The move is expected to happen at some point in 2012.

Neighbors in the Senate and at 780 Third Avenue

“Our lease has come to an end, and with the building being upgraded it made more sense for us operationally to relocate,” said Mike Morey, the spokesman for Senator Schumer.

Sen. Schumer had been in the office–legendary for its Sunday morning press conferences inside suite 1702—since 1999.

RFR Realty LLC, a joint venture between Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, has been refurbishing the nearly 500,000-square-foot 757 Third Avenue building into a Class A office tower. The asset ran into trouble last year when a $126 million loan on the property faced "imminent default."

Repeated calls and emails to Steven Morrows and Oliver Katcher, both of RFR Realty, were not returned yesterday. Calls to Joe Barnes, the manager of 780 Third Avenue, were not returned.

Mr. Morey did not know the square footage of their new office, but said that it was "comparable to the current space we're in."

In addition to Sen. Gillibrand, the AARP has its New York City offices at 780 Third Avenue.

drosen@observer.com

According to a chart presented by Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, the magazines that faired the best were those aimed at older readers: AARP Bulletin, AARP The Magazine (whose Web site boasts it's the "World's Largest Circulation Magazine"), and Reader's Digest.

AP reports that two magazine's that actually saw increases were Time Inc.'s People, which has a 5.2 percent newsstand increase (thanks a million, Knox and Vivienne) and In Style.

Of course, magazines could be in worse shape: They could be newspapers.

Even our drunk-driving reforms have their downside. Heartening was the crusade of California housewife Candy Lightner, who created Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980 after her daughter died in a crash. Hundreds of MADD chapters soon formed, without an Internet to spread the word. Within a year, a panoply of local, state and federal laws against driving while intoxicated had been passed. D.W.I. deaths plunged from 78 a day in 1980 to 44 by 1998. And MADD’s campaign inspired related attacks on reckless driving, from traffic cameras to record the license plates of speeders to a New Mexico reform that should be a national one: banning “drive-in” liquor stores. Still, drunk drivers caused 16,694 of our 42,636 highway deaths in 2004.

When Japan’s highway death rate rose to half of ours in 1992, it declared a national alert. Meanwhile, Washington did away with the national speed limit of 55 miles an hour. Alarmed by just 200 monthly car accidents caused by cell phones, Japan banned all keitei from cars in 1999. Our recent bans on handheld calls are useless, with studies showing similar crash rates for hands-free phones.

A strong voice for driving reform was President George W. Bush’s former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jeffrey W. Runge, a longtime E.R. doctor. Calling our highway carnage “obscene,” he suggested that drunk drivers causing deaths “be treated as taboo, the same as child molesters.” He also attacked Detroit for S.U.V. rollovers that take 2,000 lives a year. “I wouldn’t let my kid buy … a rollover vehicle if it was the last one on earth,” he told a Detroit audience in 2003. Within a month, Detroit pledged to lower S.U.V. and light truck frames to lessen their impacts on passenger cars—and add more air bags and reinforced doors to defend cars against such tanks.

Such things happen when Washington takes highway safety seriously.

Two very American driving problems were foreseen in Bette Davis’ only singing film role when, in Warner Brothers’ all-star war effort of 1944, Hollywood Canteen, she huskily bemoaned the slim pickings on the home front. “They’re either too young or too old,” she sang. “They’re either too gray or too grassy green.”

At least older drivers with experience are much safer than youths with next to none. Still, as overall driving deaths were falling after 1989, they soared among seniors, reflecting a sharp growth in the number of drivers over 75 years of age, many with reduced dexterity and vision. Cowed by senior voting blocs and the almighty AARP, politicians mainly look the other way. Elderly drivers in Florida’s retirement mecca may go almost two decades between license recertifications, with the state settling for palliatives like bigger street signs or more-visible lane lines.

