Not since 1990, when Whitman - then an unknown, underfunded one-time county official whose longshot campaign against Senator Bill Bradley was universally dismissed by the press and pundits - inexplicably pulled off a near-upset on Election Night have we experienced a surprise quite like this.

Yes, there have been plenty of political upsets in the 19 years since, but you could seem them coming days, weeks, or months ahead of time. They weren't anything like what New Yorkers witnessed on Tuesday night, when for 20 or so surreal minutes it actually seemed that Thompson--a man who suffered every insult and indignity imaginable during a candidacy that was written off by everyone--might defeat Michael Bloomberg.

It was shortly after ten o'clock - long after the networks and newspapers had called the race for Bloomberg - that Thompson pulled to within 2,000 votes of the man who spent more than $100 million on what was hailed as one of the most formidable political machines ever assembled. No one had seen anything like this coming. (Well, the thought did cross some of our minds.) What was going on?

Eventually, of course, Bloomberg pulled away, if you can call it that, and with nearly all votes counted, he had built a five-point margin, 51 to 46 percent. Five points. That's what his braintrust of high-priced consultants, army of field workers, and his months of television ads and slick mailers was apparently worth. This was the biggest near-shocker since Bradley-- who outspent Whitman 10 to 1--survived by just three points back in '90.

It may be worth, then, recalling the implications of that 19-year-old New Jersey result for those two candidates.

Bradley came to that election as a certified national star who, it was widely assumed, would win the race easily and then run for president in 1992. Polls consistently showed him 25 or more points ahead of Whitman - and 17 points up in the final pre-election survey. His near-loss humbled him and prompted the media to question its longstanding assumptions about his political skills and strength. That '92 White House bid never materialized, and in 1996 Bradley left the Senate instead of running again.

Whitman, meanwhile, emerged from her near-upset as the state Republican Party's new It Girl. Suddenly, she had credibility with the media, donors and activists. She parlayed it into a bid for the governorship in 1993, which she narrowly won, and by 1996 was the subject of national speculation when Bob Dole conducted his running-mate search.

Who knows if Bloomberg's and Thompson's political careers will have similar trajectories after Tuesday. Certainly, post-election analysis will focus on what Bloomberg did wrong rather than on what Thompson did right. But in defeat, the comptroller deserves something he was never given by anyone--not the press, not the president, and not his own party--during the mayoral race: a little bit of respect.

That's right: The 68-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as you might have heard, was given a role in the film, playing a man who is roughed up by Ledger's knife-wielding Joker. And now C-Span-2's loyal audience of Capitol Hill staffers, political dorks and elderly shut-ins, to whom the somnolent Leahy is a well-known figure, has responded by flooding America's megaplexes to catch their hero on the big screen.

But this isn't the first time that Hollywood has cashed in on the draw of America's political class. Here are just a few other memorable acting turns by politicians:

* Senator Paul Simon, Saturday Night Live (December 1987): The big-eared, bowtie-clad Illinois Democrat took a detour from the White House campaign trail to appear with the musician who shares his same name. When announcer Don Pardo declared "Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Simon" at the top of the show, both the politician and the musician walked out onstage, arguing about which one was actually supposed to host the show. Eventually, Simon the politician relented, leaving the other Simon to host the rest of the show.

* Michael Dukakis, Cheers (November 1990): On the same day that Massachusetts voters went to the polls to choose Dukakis' gubernatorial successor, the Duke—two years removed from his ill-fated presidential campaign—filmed an opening sequence with Ted Danson and George Wendt outside Boston's Bull and Finch Pub, which was used for exterior shots in the show. In the scene, Dukakis buys a newspaper and says a quick hello as he walks past Danson and Wendt, who are too surprised to say anything back. And then the opening credits music rolls.

