The first decade of the 21^st Century has been less than kind to New York sports fans. Yes, there was that bright shining moment in Arizona a couple of years ago when the Giants won an improbable Super Bowl championship at the expense of the New England Patriots. And, of course, across the Hudson River there’s a hockey team that has achieved a memorable feat or two since the turn of the millennium, although only members of the charming but pitifully small cult of hockey seem aware of the existence of the New Jersey Devils.

            For the most part, though, it’s been all downhill around these parts since the 2000 World Series, when the Yankees beat the Mets in an authentic Subway Series. The Yankee victory capped an eventful decade that saw the Giants win a Super Bowl (1991), the Rangers (!) and Devils win back to back Stanley Cups (1995 and 1995), and the Yankees win four world championships.

Since then, however, the Yanks have lost two World Series, the Mets have underachieved spectacularly, the Knicks and Rangers have declined precipitously and the Jets have retained their image of perpetual heartbreakers. Even the Giants looked like a team in decline in last season’s playoff lost to the Eagles, raising doubts about whether their young quarterback Eli Manning has another ring in him.

As if to drive home the whole declension thing, last week’s faux Subway Series had all the charm and tension of a consolation round in the World Baseball Classic. Neither team was in first place; worse, their hated rivals—the Red Sox and the Phillies -- were ahead of them. The Yankees won two out of three but could hardly be satisfied with their performance. As for the Mets, well, they lost one game when their second baseman, Luis Castillo, dropped a pop-up, and they lost another when their ace pitcher, Johann Santana, served up batting practice.

So if you are a sports fan in New York and you are scouring a barren landscape in search of excellence—world-class, history-making excellence—relax. Shrug off those dropped pop flies, those gruesome earned run averages, those bitter premonitions of another disappointing fall and winter.

Tiger Woods is in town. And it shouldn’t matter if your idea of an oxymoron is the television announcer’s use of the phrase “golf action.” If you appreciate epoch-defining talent, if you believe that the world’s greatest stars deserve the world’s greatest stage, it is your duty as a New Yorker to embrace the planet’s most-famous athlete as he seeks to win the United States Open for a second time at Bethpage Black on Long Island.

More than a generation ago—a lifetime ago—it was said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for General Motors. Today the measure of corporate athleticism, or athletic corporatism, is not the Yankees, but Tigers Woods Inc. Rooting for him is like rooting for Microsoft. He is a walking board room. He can be joyless. He is determined to wipe out, not simply defeat, the competition. But he also happens to be a talent like no other in his chosen line of work. New York likes to think of itself as the place where talented people come to achieve great things. That being the case, Tiger Woods should be the city’s unofficial entry at Bethpage beginning Thursday.

In the lead-up to this week’s business, Phil Mickelson was said to be New York’s sentimental favorite, in part because of the recent announcement that his popular wife, Amy, is suffering from breast cancer. Even before that news, the enigmatic lefty was considered a virtual hometown hero based on the reception he received at Bethpage in 2002, when fans serenaded him with a raucous version of “Happy Birthday” on the 17^th green of the final round. It was a nice gesture, for sure, but it was meant to cheer him up, not cheer him on. By the time he hit his tee shot on No. 17 in the red-tinged dusk of championship Sunday, Mickelson’s chances of overtaking Woods had disappeared like a wayward tee shot in ankle-deep rough. A few ill-timed bogeys dispatched him to runner-up status, a place he has maintained for most of this decade while Woods has piled up enough hardware to fill a big-box store.

It pains me to admit as much, for I’ve developed an inexplicable attachment to Mickelson based on our shared left-handedness -- we are a small band of brothers, we lefty golfers—and his generosity with fans. Woods passes through a crowd without making eye contact. Mickelson passes through a crowd without missing an outstretched hand, or so it seems.

But rooting for Mickelson is not for the faint of heart—a lead in his hands is no safer than it is in Yankee Stadium, baseball’s answer to Cape Canaveral. And as Mickelson edges closer to the great sporting divide—age 40—his best years may be behind him. He has never emerged to be Tom Watson to Tiger’s Jack Nicklaus, although, to be fair, nobody has. In golf, there is Tiger Woods, and there is everybody else. Even Roger Federer, the Tiger Woods of tennis, has had to face down serious competition over the last two years. Tiger is the lord and master of his sport, the stuff of legend.

Mickelson will tug at my golfer’s heart this week, but I’ll be cheering for Tiger--inaccessible, inhumanly focused Tiger--and for the kind of talent that comes around once in a lifetime.  Who knows when New York will get another chance to see Tiger in his prime? After four U.S. Opens in the area in this decade, it’s unlikely that we’ll see another any time soon. Tiger is 33 years old now. He occasionally pulls out a 5 wood, a classic old man’s club, and it has been years since he was the tour’s most-impressive driver of the ball. If seven or eight years pass before he comes this way again, he’ll be on the back nine of his historic career.

So if you’re looking for the sort of brilliance that reminds you why you cheer, and why you care, put aside those box scores this week and spend some quality time in front of a television set. Watch the guy who wears a red shirt on Sunday. There’s nobody like him in the world.

That might have been a challenge if Cardinal Egan had created the larger-than-life persona of his own predecessor, Cardinal John O’Connor, who died in 2000 at the age of 80 after a 16-year tenure. But Cardinal Egan never made it his business to dominate the news cycle, and never seemed comfortable with the media, as O’Connor was. (He was, his supporters would say, too busy straightening up the financial difficulties that O’Connor, never known as a bottom-line cleric, left behind.)

Cardinal Egan himself has hinted that he was conscious of the shadow cast by his formidable predecessor. Recently, the cardinal talked about the legendary Archbishop John Hughes, who built numerous schools, hospitals and other institutions during his stormy, memorable tenure from 1842 to 1864. He said he felt no small sympathy for Hughes’ successor, the dimly remembered Cardinal John McCloskey, who reigned from 1864 to 1885. It was McCloskey, Cardinal Egan wryly noted, who had to figure out how to pay for John Hughes’ building boom. As they say in Rome, touché!

Although Cardinal Egan apparently will continue to live in New York, he doesn’t figure to overshadow his successor as O’Connor did from the grave during the cardinal’s nine-year tenure. This will allow Archbishop Dolan to pursue his own priorities. They ought to include:

• Putting the bully back into the pulpit. The archbishop of New York is not the head of the American Catholic Church, but when he speaks, the nation listens. Cardinal Egan’s reticence to seize the opportunity to teach, proclaim and witness suited his retiring, administrative personality. But another long period of silence from St. Patrick’s Cathedral will be demoralizing for those who look to Fifth Avenue for moral leadership.