While a dozen states have age limits for automatic license renewals, California, home to many seniors, does not. Thus a recent notorious tragedy, when an 87-year-old driver confused the brake and gas pedals at a Los Angeles farmers’ market and killed 10 pedestrians. In the late 1990’s, when then–State Senator Tom Hayden urged age-specific license tests after a similar tragedy, the AARP yelled “age discrimination.” After the carnage at the farmers’ market, Mr. Hayden said he blamed the AARP and its “reactionary attitude.”

Another problem involving older drivers is a sharp rise in motorcycle deaths. Affluent, aging baby boomers have raised the median biker age from 27 years in 1985 to 41 today. And while 20 states mandate helmets, the others don’t (including Pennsylvania, which is why Steelers’ quarterback Ben Roethlisberger wasn’t wearing one when he was in an accident in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago). There has been an 85 percent jump in highway motorcycle fatalities since 1997.

As with banning all cell phones and restoring a national speed limit, Washington should mandate helmets for all motorcyclists of any age. For the elderly, it should require regular state license recertifications for drivers 70 years old and older.

The AARP has it right about “discrimination”: States must discriminate between good and bad drivers among elderly operators of potentially lethal machines. Given the AARP’s clout, however, this may not happen until senior driving deaths really take off, as 74 million baby boomers retire in four years.

Meanwhile, there’s the far bigger disaster of far too many teenage drivers, which I’ll deal with in my next column.

Like a grifter conjuring visions of wealth if only we trust him, Mr. Bush spouts promises that evaporate upon closer inspection. First he predicts that we will earn far higher future returns on our "personal" accounts, the name he prefers to "private" accounts, which doesn't poll well. (He never mentions the substantial risks, or the management fees that would drain away income.) Then he promises that we will each control every dollar diverted from Social Security. (He actually knows that your investment choices would be strictly limited.) He says we will be able to leave the privatized accounts to our heirs. (He neglects to explain, of course, why his plan would make that virtually impossible.)

Meanwhile, directing our attention away from all this fine print, he warns repeatedly that should we decline his amazing offer, all the taxes we've paid toward Social Security during our working lives will disappear when the system suddenly goes "bankrupt." (That alarming assertion contradicts his confident prediction of burgeoning equity growth, but he's betting we won't figure that out, either.)

So if we listen to him, we really have no choice. We must hurry-and not worry about borrowing another few trillion bucks to finance his scheme.

With such dubious hucksterism emanating from the Office of the President, it's hardly surprising that less distinguished pitchmen are eager to get in on the game. Everyone in Washington knows that the corporate interests backing privatization are prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That kind of money usually finds its way into the most dishonest hands.

Among the grabbiest, grubbiest groups inside the Beltway is an outfit called U.S.A. Next, until lately known as the United Seniors Association, which has long pretended to defend the interests of elderly Americans. It protects seniors as diligently as the Colonel protects chickens.

United Seniors was created by ultra-right direct-mail impresario Richard Viguerie, who has yearned to abolish Social Security ever since he joined the Goldwater campaign in 1964. Under the United Seniors letterhead, he would mail out ominous, official-looking letters to the elderly, telling them that politicians have "spent all the money" in the Social Security trust fund. To rescue their retirement, he urged the jittery seniors to send checks immediately to his post-office box. He churned out these mailings by the millions while pocketing a hefty proportion of the profits and prompting investigations by state and federal agencies.

Aside from swelling his own fortune, Mr. Viguerie's true purpose was to finance conservative propaganda. A classic gambit was to scare old people into sending him money and then use their donations to promote Republican cutbacks in their Medicare benefits. The man always had an ironic sense of humor.

These days, U.S.A. Next relies less on small contributions from suckers and more on funding from major corporate interests such as drug and oil companies. It is run by Charles Jarvis, a religious-right activist and fervent advocate of privatization, and represented by Curtis J. Herge, whose previous clients include a fake Holocaust-survivors group and a bogus anti-gambling organization that fronted for casino mogul Donald Trump.