* Nancy Reagan, Diff'rent Strokes (March 1983): O.K., so Nancy and Ronnie were actors before they entered politics, but still, the spectacle of a first lady playing a meaty role in a sitcom episode was rather extraordinary. Reagan's appearance dovetailed with her "Just Say No!" campaign. In the episode, Gary Coleman's Arnold writes an article for his school paper about drug use by his fellow students. His teacher doesn't believe him—but Nancy Reagan, who just so happens to be in New York and just so happens to hear about Arnold's story, does. So she visits the Drummond house and offers to accompany Arnold to school the next day, and at the school she uses her feminine charms to elicit confessions of drug experimentation from several of Arnold's classmates. Arnold's teacher immediately apologizes and the students rush to the front of the room to hug the first lady. Surprisingly, Reagan's visit didn't have much of a long-term effect on series co-stars Todd Bridges and Dana Plato.

* Tip O'Neill, Dave (1993): Ivan Reitman's comedy about a presidential look-alike who ends up running the country was the ultimate Washington insider's flick, with numerous walk-ons by politicians and Beltway media figures. Most notably, perhaps, it marked one of the final public appearances by former House Speaker Top O'Neill, who died the January after the film's release. In the movie, O'Neill, then 81 years old, is shown on the steps of the Capitol congratulating Frank Langella, who plays an adviser to the president, on the administration's sudden embrace of left-wing populism—which, little does O'Neill know, has come about because the look-alike Dave is now in charge of the country.

* Bill Bradley, The Cosby Show (February 1989): Then a second-term New Jersey senator, Dollar Bill turned in a memorable performance as Cliff's Teammate #1 in the episode "The Boys of Winter." The setup: Dr. Huxtable's wife, Claire, finds a videotape of Cliff and his fellow doctors being humiliated in a basketball game by a group of female lab technicians. Cliff's supposed doctor teammates are played by a group of aging basketball pros, including Walt Hazzard (who in real life had just been fired as the coach at UCLA), Dave DeBusschere and Bradley.

On Friday, Robert Reich formally endorsed Barack Obama, a decision that was greeted as noteworthy since Reich was an old Oxford chum of Bill Clinton’s and served as the 42nd president’s first labor secretary. He also scored a date with a young Hillary Rodham back in 1966, when, as the freshman class president at Dartmouth, he asked Hillary, his counterpart at Wellesley, to meet him for “a presidential summit” in Hanover. (There was no second date.)

Reich, in disclosing his endorsement decision on his blog, dutifully played up this sense of conflict, writing about “the pull of old friendships” but concluding that “my conscience won’t let me be silent any longer.”

In truth, his endorsement was a mere formality, more than 10 years in the making. Numerous times this campaign season, Reich has chimed in to side with Obama—and against Hillary.

And, as some members of the press noted over the weekend, Reich earned the enmity of Bill Clinton when he left the administration after the 1996 election and published an unusually frank memoir, Locked in the Cabinet. From the sidelines during Clinton’s second term, he intensified his criticism, decrying “the interminable Clinton scandals,” branding the president “utterly disgraced,” and charging that under Clinton’s centrist leadership, the Democratic Party has “expired and gone to meet its maker.”

But the history is even deeper than that. Just consider the timing of Reich’s move, on the eve of what could be Hillary’s last stand. Reich was clearly calculating that the news generated by his endorsement—Clinton loyalist jumps ship!—would only further the perception of Obama’s inevitability, thereby perhaps convincing wavering Pennsylvanians to give up on the Clintons once and for all.

Call it payback, because Bill Clinton once played the same trick on Robert Reich. Back in 2002, Reich, who had returned to academia and even co-hosted a public television show in Boston with former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (The Long and Short of It) after leaving Washington, entered the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Massachusetts. Instantly, he became one of two front-runners in a five-way race, vying for the lead with State Treasurer Shannon O’Brien.

Then Bill Clinton came to town, ostensibly to prop up his friend Steve Grossman, who had been his handpicked D.N.C. chairman during Clinton’s second term. Grossman was one of the also-rans vying with Reich and O’Brien for the Democratic nomination, and his doomed campaign (which he abandoned shortly thereafter) was barely registering in polls. Clinton’s real reason for visiting, of course, was to slide the knife into Reich.

First, Clinton made clear to reporters that he hadn’t urged Reich to enter the race, as Reich had suggested: “I didn't like the implication that somehow I encouraged him into the race when you already had one guy in the race (Grossman) that had supported my policies, and at critical points he didn't.”