• Talking to the priests and nuns. There are a lot fewer of them now than when O’Connor became archbishop in 1984, and their numbers continue to dwindle. But they remain the foot soldiers of the archdiocese. Their work can be lonely and difficult. The new archbishop should remind them that their labors are not unappreciated.

• Rethinking the building blocks of Catholic education. Perhaps it’s time to concede that the archdiocese can no longer afford to educate large numbers of non-Catholic students. Converting inner-city Catholic schools to charter schools, as the Brooklyn Diocese seeks to do, may offer parents, students and teachers an alternative to outright closures, and may allow the new archbishop to deploy resources toward the education of Catholic students, who, after all, ought to be the system’s first priority.

• Interacting in a meaningful way with the laity. Cardinal O’Connor was popular, but not especially accessible to the average Catholic layperson. Cardinal Egan clearly was not cut out for retail religious politics. The new archbishop is said to be of the gregarious sort. (Some accounts link this character trait to his ethnicity—do other groups have certain identifiable character traits?) That trait could be put to good use through regular meetings with the people in the pews, whether in public or in private.

• Remembering that the New York Archdiocese is, and always was, an immigrant church. The leader of New York’s Catholics can and should be an advocate for all immigrants, not just Catholics. But he also must bear in mind that the New York landscape is filled with quiet memorials to Catholic immigrants of the past. That includes churches like St. Brigid’s in the East Village, which Cardinal Egan tried, regrettably, to close and tear down. Archbishop Dolan should avoid such lapses.  

People forget that even media-savvy, charismatic John O’Connor had his share of missteps early on. Archbishop Dolan no doubt will make a few mistakes early on as well. But he’s here for the long haul—he won’t reach retirement age for another 16 years. His response to today’s challenges will help determine the church’s role in New York’s civic life in the 21st century.

editorial@observer.com

In 10 months, the nation will celebrate, if that’s the proper word, the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Depression. A lot can happen (a lot had better happen) between now and Oct. 24, the date in 1929 when the stock market began its catastrophic slide. One can only hope that when we reach that historic milestone, we’ll still think of the Depression as the nation’s greatest economic catastrophe. If not—well, buddy, can you spare a dime?

Comparisons between today’s disasters and yesterday’s are so ubiquitous that one half-expects to turn on the radio and hear Fred Allen skewering greedy CEOs. The bank failures, the corporate collapses, the despair of the unemployed—yep, it’s that ’30s show all over again.

In keeping with the theme, Barack Obama’s election has inspired comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in 1932, when the nation rallied to a message of hope in the midst of ruin. And if Mr. Obama is the new Roosevelt, then his plans for a massive stimulus package must be the new New Deal.

And what of the outgoing president, George W. Bush? Two words come to mind: Herbert Hoover. It’s a tempting comparison: Like Hoover, Mr. Bush will leave office as a reviled and discredited public figure, destined to become a tackling dummy for a generation of Democratic presidential contenders.

But that formula isn’t quite fair—to Hoover. As historian William Leuchtenburg reminds us in his timely study of Hoover’s life, the man who presided over the hardest of hard times in the early 1930s was, until that moment, one of the most admired figures in the world. It could and indeed should be said of Herbert Hoover that few people in the 20th century did more than he to save other human beings from starvation and deprivation. His work as a relief administrator during and after World War I earned him the title of the “Great Humanitarian,” as well as the respect of muckraker Ira Tarbell, union organizer John L. Lewis and, wouldn’t you know, an ambitious New Yorker named Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Mr. Leuchtenburg writes of Hoover’s efforts during the war, “At its peak, his organization was feeding nine million Belgians and French a day. … Under a ‘soupe scolaire’ program, some two million children got a hot lunch of filling vegetable soup with white bread, and, thanks to Hoover, cocoa too.”

And what was Mr. Bush doing at a similar stage in his life? Presiding over a mediocre baseball team, overcharging fans for hot dogs and beer and trading away his franchise’s brightest star, Sammy Sosa. A great humanitarian, indeed.

In a sense, though, Hoover’s administration of relief programs and Mr. Bush’s part-ownership of the Texas Rangers from 1989 to 1998 are comparable because of the myths both men fashioned out of their experience. Hoover decided, against the evidence and his earlier critiques of laissez-faire political economy, that the success of his relief operations was a tribute to voluntarism and private initiative, not government intervention. But, as Mr. Leuchtenburg points out, nearly “four out of every five dollars Hoover spent came out of government treasuries. Of the $12 million required each month to feed the Belgians, $10 million were provided by British and French officials.” Charitable contributions to Hoover’s relief efforts, Mr. Leuchtenburg writes, accounted for “only 4.5 percent of the funds” he distributed. While he fed the Belgians, he opposed spending government money to put them to work. “I cannot see anything but social harm in giving workmen payment as a right for idleness,” he told Belgian officials. If nothing else, let it be said that Hoover treated American workers no differently than he did those in Belgium.

As for Mr. Bush, the tidy profit he made from his purchase and sale of shares in the Rangers (he bought in with $600,000 of borrowed money and sold for $15 million nine years later) apparently convinced him of the merits of free enterprise—never mind that taxpayers built his team a new stadium and other amenities that drove up the team’s value and led to the future president’s windfall. Mr. Bush’s emphasis on private charities (remember the faith-based initiative?) and his slash-and-burn policy toward all manner of regulation would have cheered Hoover’s icy demeanor. Both men—the humanitarian and the frat boy—somehow managed to persuade themselves that their success had nothing to do with the generosity of taxpayers and public treasuries.

These attitudes, needless to say, influenced public policy. Mr. Leuchtenburg, a prolific author best known for his studies of the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal, shows how Hoover’s carefully constructed fictions left him unprepared for a catastrophe that should have seemed familiar.

While he may have been an aloof know-it-all who made himself few friends in Washington (Mr. Leuchtenburg is persuasive on this score), Herbert Hoover understood something about human suffering, and not just from observation. Orphaned at age 10, separated from his two siblings and reared by a humorless uncle, Hoover was on far more intimate terms with despair and poverty than his future antagonist, Roosevelt, ever was. F.D.R. needed his wife, Eleanor, to show him how the other half lived; Hoover experienced it firsthand. Mr. Leuchtenberg notes that only once did Hoover refer publicly to his childhood, telling an interviewer in 1928, “You see, I was always hungry then.”