Lately, Mr. Jarvis has launched a campaign against the American Association of Retired Persons-an authentic organization with about 33 million members-because the AARP has dared to oppose the President's scheme. Echoing the tired old clichés from the Clinton era, when United Seniors regularly targeted AARP, he accuses the bipartisan seniors' lobby of "liberalism."

For a Christian, Mr. Jarvis seems to have no fear of bearing false witness against his neighbors. He boasts of hiring the same consultants who devised the Swift Boat advertising that smeared John Kerry. In a demonstration of the weapons they will use to "dynamite" the AARP, Mr. Jarvis recently posted an Internet ad insinuating that this traditional, utterly mainstream organization disdains American soldiers and supports gay marriage.

That sensational lie must have surprised longtime AARP members, but the ad had a momentary media impact. No doubt Mr. Jarvis and his advisors are busily concocting more of the same.

Mr. Jarvis has never abandoned the business ethic established by Mr. Viguerie, according to the researchers at BlogPAC, a new investigative association. In August 2003, the federal government fined United Seniors more than $500,000 for sending out "misleading" mail designed to look like "some sort of official mailing containing information from the Social Security Administration."

The Bush "reform" campaign increasingly resembles a typical consumer fraud in both style and substance. Should it succeed, the most likely result is a historic national case of buyer's remorse.

The Democrats' decision ratifies what has been apparent for some years: The attempt to limit the influence of big money has failed. In fact, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that all attempts over the last century to effect political reform-defined as limiting the power of money-have failed. Money is as much the king of American politics now as it was in the time of Mark Twain's Great Barbecue.

Over the years, there have been so many schemes with such great hope invested in them. To get some perspective on the progress of reform or lack thereof, it helps to listen to the voices of yesterday. One of the strongest and most respected belongs to William Allen White, the legendary editor of the Emporia Gazette. White, a small-town, progressive, Teddy Roosevelt–ian Republican, was a figure whose shadow was cast well beyond the wheat fields of his flat farming state. For decades he was regarded as not merely the sage of the Midwest but of real-read Anglo-Saxon-Americans everywhere. Never a Populist, never a radical, a Republican through thick and thin, but always a reformer, in 1910 White published an optimistic book entitled The Old Order Changeth , the contents of which should afford the stuff of cogitation for those of us living a century later.

He wrote jubilantly of the approaching election of U.S. Senators by popular vote and not by state legislatures: "United States senators will go directly to the people for nomination, and not to the railroads and … corporations." Taking the selection of Senators out of the hands of state legislatures and deciding it by popular vote has not changed the composition of the Senate; it is still a bastion of millionaires and multimillionaires.

"Indeed," White enthused, "the growth of fundamental democracy is astonishing. Thirty years ago the secret ballot was regarded as a passing craze by professional politicians. Twenty years ago it was a vital issue in nearly every American state. Today the secret ballot is universal in American politics." And now most people think the secret ballot is somehow embedded in the Constitution and would be surprised to learn it was unheard of in America until around the 1890's.

It turns out that the secret ballot is an example of a meaningless reform. It had more to do with creeping middle-class hoity-toityism than any significant empowerment of people over and against big money. The idea behind the secret ballot is that it protects the voter against intimidation, which it does, but a stout police officer at the polls should be able to do that. The secret ballot came in about the same time that the American middle class was able to afford separate bedrooms for all the members of the family. It came in with the triumph of privacy, but privacy is of dubious value in a democratic political process, which should be highly social and interactive. Privacy encourages a retreat into passivity, which is the last thing you want in a democracy.

White also wrote: "Ten years ago the direct primary was the subject of academic discussion …. Now it is in active operation in over two thirds of our American states and over half of the American people use the direct primary as a weapon of self government." White and many other reformers embraced the primary as a replacement for the caucus and convention system, which had theretofore obtained in the states-and which still lives in Iowa and, in modified forms, a number of other states. In White's time, it was subject to outrageous manipulation and purchase, but it had the advantage that, if hotly motivated, people without money could rise up and seize their political party. The caucus or convention system of nomination and party governance encourages large-scale active participation. It is not impervious to big money, but big money has to get its butt out there and bribe the grass roots one root at a time.