Then he insinuated that Reich was disloyal and a quitter, noting that Grossman, unlike Reich, “helped us when we were down and out and didn't leave us and believed in what we were doing all the way. And it's hard to quarrel with the results.”

“He has a right not to support my policies and to leave and say whatever he wanted to,” Clinton said of Reich.

But the kicker came when Clinton—unprompted by anyone—began talking up O’Brien, Reich’s real competition for the nomination. As the Boston Herald reported at the time: “At four separate points during the 15-minute session with reporters, Clinton mentioned O'Brien with no solicitation. Twice, Clinton called O'Brien a ‘very impressive woman,’ and noted that she was leading the other four candidates in opinion polls.”

It was a humiliating day for Reich, who ultimately lost the primary to O’Brien by eight points. The Clinton visit was hardly the main reason for his defeat, but might it have been on Reich’s mind when he sat down to write his blog entry last Thursday night?

Another grudge seemed evident on Sunday morning, when Bill Bradley and Jon Corzine appeared on CNN’s Late Edition for one of the “dueling surrogates” segments with which television producers seem so enamored. On the surface, it was a dull and predictable exchange. Neither Bradley nor Corzine are known for their magnetism, and they both hewed to familiar, pre-approved talking points—Corzine for Clinton and Bradley for Obama—that anyone who’s followed this campaign even casually could probably recite on cue.

But the argument between Corzine and Bradley was about Clinton and Obama less than it was about two rivals who each wanted to look better than the other on national television. In fact, some of those who know Corzine well insist that, in his heart, he prefers Obama to Clinton, but that a sense of obligation to the Clintons (who both lent considerable assistance to his 2005 gubernatorial campaign) and the persistence of Bill (who maintained almost daily phone contact with Corzine last year while he weighed his endorsement options) compelled him to side with Hillary.

The differences between the two stem from the radically different paths they pursued in the New Jersey political world, where old-school patronage machines still tend to dominate both parties.

Bradley was an outsider through and through, a man who spoke and lived the credo of the reformer. His strength came from the popular support he accrued as a star basketball player at Princeton and with the Knicks, and he won his Senate seat in 1978 without the support of any major county organizations—and almost unheard-of feat. In his three Senate terms, he largely ignored the state’s Democratic establishment, among whom he was—and remains—thought of as arrogant.

Corzine played the game differently: He spoke like a reformer, too, but he dipped into the fortune he made at Goldman Sachs and essentially purchased that same party establishment, one county chairman, one consultant, and one union leader at a time, showering them with cash and promising them whatever they wanted, so long as they’d back his campaign.

The Bradley approach and the Corzine approach came into conflict in 2000. Bradley was running for president. Corzine had just jumped into the race for an open Senate seat. The New Jersey establishment that despised Bradley decided it was time for revenge and lined up with Al Gore, embarrassing Bradley with stories about widespread home-state defections. They told Corzine he should go along with them. And he did.

One of the very few powerful New Jersey Democrats to stick with Bradley that year was Richard J. Codey, who was then the party’s State Senate leader and who would become the Senate president and acting governor a few years later. When Corzine ran for governor in 2005, he pushed Codey—then the acting governor—out of the way. In the fall campaign, Bradley agreed to do one high-profile event with Corzine—a photo-op at a basketball court. Codey was also present and Bradley used the occasion to sing Codey’s praises to the press and to publicly suggest that Corzine, upon being elected as governor, appoint Codey to replace him in the U.S. Senate—not exactly on-message and about the last topic that Corzine wanted to deal with at that point.

Eight years after Corzine teamed up with the New Jersey Democratic establishment to help derail his presidential ambitions, Bradley is seemingly on the verge of returning the favor: If Obama does win the nomination, he will have defeated the candidate backed by Corzine and the party establishment.

Barack Obama released his and Hillary Clinton hasn’t (which the New York Times editorialized about this morning).