THIS IS HARDLY THE Herbert Hoover preserved in American folk memory. Today, the mere mention of his name conjures images of a coldhearted bureaucrat indifferent to the plight of millions who were hungry in the early ’30s. When Dick Cheney tried in vain to win Republican support for the auto company bailout last month, he warned Senators that they would be seen as neo-Hoovers willing to put ideology ahead of humanity. Too bad none of the Senators in question has ever exhibited a sense of irony, for it seems clear that the vice president himself has emerged as the new Hoover, a whipping boy for Democrats yet unborn. Forget Mr. Bush: It’s Mr. Cheney who’s emerged as the snarling face of this latest failure of so-called free-market capitalism.

Unlike the vice president, Herbert Hoover’s heart bled for the world’s victims, especially children. He stood accused of propping up Bolshevism in 1921 when he organized emergency food supplies for famine victims in the Soviet Union. “Twenty million people are starving,” he told a critic, his fist pounding a desk. “Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” And so they were.

The Herbert Hoover who emerges in Mr. Leuchtenburg’s telling knew how to respond to humanitarian emergencies. He knew how to feed the hungry. He knew how to marshal resources, cut through red tape and get help to those who needed it. And he knew that kids needed not just soup and bread, but a little cocoa, too. Yet when he was confronted with mass suffering in his own country, he froze up. He couldn’t mobilize the creativity, ingenuity and, yes, passion he’d brought to earlier projects.

Why? Mr. Leuchtenburg’s Hoover is hostage to a self-crafted narrative that bore only passing resemblance to reality. He really did believe that his remarkable achievements had more to do with charity and grit than government intervention. Not unlike his immediate successor, Hoover really was wary about handouts, make-work projects and budget deficits (although his successor rather famously managed to overcome his fears).

Hoover, Mr. Leuchtenburg writes, “cocooned” himself “from the magnitude of the deprivation.” His aides simply denied that things were as bad as the public thought they were. Amazingly, Hoover’s interior secretary insisted that the nation’s children would benefit from the suffering because jobless parents “were more attentive.”

There’s more, I think, to Hoover’s failures than Mr. Leuchtenburg lets on in this slim but powerful study. Hoover was a big-p Progressive in every sense of the word, meaning, in my view, that he could not get over the Progressive’s moral disdain for the poor, especially those in urban areas. Like British administrators during the Irish famine of the 19th century, American Progressives like Hoover suspected that the root cause of poverty and deprivation was lack of character and poor values. Hoover suspended moral judgments when innocent civilians were caught up in the effect of war. But when millions were hungry in peacetime America, Hoover, I suspect, had a hard time shaking off the thought that somehow it was their fault.

F.D.R., who worked for the most Progressive of Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, had the benefit of studying the ways and means of Tammany Hall during his formative years. Al Smith and Robert Wagner, two of the most small-p progressive politicians in New York history, never presumed to judge the poor. Roosevelt’s New Deal, implemented with the cooperation of the nation’s urban political machines, spared America moral uplift and personal improvement. That’s why it remains so well remembered, and so worthy of emulation today.

Mr. Leuchtenberg does not spare Herbert Hoover even as he describes the man’s achievements. He was a dour, unpleasant man whose relations with Congress were poor almost from the beginning. The author convincingly argues that Hoover would have failed as president even if the Depression hadn’t ensured him a place in political Hades.

HERBERT HOOVER IS THE latest in a series of short presidential biographies edited at first by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and now by Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz. Like the other books in the series, Mr. Leuchtenburg’s biography reminds us that the personalities, actions and beliefs of political leaders have a profound effect on the rest of us. That concept, which may seem like common sense to most lay readers, is well nigh heretical among many academic historians. Presidential historians are a dying breed on campus today; graduate students are encouraged to examine the lives of the voiceless—the enslaved, women, the nonwhite poor—rather than focus their research on politicians. In some ways, this is a necessary corrective to the Great Man narrative of old-fashioned history, but it doesn’t bode well for those cable television programs that depend on academic drop-ins to provide gravitas and perspective.

Mr. Leuchtenberg has been writing presidential history for more than a half-century, and he remains one of the finest interpreters of our nation’s past. His new book is a superb example of the vitality and importance of political history.

What a shame, for all of us, that it’s also spot-on relevant.

Terry Golway is the director of the Kean Center for American History at Kean University and a regular contributor to The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

A former priest with whom I’m friendly tells a story of the day when he realized he was no longer cut out for a Roman collar. He and his immediate superior, a monsignor, were arguing about how to handle a parish matter that required a choice between idealism (i.e., expanded services to parishioners) and pragmatism (i.e., the expenditure of cash money).

My friend thought the solution was obvious. “Monsignor,” he said, “what would Jesus do?”

The monsignor did a double take. “What,” he sputtered, “does Jesus have to do with this?”

After reading Christopher Hitchens’ polemic, God Is Not Great, I’m left with a variation on the monsignor’s question. What does God have to do with any of the crimes, abuses, brutalities and other atrocities which Mr. Hitchens offers as proof of heavenly mediocrity?

Mr. Hitchens expends over 300 pages of energy to argue that religion screws up everything. Richard Brookhiser, assessing the role of religion in the post-9/11 world, made a more subtle point in a piece in this newspaper several years ago. Religion, Mr. Brookhiser wrote, offers comfort to many and pretext to a few. Mr. Hitchens chooses to focus his moral indignation on the few while ignoring the many.

Nearly every theme in Mr. Hitchens’ book—the hypocrisy of holiness, the irrationality of blind faith, the criminal righteousness of true believers—can be countered by an illustration of the ways in which religion ennobles human activity. One such recent counter-narrative was written by a Jesuit friend of mine named James Martin, whose book bore a title almost as shocking as Mr Hitchens’: Searching for God at Ground Zero. Mr. Hitchens and others might cite 9/11 as evidence of religion’s murderous pitfalls. Father Martin, who worked with rescue personnel at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attacks, came to a different conclusion: He found love and decency in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, and attributed that discovery to the presence of God.

Ah, but where was God when those monsters crashed airplanes into the towers? So might Mr. Hitchens counter Father Martin, and rightfully so. I don’t have the answer, and I’m guessing neither does Jim.

Mr. Hitchens, however, believes he does have the answers: Since time immemorial, human beings in their ignorance have placed their faith in fairy tales about miracles, virgin births and angelic dictation of holy books. Thus did the world become a vale of tears.

Mr. Hitchens has compiled a prodigious litany of profanities committed in the name of the sacred. For that reason, any religious person would do well to read Mr. Hitchens—there is never a good reason not to, in any case—as a reminder of the ways in which religion indeed offers pretext not only to suicide bombers, but despots, lunatics and control freaks the world over.