What White and his fellow reformers did not see, although there were a few who did, was that the primary system would not only discourage one-on-one politicking, but would ultimately hand over the political process to the mass media and therefore to the biggest of big money. With the switch to the primary system, candidate selection was opened up to the millions who would not stir their stumps to turn up at local caucuses, where delegates were chosen to go to the regional or state conventions where the nominations took place. Those new primary-voting millions were subject to a mass media barrage before they voted, and as that happened the political parties, as organizations, had an increasingly hard time interacting directly with the voters. What the political experts call "retail politics" began to shrivel, and the parties watched as their power to choose their own candidates and policies was curtailed by the media machines, which did the bidding of the big-money interests.

White's optimism was boundless. He thought everything was coming up roses: "Five years ago the recall was a piece of freak legislation in Oregon. Today more American citizens are living under laws giving them the power of recall than were living under the secret ballot when Garfield came to the White House (1881) …." His hopes for initiative and referendum were just as high: He believed he foresaw citizens-not professional politicians-banding together to collect names on petitions to pass needed legislation stalled in state lawmaking bodies. He could not foresee that rich interests would kidnap these procedures by hiring signature gatherers to put their own projects on the ballot and then, using their money to fill the airwaves with their propaganda, would job the millions into voting against their own interests time and time again.

White was a thoughtful and broad-minded man. He was not a naïf, but he placed too much faith in the power of laws and purely mechanical arrangements to make right the political wrongs he saw around himself and his contemporaries. With no interest in overthrowing the entire system or instituting a semi-socialist revolutionary regime, he thought he could right the balance of power stemming from the concentration of wealth by proposals of the kind we still hear today. But money is very difficult to defeat: Like water, it can seep in everywhere. Money will despoil every reform which is not backed up by some kind of enforcing political muscle.

One thing the American masses do not have is political muscle. For a variety of reasons, labor-union power has been on a long decline, and no new kind of institution has grown up to represent the middling millions. There is one exception, the American Association of Retired Persons-the only successful attempt at the organizing of non-rich people in the past 50 years. AARP is also the only successful example of organizing white-collar people, the kind of people who have a visceral repugnance to joining anything which quacks like a labor union.

Unfortunately, there is no equivalent organization for non-retired, white-collar people while these same masses grow weaker in terms of power every year. They grow weaker because, with the passing of time, the top 5 or 10 percent control an ever larger percentage of the nation's wealth-wealth which can be used to manipulate the democratic process to aggrandize the already overly powerful rich. The middle-class masses grow weaker because they grow financially ever less secure in their jobs, in their savings and in their hopes for retirement. The attacks on private pension plans and Social Security create a vista for millions of working until they drop in the traces. In the last few months, thanks to the efforts of Eliot Spitzer, New York State's Attorney General, it has come to light that one of the reasons that the rich have been bloating up at a faster-than-usual pace is that they have been plundering the mutual funds, which constitute the savings of countless millions. The less money you have, the more you fear the boss and thus the less independence you have. Coupled with the huge debts that have much of the middle class tossing and turning every night, this vast number of people-the unconscious majority-have seldom been in a weaker position, economically, socially or politically. Their weakness is compounded by the apprehension that their livelihood may be exported to India any day next week.

Pending the day that this unconscious majority wakes up and organizes protection for itself, there is scant reason to put faith in reformist schemes. As the other Democratic candidates reject federal campaign-spending limits, all you can do is send regular-if small-contributions to the candidate of your choice. William Allen White would approve.