Former Senator Bill Bradley, in a capable bit of segueing, said, “I think this is part of a larger issue that actually affects healthcare, and it is full disclosure.  There is an issue of full disclosure of income tax returns. There’s also an issue of full disclosure of what a mandate will cost. And she has not made a full disclosure of that nor her income tax returns.”

He went on to say, “And as long as we’re on the issue of full disclosure, President Clinton hasn’t revealed who were the contributors to his presidential library while he was still in office.”

Here's the text of invitation:

The predicament she now faces—brought on by the twin revelations that Barack Obama is actually serious about running and that John Edwards is actually popular—is startlingly similar to the one Mr. Gore overcame to win his party’s nomination.

Mrs. Clinton, like Mr. Gore before her, owned the formative months leading up to the primary campaigning season as the singular, Mondale-esque favorite for her party’s nomination, a status owed to the perception of her overpowering inevitability. But as it did for Mr. Gore, that inevitability is giving way to unforeseen political peril.

She’s hardly an underdog, but the signs sure are ominous: a fourth-place finish in an Iowa poll two weeks ago, a feeble 22 percent showing in a New Hampshire survey, and a lack of the freshness and excitement surrounding the initial maneuverings of Mr. Obama and, to some extent, Mr. Edwards.

Mrs. Clinton’s standing now contrasts sharply with her popularity during the last Presidential election, when trial-heat polls clear through 2003 showed her, without lifting a finger, easily lapping what was largely an anonymous Democratic field. And that was how it was supposed to go this time, too. As countless media analyses told us, with her celebrity, money and machinery, Hillary would dwarf the field until early in ’08, at which point a second-tier candidate would finally emerge as the “anti-Hillary” choice. They’d joust for a bit, but it would be for show: In American Presidential politics these days, David can annoy Goliath, but he doesn’t win.

But that was when Hillary’s chief ’08 rivals had names like Kerry, Feingold and Biden. Now, her risk-averse blandness seems like a distinct liability in the context of the Obama media storm. Political observers are also belatedly acknowledging the staying power of Mr. Edwards, who has spent the last two years relentlessly charming the party’s grassroots.

Instead of subsisting on inevitability through 2007, Mrs. Clinton is suddenly locked in a battle with a pair of viable foes.

Which brings us back to Al Gore, whose 2000 campaign, like Mrs. Clinton’s ’08 effort, was years in the making. At this same point eight years ago, there was talk of an uncontested nomination for Mr. Gore.

One by one, the shadow of Bill Clinton’s Vice President scared off some of the Democratic Party’s most ambitious names: Dick Gephardt, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, not to mention Jesse Jackson and Paul Wellstone. Only the arid and double-chinned “Dollar” Bill Bradley didn’t take the hint.

Mr. Gore—like Hillary, a practitioner of a public style that smacks of caution and condescension—soon found himself in a surprising dogfight. By the spring of 1999, Mr. Bradley had caught him in the polls in New Hampshire, and soon the onetime Knicks small forward was ahead in national polls, too. Amazingly, Mr. Bradley even out-raised Mr. Gore over the summer months, and as Iowa and New Hampshire neared, he actually looked like a front-runner.

And yet Mr. Gore ended up sweeping every single contested primary and caucus in 2000, a historic running of the table that might now offer clues to Mrs. Clinton on how to separate herself from Messrs. Obama and Edwards.

Mr. Gore, for instance, benefited from a strategic miscalculation by Mr. Bradley, who invested heavily in the lead-off Iowa caucuses, where he faced long odds, thereby inflating the value of the Vice President’s eventual victory there. Then, in New Hampshire, Mr. Gore received an assist from John McCain, who drew independent voters to the Republican primary like the Pied Piper. Otherwise, many of those same independents would likely have opted for Mr. Bradley, vaulting him past Mr. Gore.

But the main explanation for Mr. Gore’s comeback is simply that he took the gloves off, dusting off his notorious attack-dog act and shamelessly slandering Mr. Bradley with conventional (and yet maddeningly effective) scare tactics, warning that his opponent’s programs would, essentially, kill old people. It helped, too, that Mr. Bradley showed all the eagerness to fight back of Michael Dukakis.