But if Mr. Hitchens wishes to inspire mass conversions to secular humanism, he might well have sought to appeal to the better angels of those who, well, believe in angels. Mr. Hitchens, however, displays little faith in the faithful. He tells of serving on a panel with a religious broadcaster who asks him to imagine himself in a strange city as night falls. A group of men approaches. Would Mr. Hitchens feel more safe or less safe knowing that the men have just come from a prayer meeting?

The broadcaster surely believed he had trapped his God-denying antagonist, but as countless debaters have learned to their chagrin, one does not so easily win points against Mr. Hitchens. He replied that the question actually was not hypothetical, that he had been in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad. “In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance,” he writes. And that, he notes, was just a list of cities beginning with the letter “B.”

A fair point, one might say, given the histories of those wounded cities. But is it? I have been to only one of the places on Mr. Hitchens’ B list—Belfast. I was there for a July 12 extravaganza when Protestants paraded through Catholic neighborhoods and sang nasty songs about the Pope. But I came away from this display convinced that the so-called religious conflict in Ireland had nothing to do with God and everything to do with the holding and wielding of power. The Presbyterians of Northern Ireland objected to Catholics not because the latter believed in transubstantiation or filled their churches with graven images. The conflict there was about power and patronage, not the Papacy.

Mr. Hitchens cites a plainly apocryphal story from Belfast as evidence of yet another way in which religion ruins everything; worse, Mr. Hitchens insists that the story is both true and a local joke:

A visitor to Belfast is asked if he is a Protestant or a Catholic? He replies that he is an atheist. The inquisitor pauses, then asks: Are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?

Mr. Hitchens insists a friend of his underwent this very inquisition. Oddly, several friends of mine swear that friends of theirs (or their cousins, or their in-laws, but never themselves) also were asked these questions, although my friends’ friends, or their in-laws, invariably were Jewish, and so were asked if they were Protestant Jews or Catholic Jews. I regard this story as literally apocryphal. For Mr. Hitchens, it is part of the Creation story, a true statement of religion’s corrupt origins.

But surely the story, true or not, shows us that the conflict in Belfast was—what a joy to talk about it in the past tense—about labels, not about theology. Those labels, those divisions, were nurtured by the British Empire, which saw religion as a nifty way to keep the locals at each other’s throats. In Ireland, India and the Middle East, British civil servants did their best to encourage homicidal tensions between Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, and Muslims and Hindus. The ensuing carnage throughout the old empire might, at first glance, prove Mr. Hitchens’ thesis. A closer look, however, would demonstrate something else again: That human beings screw up religion, not the other way around.

To Mr. Hitchens’ everlasting credit, he plays no favorite—he bashes all religions, and even some revered religious leaders. (One is tempted to argue that he has no sacred cows, but we ought not to go there.) His terrible swift sword slashes away at the failings of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists alike. This is satisfying, in a perverse way, because generally Jews and Christians bear the brunt of attacks from Western secularists, while Islam is protected by the tenets of political correctness and Buddhism is tolerated as a benign spiritual club—Unitarianism with yoga.

During or around the Gulf War of 1991, I was part of a panel discussion with a prominent liberal activist and author with whom I had an enjoyable private conversation, and so will not reveal her name. (She surely didn’t expect to be quoted a lifetime later.) We discussed the left’s history of anti-Catholicism, prompting her to note that she had recently attended a demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Vatican’s refusal to ordain women. Afterwards, these indefatigable cultural warriors were to move on to the Saudi Arabian consulate, where they would protest the Saudis’ ban on women motorists, which they justified by a chapter or verse in the Koran. This prohibition was in the news at the time, I believe, because the U.S. military in the Gulf agreed to abide by the restrictions.

According to my panel-mate, many of the pro-ordination protesters refused to join the second demonstration in favor of women drivers in Saudi Arabia. “We can’t condemn them,” they said. “That’s their culture.”

Hmmm. All these years later, the left’s antipathy for Western religion and its refusal to condemn militant Islam—indeed, its attempts to justify militant Islam as the understandable outgrowth of U.S. foreign policy—has only gotten worse. As one of the nation’s oldest graduate students, I regularly see the contempt that today’s humanities students hold for conventional Christianity and Judaism. One can pretty much say whatever one wishes about Jews and Christians, but to criticize Islam is to be accused of cultural imperialism—believe me, been there, done that. So goes debate in academia.

For that reason, I suspect it will be some time before Mr. Hitchens is welcome on some of our more ideological campuses, for he can be as impatient with secular cant as he is with religious dogma. Not for him the cultural-leftist theory that militant Islam is merely an expression of authentic culture and thus beyond the judgment of oppressive-minded Westerners. He has traveled too widely, read too broadly, to ignore what is in plain sight.

For example, he cites the fatal effects of Islamic dogma in northern Nigeria, where polio had been, at last, conquered. Until, that is, “a group of Islamic religious figures issued a ruling, or fatwa, that declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States (and, amazingly, the United Nations) against the Muslim faith,” he writes. “The drops were designed, said these mullahs, to sterilize the true believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal.”

Polio returned not only to Muslim Nigeria, but to the Arabian peninsula, brought by pilgrims, and to other African nations. What in the name of God is going on here?

Pretext, that’s what. The mullahs in northern Nigeria may claim to be acting on behalf of the faith, but in fact they are despots who, like any other, seek absolute control over the peasantry. Does this prove that Allah is not, in fact, great? Nope. It proves that human beings are capable of unspeakable evil.

Many are the crimes committed in the name of God. But then again, many are the crimes committed in the name of peace. In the name of progress. In the name of the people. In the name of The Cause, whatever it may be. Mr. Hitchens faults religion for providing clerics, charlatans, fakirs and mullahs with pretext. And well he might. But if we are to calculate the balance sheet of religion by the behavior of its adherents, what are we to make of those whose sense of justice is informed not by Das Kapital, but by the Torah; not by the sayings of Chairman Mao, but the writings of John Paul II?

Religion drives people to commit murder. Religion likewise inspires people to place themselves in harm’s way for the sake of others. Do we need religion to act with charity and kindness? Mr. Hitchens says no.

Now there’s a leap of faith.

If you want to know why New York has become the Mets’ city, don’t look at today’s standings. Look at today’s pictures – the pictures from last night’s 5-4 Met win over the Giants at Shea Stadium.

Predictably enough, there were a lot of smiling faces around home plate last night after Carlos Delgado won the game with a 12^th inning homer. The Mets have had a lot to smile about in recent weeks, so in some ways, the pictures from last night’s game are a variation on a cheerful theme.