Have you ever wondered why New York is always teeming with Oscar parties, but you never hear anything about Grammy parties? We'll tell you why: Rock stars can't dress! Their idea of a snappy outfit is a shredded T-shirt over some tights, and maybe some kind of big shearling coat. Also: The Recording Academy is still handing out an award for "Best Polka Album." Tonight on the other coast, The Daily Show 's Jon Stewart hosts the Grammys as vastly overrated R&B singer Alicia Keys goes up against mellowing proselytizers U2 …. Meanwhile, back home, the Museum of Modern Art previews an exhibit of amateur photos of our town called Life of the City , a tribute to the city post–Sept. 11. "Of course, if the museum just opened its doors and said, 'We'll hang everything anybody brings us,' we wouldn't be doing our job," said curator Peter Galassi . "But if you're in the mood to help us, we need more pictures by ordinary people: a corner deli, the nutty friend at the party …. They're going to be put up-not casually, but they're going to be put up with pushpins." O.K., Pete, you asked for it: A pic of our nutty friend at the party is on its way to you!

[Grammys, CBS, 8 p.m.; Life of the City , deliver your photo in person to 11 West 53rd Street, exhibit opens to the public tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., 708-9400, push 7 for information on submitting.]

Thursday 28th

Heimel maneuvers: If you're like us, you're completely sick of the whole single-woman-whining-about-her-plight-over-Cosmos genre-and when, exactly, did the feminist ideal morph from the sensibly randy Simone de Beauvoir to the bubblebrains on HBO's version of Sex and the City ?-but way back in 1983, when most of those tootsies were still in tube socks, Cynthia Heimel wrote the seminal Sex Tips for Girls and, we swear, it's one o f the best books of all tim e , right up there with Anna Karenina ! Now she's publishing Advanced Sex Tips for Girls , and so we tracked her down in Los Angeles, where she was visiting her 31-year-old son, Brodie, a producer. "I'm just so sad I ever left New York," she told us between deep drags on an American Spirit Light. "It was just such a mistake. I left because I lost my job at Vogue , there were crackheads every night screaming on my block-and it was a good block- and all my friends had disappeared because I had stopped going to nightclubs. I was lonely and scared and depressed, so I thought, ' I'll go to L.A. because it's sunshiney .' Big mistake-what can I say?" Now she lives in Oakland with her four dogs and 6-foot-2 younger boyfriend , who is six years older than her son. Oakland, she said, is "a really nice place to live if you're a woman of a certain age, which is 47, something like that. There is a lot of intelligence . The cons are, they are a bunch of control-freak maniacs who are really serious about being politically correct . Since I left New York, I feel underappreciated, if you must know the truth." Tonight Ms. Heimel reads and signs in Chelsea, after a mad dash through Loehmann's shoe department.

[Barnes & Noble, 675 Sixth Avenue, 7:30 p.m., 727-1227.]

Friday 1st

It's March, and everyone's dancin '! Just try to avoid getting trampled tonight! Nancy Karp and her Dancers are flying in like a bunch of reindeer from San Francisco (uh-oh) to premiere Kalasam , which was inspired by India. Meanwhile, Savion Glover (tap, tap, tap) is M.C.'ing the " World's Best Tap Dancers Aged 21 and Under" in midtown …. Also, the Heather Harrington Dance Company is out in Williamsburg, which Th e New York Times has finally discovered, rapidly dooming it to become the next Upper West Side.

[Nancy Karp and Dancers, Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, 8 p.m., 334-7479; Savion Glover, Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, 8 p.m., 307-4100; Heather Harrington Dance Company, 205 North Seventh Street, Brooklyn, 8 p.m., 718-599-7997.]

Saturday 2nd

Remember Wonder Woman? And trying to dress up like her for Halloween when you were little , except your half-heartedly bohemian mom wouldn't fork up for the Underoos ("too commercial"), so you wound up pasting gold stars on a T-shirt?… Tonight, Chicago comic-book artist Alex Ross - not the secret alter ego of New Yorker music critic Alex Ross (we think )-headlines a charity event featuring an exhibit of art from his new graphic novel, Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth . What it benefits: Sept. 11 charities. "Wonder Woman's special quality is that she's coming from an idealized society," said Mr. Ross, "somewhere better than here. The Amazons are completely at peace with each other, their society is a utopia of sorts , and she comes to us representing the peace and wisdom of the Amazons." But screw the philosophy-when's the big splashy Hollywood movie ? "So far as I know, Sandra Bullock has the rights to do something with it , but they're very shy of trying, because they fear the character coming across as ludicrous in today's times-which is a misleading conjecture, because if you think about it, the character was reinvented almost in totality as Xena ."