Whether Mrs. Clinton would replicate such an unglamorous strategy is another matter. For one thing, criticism might not stick to Messrs. Obama and Edwards as easily as it did to Mr. Bradley. What’s more, the first viable female Presidential candidate is likely to squander whatever sympathy that status may afford her if she starts a mud fight with the boys.

For now, a safer path for Mrs. Clinton is to hope that her rivals fade on their own, or even better, that they turn their guns on each other and do her dirty work for her. The question, with little more than a year until Iowa, is how long she’s prepared to wait.

And then New Jersey’s Bill Bradley came within an eyelash of losing his seat to former Somerset County Freeholder Christine Todd Whitman in 1990, and there went his ’92 Presidential aspirations. It takes no more than a dollop of creativity to draw up a scenario in which a similar fate befalls Hillary Clinton this November, although the analogy is far from perfect. The lone big Democratic name on the 1990 New Jersey ballot, “Dollar Bill” felt the rage of an ordinarily sleepy public jolted awake by their Democratic governor’s decision to tax their toilet paper. Hillary, by contrast, is leading an unusually strong Democratic ticket against a state Republican operation that can best be called a train wreck—this in an election season when the overarching question is how big the national Democratic wave will be, not whether there will be one. She demonstrated some electoral strength this week—to the extent her ability to trounce nuisance anti-war candidate Jonathon Tasini was ever in doubt—by winning the Democratic primary by a margin of better than four to one. And in some ways, the next few months could serve as a valuable tune-up for her. “She’s got to run and she’s got to win, and it certainly appears she’ll have no trouble doing that,” said Michael Dukakis, who can fairly relate to Hillary’s balancing act, having parlayed his landslide 1986 re-election as governor of Massachusetts into a 1988 Presidential campaign. “I think it would actually be less of a transition for her,” Mr. Dukakis said, “since she’s already on the national scene and she’s running for a federal office this year. The issues that provide the backdrop for this campaign are presumably the same issues she’d want to talk about in a Presidential campaign.” And yet there remains on her path to a cushy re-election several leg traps that could—potentially—hobble her effort to transition later to a full-fledged White House campaign. The simplest is the matter of how many votes she actually gets in November. To return to the Bradley example, a 50 percent showing humbled him off the national stage, for ’92 at least. Hillary had no chance of sinking that low. (She was sufficiently nonchalant about her primary challenge on Tuesday to have forgone any sort of public victory celebration; she was in Washington when the results came in.) But maybe a better numerical barometer this November will be how she fares compared to Eliot Spitzer, who is poised to steamroll a similarly overmatched foe in the other high-profile statewide race; if Hillary runs far off his pace, what does that say? Beyond that, analysts will be left to nitpick exit-poll cross-tabulations and town-by-town tallies dissecting Hillary’s performance in, say, the handful of competitive Congressional districts in New York (consequences for Ohio!) or among specific demographic groups that gave her trouble in 2000. More broadly, she will at last be forced to confront The Question, which to date she’s nuanced with practiced evasion, dutifully carrying out her role in the silly on-the-record games that reporters and politicians play. “Are you going to run for President?” she’s asked now, and always she replies that she’s just focused on doing the best job she can for the people of New York. But The Question will be put to her with far more precision and persistence this fall—perhaps magnified by the spotlight of live television—and it will also assume a new, more provocative form: “Will you promise the people of New York that you’ll serve a full six-year term if they re-elect you?” Say yes and her first post-November task will entail some uncomfortable and awkward wiggle-work to break free of an unwise pledge. But say no and she hands the New York media the scoop that Hillary has finally ’fessed up to her Presidential ambition. This is not uncharted territory for the family Clinton. Bill Clinton famously botched The Question in 1990, as he sought a fifth term as Arkansas’ governor. It was a matter of some sensitivity then, since he’d very publicly toyed with a Presidential bid in 1988, and the ’92 Democratic nomination was looking wide open. There were suggestions that maybe the governor was getting a bit big for his britches—a sentiment, perhaps, that explained the mere 55 percent of the vote he snagged in the gubernatorial primary that year. Spooked, Bill promptly vowed to stick around Little Rock