But those pictures tell another story, if you look closely enough. One smiling face stands out: Oliver Perez. The 25-year-old lefty started the game for the Mets and pitched effectively (save for those three solo homers he gave up) for seven innings. He didn’t get the win, but it was another quality start for a young man who has resurrected his career in New York.

Here’s the interesting thing about Perez: In the picture I’m staring at, he’s in the middle of the Met mob – in uniform -- waiting for Delgado to cross the plate.

Starting pitchers sometimes hit the showers when they’re done. Heck, these days, some of them (er, one of them) may even leave town after a hard six innings.

Oliver Perez stuck around right through the end, and was one of the first to slap Delgado on the head in the bottom of the 12^th.

As a longtime Met fan and Yankee detractor, I’ve spent the last decade insisting, much to my surprise, that the Joe Torre Yankees were a likeable team. It’s easy to despise Yankee fans, who believe they are entitled to the services of any major league player with above-average skills. It’s easy to mock the absurd frontrunner John Sterling. But the players? How can you not like Derek Jeter? How could you not like Bernie Williams? Paul O’Neill? Torre himself?

But Yankee likeability, like the team itself, just ain’t what it used to be. In Queens, however, there’s a lot to love. This edition of the Mets probably will not put together a run like the Yankees had from 1996 to 2006. But players like Perez, Jose Reyes, David Wright, Carlos Beltran and Endy Chavez are going to be putting smiles of the faces of Met fans for years to come.

It helps, of course, that the team is terrific. But terrific teams aren’t always lovable. Terrific teams don’t always have the spirit and joy of the Mets’ dugout. Terrific teams don’t always have starting pitchers who wait around until the 12^th inning to celebrate with their teammates.

Take a look at those smiles from last night. Take a look at the faces of New York baseball.

You’d have to be a dedicated watcher of the ESPN sports crawl to notice this, but over the last few years, some odd place names have begun appearing in college-sports results. Buffalo, for one. Albany, for another. And Stony Brook, too.

The state-university schools in those places were once known primarily for their strong academics—they were among the public Ivy League colleges, the state equivalent of CCNY back in the day.

About a decade or so ago, however, SUNY Buffalo rechristened itself as the University at Buffalo, perhaps to shed its unfortunate reputation for academic excellence, and decided to begin fielding a big-time college football team. For years, Buffalo existed mainly to provide its New Jersey cousin, Rutgers, with a guaranteed victory—no small achievement in the late 1990’s.

With Buffalo leading the way, SUNY Albany and SUNY Stony Brook also rebranded themselves (as the University at Albany and Stony Brook University, respectively) and decided to get into the big-time sports game, too. As a matter of fact, just recently, Stony Brook announced that its football program is joining the Big South conference, whatever that is.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that these schools provided thousands of smart New York kids with a first-rate education.

The students, somebody decided, needed to paint themselves in school colors and cheer from the sidelines in order to fully develop their academic potential.

I’ve been waiting for years to hear some lawmaker raise a question about the state university’s conversion to big-time sports. How much is Division I sports costing taxpayers? Does New York really need to be in the company of the football factories of the South and Midwest?

More than 20 years ago, dozens of colleges and universities around the country tried to take a page from Boston College, birthplace of the so-called “Flutie Effect.” As writer Murray Sperber, a retired professor of American Studies at Indiana University, has noted, Boston College saw a flurry of applications and donations after Doug Flutie won the Heisman Trophy in the early 1980’s. But Mr. Sperber, in his book College Sports Inc., showed that the move to big-time sports was ruinously expensive and never delivered the promise of bowl-game riches.

Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, cheerfully ignored Mr. Sperber’s warnings by pouring tens of millions into its football and basketball programs. For years, Rutgers football was a Big East joke, capable of beating Buffalo but almost nobody else. This year, of course, the team finally made it into the Top 15—but at what cost? The tab for football at Rutgers is so huge that the athletic department recently found itself in the hole for a million bucks. The department cut crew, men’s swimming and several other low-profile sports.

Just yesterday, Rutgers enjoyed another high-profile athletic success, with its women’s basketball team playing archrival Tennessee for the national championship. I suspect that folks in Buffalo, Albany and Stony Brook were watching with envy, and dreaming of doing likewise.

Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t. But why are these schools—supported as they are with tax dollars—proceeding with little or no supervision? If any State Comptroller in the last decade has studied the cost-benefit analysis of big-time sports at SUNY, I’m not aware of it.

In the meantime, I know of several parents who are discouraging their children from attending Albany. Word on the street has it that the school is best known today for its parties.

I’m sure that’s unfair. But I’m also sure that building a big-time sports program at SUNY may hurt, rather than help, the schools’ reputations for excellence.

But when David Justice lifted a pitch into the high right field stands of Yankee Stadium last night, where once Babe Ruth lifted them as well, it seemed as though history had happened once more.

Justice was followed by Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez, and by the time the Yankees had finished pummeling the Mariners in the seventh inning, it seemed as though the amazing Mets and the regal Yankees were finally in place for their nuptials. Those Met fans who left Queens prepared to abuse their crosstown rivals found themselves pulling, improbably, for the Bronx Bombers, and most of the Bronx exhaled. For the first three innings, the Yankee hitters had looked as puzzled as George W. Bush trying to talk himself around Al Gore’s wasp-swarm of health-care numbers during the night’s Presidential debate, while the Mariners came out of the box focused, passionate, aggressive and surprisingly effective.

And as the two candidates glowered at each other, using threatening postures and physical stances, the tension built. “I’m glad I had a chance to knock that down,” the Vice President said of Mr. Bush’s fuzzy charges about Mr. Gore’s zeal for spending. “I will pay down the debt,” he added, his pasty features turning wolverine as he tied his spending plan to education reform. “Just add up all the numbers,” Mr. Bush responded, looking ever-so-slightly punch-drunk, as simultaneously Jorge Posada’s bases-loaded double scored two runs and Paul O’Neill drove another home to make it 4-3, Mariners.