[CB's 313 Gallery, 313 Bowery, 8 p.m., 677-0455.]

Sunday 3rd

Oscar heat is building … but first, it's the dulling vapors of the Stony Awards , the Oscars of High Times magazine, which we hear humiliated the New Yorker team on the softball field last summer. Celebrity wattage: Snoop Dogg. Interestingly, Stony nominee The Anniversary Party is better than an awful lot of this year's Oscar-nominated films . "We're moving it uptown," said High Times senior editor Greg Casseus. "We kind of felt like we wanted the show to be a little more glamorous. In terms of attire, I don't really care-when I say 'glamour,' I mean sort of a soirée along the lines of the Golden Globes, as opposed to a glass of wine and a slice of hemp pizza." Does he and his staff ever get busted? "Why should we? We're not the only office in New York that has pot smokers!" True-one of our cubicle mates smells like the lower decks on a Colombian banana boat!

[B.B. King's Blues Club and Grill, 243 West 42nd Street, 8 p.m., 387-0500.]

Monday 4th

More proof that baby boomers just aren't going to roll over and go quietly into that dark Westchester: My Generation , kind of the Sassy to Modern Maturity 's Seventeen , throws a party (celebrity wattage: um, Pete Seeger ) to celebrate its first anniversary and 3.8 million subscribers, who get it free with AARP membership (AARP used to stand for American Association of Retired Persons , but because boomers don't retire-they just become consultants-it now stands for nada ), and something called the Genny Awards that they've conferred upon Julia Child, the Pill and Muhammad Ali. "There's a new executive director and a whole new branding campaign!" said My Generation editor in chief and peppy boomer Betsy Carter. "Boomers have sort of changed aging, and are changing how we're aging. First of all, they don't think they are - we all think we're 35 . Also, we tend to be in kind of better shape , and we know more song lyrics ; we're much more in sync with a younger group of people. I'm going off to Costa Rica for a week on Friday!" Cra-zy! Meanwhile, Grammys aftershock in midtown as dusky pop singer Nelly Furtado does her strange, lurching dance at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

[Genny Awards, Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52nd Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 255-8455; Nelly Furtado, Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th Street, call Ticketmaster.]

Tuesday 5th

Level III chef groupies, the truly desperate breed ( house husbands with house accounts at Williams-Sonoma and big, well-oiled butcher blocks ), descend on Lincoln Center, where they'll watch cuddly Babbo celebri-chef Mario Batali narrate a piece called The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine by composer Aaron Jay Kernis , played by one of those modern-music chamber groups with ladies in billowing Yohji Yamamoto black skirts and men with prominent Adam's apples.

[Alice Tully Hall, 65th Street and Broadway, 8 p.m., 721-6500.]

Wednesday 6th

Even the circus is falling prey to the "girl power" scam . "Never before has the Greatest Show On Earth featured so many women headliners in such dramatically divergent displays of derring-do, " boasts the press release for the 132nd edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Here comes Sara, the famed Tiger Whisperer ; Circus Siren Sylvia Zerbini; and, of course, Mei Ling the Motorcycle Maiden ( vrooom )-umm, is this the circus, or the Penthouse Forum? And tell us something else: Since they have all these babes on their roster, why on earth did they send a picture of T.M., the "Gator Guy"? (See off-putting photo.)

[Beat the crowds-the circus comes to Madison Square Garden on March 21-and schlep ironically out to the Continental Airlines Arena, somewhere in New Jersey, tonight; www.Ringling.com.]