offending would-be donors. There are not enough wealthy people like Mr. Spitzer who are willing to subject themselves to the day-to-day grind of a political campaign, who want to do more with their lives than blow the family fortunes on trophy spouses, beachfront estates or drugs.

Self-righteous political prudes resent the wealthy in politics. But New York voters know better. That's why we've had such governors as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller.

Mr. Spitzer should be free to spend his inheritance as he sees fit. It shouldn't be an issue in the campaign.

Food for Thought

Food vendors thrive in midtown Manhattan because they are the only dining option for working people who don't have expense accounts. The absence of alternatives (except for the fast-food chains) isn't hard to explain: Ever since the City Planning Commission began giving financial incentives for construction of massive outdoor plazas, there has been a shortage of street-level retail space in Manhattan.

No wonder there are few affordable restaurants in Manhattan. And with rents rising, even the upscale eateries are wondering how they can afford to stay in their current locations. The solution to the vendor-congestion problem is not Giuliani-style prohibitions, but more street-level retail space so that all kinds of shops, and not just Disney stores and Hard Rock Cafes, can thrive in Manhattan.

Terry Golway is on vacation.