The Dempsey-Firpo scene in the Presidential debate became sweatier and tenser, as Mr. Bush struggled with his definition of “affirmative access”--while from the Bronx, a rumbling noise. If only. If only. If only the right history would happen. If the Yankees could come from behind to make this once-in-a-lifetime moment happen. If only Mr. Bush the Younger had depth or intelligence; if only Mr. Gore had an iota of the Clintonian seducer. Put together, you’d have a candidate. If only our history would happen. It was a matter of escaping the giant holographic ghosts of Jackie Robinson and Don Larsen; F.D.R., Ike; Tom Brokaw! That’s what was behind the yearning--to haul history into our own backyard. A generation of New Yorkers taught to believe in glory days was seeking its own glories, its own myths. Tired of playing the literary foil for the greatest generation, aware that the stories of 1951 and 1955 and 1956 belong to somebody else, the open stadiums in Queens and the Bronx desperately sought a legend to claim for their own as both coda to the last century and springboard to the next.

A weekend of color and sunshine had faded into a dull, chilly, wet night by the time the cast of Cabaret sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Shea for Game 5 on Oct. 16. A cone of gray-blue smoke hung languidly over left field--they were cooking meat on a barbecue in the picnic area. The mood was anticipatory, but with an edge. Fans at field level, where seats went for $150 apiece, chatted on cell phones, some wondering aloud if, or where, they should flee if rain began to fall.

The weather was worse at Yankee Stadium the following night; the rain was steady at game time as the Yankees fell behind 2-0 in the first inning. Pre-game cheers for yesterday’s legend Don Mattingly, who threw out the ceremonial first pitch, were instantly transformed to Al Gore–like sighs as the Seattle Mariners scored on a pair of one-out doubles by Alex Rodriguez and Edgar Martinez.

The trajectory of New York in the 90’s--the successes, the excesses, the anxious certainty that a big and possibly dreadful event lay just over the horizon--brought the city to a millennial autumn certain to be of famous memory. The President and the Mayor who attached their names to the decade’s peace and prosperity were fading--their time finished, their successors uncertain. A woman from Illinois and Arkansas was seeking to represent the state in the Senate, and the nation was forced to endure the spectacle. The World Series was poised to become an intra-city affair for the first time since 1956--a symbol of triumphalism, yes, but also of isolation. The Presidential candidates have ignored New York. During the debate in Missouri, the two Ivy Leaguers who would lead us talked about the depredations of the IN-surance industry, a pronunciation not recognized east of the Hudson River. Twangy baseball fans in the heartland and beyond might act similarly if faced with seven nights filled with New York nationalism.

Would that the rest of the nation understood how uneasily the crowns would lay on New York’s brow. After a magnificent run, the Yankees had the look of yesterday’s champions, especially after their dreary first inning. Mr. O’Neill is a star on decline; David Cone finished the regular season with four wins and many embarrassments. Their best moments are memories. Joe Torre cried when this aging team clinched the Eastern Division--why not? The most memorable years of his managing career may be behind him.

The Mets’ pitching staff, the key to the team’s resurgence, is made up of aging veterans; of the four post-season starters, only Mike Hampton is under 30, and he will be a free agent after the season. His return is uncertain; likewise, Met manager Bobby Valentine. There was a palpable sense at both stadiums on consecutive rainy nights that if there is to be an all–New York World Series any time soon, it will have to be this year, or it will be in somebody else’s lifetime. These two teams are not built for the future. They have been designed to win now.

Players often say they savor championships because they never know if they will experience the thrill again. Fans, who see generations pass before their eyes, often are luckier (assuming they don’t live in Boston or Chicago). If they keep showing up, they generally are rewarded. Sometimes they are rewarded amply, as Yankee fans have been. And certainly Shea Stadium is no stranger to epic victories. The Mets are not the tragic Red Sox or the forlorn Cubs; they have won the World Series twice in the last three decades, clinching at home both times. The inevitable between-innings videos reminded fans of past championships: Cleon Jones dropping to one knee after catching the last out of the 1969 World Series; Jessie Orosco flinging his glove after getting the last out of the ’86 Series. So the almost desperate quality of the cheers after Mr. Zeile’s hit was a little shocking. It was as though 1969 hadn’t happened, or 1973, or ’86.

On this night, with the Yankees on the verge of clinching the American League pennant, images of the Gary Cooper–like Gil Hodges, manager of that ’69 team and one of the long gone boys of summer, of Casey Stengel, the eccentric manager of the team that beat the boys of summer and who ended his career as manager of the famously incompetent early Mets--these were scenes from a past life. On the chilly, damp fall night of Oct. 16--the 31st anniversary of the ’69 Met miracle--Met fans who remembered Stengel as a cuddly grandfather (he once went on and on about all the children who said “Metsie, Metsie, Metsie” in their cribs) and Hodges as a solid, infallible father were peers of 50-year-old Mr. Valentine. This was their moment, and they embraced it without regard to caution. By the seventh inning, a few thousand fans were chanting “Yankees suck, Yankees suck,” never mind that the Seattle Mariners were standing in the way of their dreams. An intellectually challenged young man wearing, of all things, a Yankee jacket inspired a chorus of “ass-hole, ass-hole.” More-civilized fans began plotting match-ups: Mike Hampton vs. Roger Clemens, Al Leiter vs. Orlando Hernandez. “Nah, Hampton’s gotta pitch at Shea so he can hit,” somebody interrupted, insisting that the Met ace shouldn’t pitch until Game 3 at Shea Stadium, where there will be no designated hitter. “Pitch Leiter in the Bronx so we can hit for him.”

Met fans were making assumptions about their rivals that they wouldn’t have made for their own team, not until Mr. Zeile’s double.

Faith of Their Fathers

They wanted a championship; all fans do. But these Met fans craved the seemingly mythical Subway Series as a capstone to the fat years of the late, departed century. Their parents had prosperity and Ike and Robert F. Wagner and childhood memories of Fiorello LaGuardia, and, boy, they said, there was nothing like watching DiMaggio cover ground in Death Valley, or Willie Mays lose his hat as he raced from first to third on a single, or Carl Furillo gun down runners foolish enough to test his arm from right field. They had Campy and the Duke; Mickey and the Scooter; Bobby and the Barber. Their New York reached its apogee in 1956, in the last Subway Series of the era, of the time of their lives, when the Yankees beat the Dodgers and Mr. Larsen pitched a perfect game. The Giants and Dodgers moved to California after the ’56 Series, and the postwar New York of their youth and middle age--the glory that was the Grand Concourse and Bedford Avenue--vanished in less than a decade. Twenty-one years later, when the Dodgers, now representing Los Angeles, returned to New York to play the Yankees in the 1977 World Series, a national television audience saw flames engulf a building blocks away from the Stadium. “Ladies and gentlemen: The Bronx is burning,” intoned Howard Cosell.

The fans who shook Shea Stadium after Mr. Zeile’s double, who nearly drowned out Bob Sheppard as he read the lineup for Game 6 at Yankee Stadium a night later, were cheering not only for their teams but for this moment in their lives, the time in their lives and in the life of their city, not likely to be replicated until they are old enough to remember the Clinton-Giuliani years to children born in the uncertain future we have glimpsed with some apprehension this fall. For the moment, it is 1956 again. Bernie Williams patrols center field, the legatee of DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. Mike Piazza is our Yogi Berra and Roy Campanella. In place of Ike and Bob Wagner, we have Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. The Mayor appeared at 8:17 p.m. at Shea, a minute before the first pitch. He wore a neutral New York Rangers cap, and he led Judi Nathan to a box near the St. Louis dugout, where Ms. Nathan twirled her hair, nervously, for the next three hours. Mr. Giuliani’s name and Mr. Clinton’s are destined to be linked together when the fortunes and foibles of New York in the 90’s are recorded as history. Our prosperity, like that of the 1950’s, has been unfathomable, and like all others, it is destined to end, perhaps sooner than later as the New Economy bows to the laws of the Old. Peace, too, seems more fragile now, with faceless enemies armed with rubber boats blowing holes in billion-dollar warships. In 1956, when the only war America was fighting was of the cold variety, the French had already been routed at Dienbienphu, and only the best and brightest could identify the nations of North and South Vietnam.

A Tarnished Beauty

The beauty of Game 5 at Shea was not untarnished. Jay Payton, the Mets’ 27-year-old rookie center fielder who had a splendid season, was hit on the forehead by Cardinal reliever David Veres in the eighth inning. There was no reason for Mr. Veres to bean Mr. Payton; the game was over, and Mr. Payton, while contributing several key hits, had been relatively quiet during the series. The sound of the ball hitting Mr. Payton’s helmet could be heard in the mezzanine, and the crowd was quiet for the first time all night when Mr. Payton fell to the ground. But he was up quickly enough, charging the mound as the benches emptied. As Mr. Payton sought revenge, a welt blossomed over his eye, and a vivid rivulet of blood began trickling down his cheek. Later, in the locker room, Mr. Payton admitted that Mr. Veres probably wasn’t throwing at him. His anxiety got the better of him, even on the verge of triumph. Anxiety got the better of the New York Police Department, which issued a hyper-alert, like that for this past New Year’s Eve, in anticipation of Subway Series trouble. The private Yankee Stadium parties that were part of the World Series atmosphere in 1998 and ’99 have been canceled because of security concerns.

Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem “Recessional” on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1896, when the British Empire was master of a quarter of the globe and General Kitchener was safely in charge of the Sudan. Those who lined the streets of London thought they were celebrating the present; Kipling saw that they were saluting the past. A year later, Winston Churchill was part of the world’s last cavalry charge, at Omdurman under Kitchener’s command, and Britain was becoming mired in its Vietnam, the Boer War. By 1918, the Empire was exhausted; by 1945, it was finished.

“The tumult and the shouting dies / The Captains and the Kings depart,” Kipling wrote.

The shouting at Shea ended by midnight. The Mayor slipped away from his seat minutes before, so he, the defiant Yankee fan, could celebrate in the Mets’ locker room. The next night in the Bronx, an hour after Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush shook hands and withdrew to their tents, the roar in the east began once more. It was loud enough to wake Victoria.

--additional reporting by Mary Ann Giordano

George Pataki, more than halfway through his third term and seemingly no closer to national prominence than he was a decade ago, evidently hasn’t given up on the notion that he may yet find something other than a nice pension awaiting him when his time in Albany has run its course. If so, he would shatter recent precedent. No sitting New York Governor since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 has won national office. Some have tried (Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller); some were mentioned, and mentioned, and mentioned again (Mario Cuomo); and some seemed ready if asked (Hugh Carey). Only Mr. Rockefeller was able to move--albeit indirectly---into national office, but his appointment to succeed Gerald Ford as Vice President in 1974 was more like an award for lifetime achievement than an earned prize.

Nevertheless, the 59-year-old Mr. Pataki, a moderate Republican from a blue state, persists in believing that the past need not be prologue. Although his poll ratings are at their lowest level and the Pataki family has been on the wrong side of recent tabloid headlines, the Governor and his allies see before them unexplored terrain and exciting possibilities, and not the same scenery they saw two years ago, and two years before that.

A flurry of fresh rumors have Mr. Pataki declining a fourth term next year in order to prepare for the Presidential campaign that some of his aides and loyalists have been promising for years. New York 1, the cable news outlet, reported on March 30 that Pataki aides were saying the Governor won’t run for re-election next year, and that Mr. Pataki is thinking about a Presidential campaign in 2008.

Then again, there’s no shortage of chatter containing unspecified threats that Mr. Pataki will in fact attempt a fourth term in 2006, and so achieve what he famously denied Mr. Cuomo in 1994.

In any case, decisions must be made, and soon. Mr. Pataki has said that he would announce his future plans by June of next year, but that wouldn’t leave much time for Republicans to find an heir should he renounce his incumbency.

Mr. Pataki has been Governor for a decade, and what is true of dogs is also true of sitting Governors--10 years is a long time. Sometimes 10 years can seem like 70. When Mr. Pataki became Governor in 1995, Republicans also held the Attorney General’s office, a U.S. Senate seat and the county executive’s office in politically powerful Westchester and Nassau. Most of the Long Island Congressional seats were in Republican hands, and the party had a firm grip on the State Senate.

In the years since, there are no Republicans in statewide office except the Governor (and his lieutenant, Mary Donohue); Peter King is the only surviving Republican Congressman from Long Island; and the party will have to fight as never before to retain the State Senate next year.

A dozen years ago, a freshman State Senator from Westchester decided that the public had tired of the incumbent Governor, and that the Governor was ripe for the taking if he made the mistake of running for a fourth term. That State Senator was George Pataki, and the Governor was Mario Cuomo, whose seemingly inevitable campaign for President never materialized.

Mr. Pataki was barely known in his district, never mind statewide. Mr. Cuomo was among the nation’s most famous national figures. But Mr. Cuomo now practices law, and has since his defeat at Mr. Pataki’s hands in 1994.

As Mr. Pataki contemplates his next move--re-election? A Presidential campaign? That long-rumored cabinet post? A gilded semi-retirement?--he surely remembers the calculations he made in 1993, when Mr. Cuomo was preparing for another term. But at this stage in Mr. Cuomo’s third term, no prominent Republican had risen to challenge him. The party’s stars eventually would pass on the challenge, leaving it to the seemingly quixotic George Pataki.

But if Mr. Pataki, like Mr. Cuomo, does decide to run for a fourth term, he will face Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whose fame surpasses his own. And if Mario Cuomo couldn’t beat George Pataki in 1994, how in the world can George Pataki expect to beat Elliot Spitzer in 2006?

A Loser?

“Everything, from poll numbers to political observations, suggests that he is a loser if he runs again,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. But, Mr. Carroll pointed out, history is George Pataki’s friend, not his enemy. “He has never lost,” he said. “That’s the thing about him--he’s never lost a race for anything.”

Nothing, except the most recent poll by Mr. Carroll’s employer. A Quinnipiac University poll in February showed Mr. Pataki losing to Mr. Spitzer, 54 to 30 percent. Mr. Pataki’s job disapproval rating was 49 percent, the highest it’s never been. “He’s not strong upstate, he’s no better than even in the suburbs, and of course he’s nowhere in the city,” said Mr. Carroll.

That’s a trifecta no statewide politician would want to play, and few observers seem to believe he will. At the moment, however, nobody knows for sure what’s next for Mr. Pataki. On March 30, as the state Capitol buzzed with talk that Mr. Pataki had decided against a fourth term, the Governor replied with an amiable non-answer. “I’ve always believed if you care about people and you love the state that you’re leading, it is the greatest job you can have,” he said.

His closest aides say that concerns about career moves take a back seat to the business at hand in Albany, where the Governor and state legislative leaders are grimly focused on bringing in the first on-time state budget in 20 years.

“It’s pretty obvious and fairly clear--he is very much focused on the budget,” said Michael McKeon, a political consultant and former spokesman for Mr. Pataki. “What he decides to do will be the product of discussions he has with his family and advisors post-budget.”

Some observers are suggesting that Mr. Pataki has his eyes not on the Republican Presidential nomination--a tough sell for a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights moderate from New York--but on the party’s Vice Presidential nod. But that still begs the question of what comes next. “If you’re out of office, it’s hard to be a potential Vice President,” said Mr. Carroll. While that is generally the case, neither George H.W. Bush nor Dick Cheney held elective office when they became the Republican Vice Presidential nominees in 1980 and 2000, respectively.

If Mr. Pataki decides that his ambitions require not retirement from Albany but a fourth term, he will have to take an extraordinary gamble. If he runs for a fourth term and loses to Mr. Spitzer in 2006, it’s hard to imagine that he will be taken seriously as a national candidate in 2008.

But, on the other hand, if he takes a pass and Mr. Spitzer wins a resounding victory against an unprepared replacement and a demoralized Republican Party, he may get the blame for the ensuing disaster.

“What’s interesting about George Pataki is that nobody in New York takes him seriously,” said Mr. Carroll. “They say, ‘How could he have national ambitions?’

“But then, how do you get to be President these days? You become a governor.”

Then again, that’s what they said about Mario Cuomo. And Nelson Rockefeller. And Tom Dewey.

--Additional reporting by Ben Smith

Other New Yorkers have sought the office in the nearly half century since Dewey. Nelson Rockefeller discovered that there are some things in life that even a man with his last name can’t buy. Rocky’s great Republican nemesis, John Lindsay, decided that his yearning for the White House could be satisfied only by changing parties, but during the 1976 Presidential primaries, the Democrats offered him the kind of welcome the British gave Benedict Arnold: formal and without affection. Representative Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn declared herself a candidate for President in 1972 on the basis of what-the-hell. She is now the answer to a political trivia question: Who was the first African-American woman to seek a major-party Presidential nomination? Jack Kemp, adopted citizen of western New York, tried to make a go of it in 1988. As a Presidential candidate, he is best remembered as a onetime football hero.

In 1948, New York was the Virginia of the 20th century, home and training ground of Presidents and Presidential contenders. Four New York Governors had run for President since Theodore Roosevelt accidentally found himself President in 1901, and the Democratic Party from 1928 to 1944 nominated nobody except New York Governors (Alfred E. Smith in 1928, and then Franklin Roosevelt four times). Dewey ran twice; his first race, in 1944, marked what turned out to be the apogee of New York’s political power. The ’44 Presidential campaign featured one New York Governor (Dewey) running against another (Roosevelt). The all–New York Presidential campaign of 1944 seemed almost natural at the time. Upon reflection, however, it now seems extraordinary--though the all-Texas Republican ticket of this year is extraordinary, too, and historians may well decide that its emergence marked the time when the Northeast in general, and New York in particular, gave way to the sons and daughters of the Sun Belt and the suburbs.

New York could not have expected to fend off the colossus of the West, California, in the postwar years. But its fall from political prominence has been stunning, especially when eyes are turned westward to New Jersey, which produced two would-be Presidential candidates this year, Bill Bradley and Steve Forbes.

Where are the New York Presidential candidates of yore? Find the center of power in New York and you will have your answer. As the country’s media and financial center in a world gone global, New York no longer acts as though politics--particularly gritty local politics--matters. Since the city’s brush with bankruptcy, economics have taken precedence over politics. And in New York now, the barons and baronesses of international media and entertainment have higher profiles than, say, the Governor.

An absurdly extravagant party that Michael Bloomberg threw for the New York media on July 30, designed to pay homage to Governor George Pataki, illustrated the point. Actually, some partygoers were persuaded that it was Mr. Bloomberg himself, a man not without political ambition, who wished reporters to think kindly of him. Gathered in a restaurant converted from an old bank, with heroic windows and high ceilings, were bureau chiefs and City Hall reporters and television correspondents--but not the party activists, alternate delegates and state legislators who may one day be asked to gather signatures or make phone calls or twist arms on Mr. Bloomberg’s behalf. Yes, there were a few actual politicians in attendance: former Senator Alfonse D’Amato (grayer around the temples now, and slim enough to look almost gaunt) and the irrepressible Representative Peter King, possessor of the largest hands in modern convention history. But this was an event of, by and for the media.

Outside the restaurant, the flotsam and jetsam of such events hovered in hopes of spying the media celebrities they associate with displays of New York power. And perhaps they had it right, for New York’s power these days is measured not in electoral votes--the state’s total has been heading south at a rapid pace for 30 years--but in the hype and cant of the modern media statelet that the city has become. Power in New York is measured by the audiences, not the districts, that one can deliver. Mr. Bloomberg, whose ambitions, it was whispered during the party, extend to the Executive Mansion in Albany, was shrewd enough to know that his money was best spent courting the media, not the delegates housed just around the corner from the festivities.

Politics once mattered in New York, and we had the Presidential candidates to prove it.

Now, it’s just show business, baby.