at least through 1994, a knee-jerk posture from which he began backtracking even before the general-election campaign ended, by which time it was clear he’d win no matter what. Still, it took months of massaging and ring-kissing after the election before he was clear to enter the Presidential fray without fear that his home-state allies would loudly brand him a con man. It’s no wonder, then, that Bill, several months back, broke the customary Clinton silence on the ’08 election and suggested that Hillary follow the lead of George W. Bush—who masterfully finessed The Question while bidding for re-election as the governor of Texas in 1998. “I’m going to take a look at it,” W. said back then, and he was shoulder-deep in Presidential waters before his second gubernatorial inauguration. But even adopting that line would mark a dramatic shift in tone for Hillary, who to this point has acted like it’s a revelation that there’ll be an election of any sort in 2008 when the matter has come up. “If she has any intention of at least considering a run for President, she’s got to be open and honest about it,” Mr. Dukakis advised. Her ’08 intentions are actually the least of the weighty subjects that Hillary has managed to evade discussing publicly. Four years ago this October, she voted to send American troops to Iraq. Thousands of them have since been deployed and returned home—zipped up in bags. If she had it to do over, would she cast the same vote today? It’s a question that she’s so far punted on, no surprise given that a straight answer—a yes or a no—could antagonize one of two key constituencies: the dogged anti-war leftists who loom large in her own party’s Presidential nominating process, or the moderate-to-conservative independents who will doom her chances of turning over key red states in the general election if they smell a modern-day McGovernite. But this fall’s campaign season brings with it an instrument that could force Hillary to cough up specific replies to uncomfortable questions: the debate. By the morning after the primary, it’s a 3-to-5 bet that John Spencer, the winner in the Republican primary, will already have demanded that Hillary join him for some absurd number of head-to-head showdowns. (The over/under might be set at 62—one for each county.) And given her star power, there will be no shortage of outlets eager to sponsor, publicize, broadcast, report on and even cater any such encounter. There is a proud tradition in American politics of front-runners ducking debates. But Hillary will find it tough to shun Mr. Spencer completely, and not simply because doing so would provoke an erudite tongue-lashing from the New York Times editorial page. She is already being watched by a curious national audience: What will this ’08 electorate think if the story of this uneventful New York election season is Hillary Clinton shying away from a former mayor of Yonkers? To demonstrate strength and self-confidence, she might have to agree to one—no doubt with numerous stipulations aimed at minimizing the size of the audience and the number of direct exchanges between her and Mr. Spencer. But that could still be enough to create problems. Maybe the moderator would press
her on Iraq, refusing to accept the pat rhetoric she usually offers while waiting for her aides to steer her away from reporters. And Mr. Spencer, an accomplished bomb-thrower, will have absolutely nothing to lose. There is no telling what ugly charges he might bluntly confront Hillary with. And the more he ratchets up the intensity—especially if she takes the bait and snaps back—the more national press coverage their interaction will receive. “If you know he’s a bomb-thrower, you deal with it,” said Mr. Dukakis, who was blessed with a courtly G.O.P. opponent in his ’86 re-election. “You just focus on the things you think are important. She’s been on the national scene, and prominently so. I don’t think voters will begrudge her.” For all the potential pratfalls, of course, Hillary is actually in a fairly enviable spot. If she exercises the focused discipline that has marked her public career, chances are she’ll cross the finish line in this November’s trial heat with legs plenty fresh to carry her straight into the White House marathon. As long as she can avoid calling Mr. Spencer a putzhead.

And so delegate-rich New York became Mr. Bradley's virtual home state, with his left-of-centrist campaign made to order for those sturdy soldiers of class, gender, cultural, ethnic and racial conflict who dominate the party during primary seasons. When the state's most respected legislator and party elder, retiring U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, endorsed Mr. Bradley and asserted that Mr. Gore couldn't win in November, the effect was not unlike one of Mr. Bradley's patented 25-footers from the corner: The timing was impeccable, and the opposition suddenly seemed a step slower.

As things worked out, however, Mr. Moynihan's endorsement probably was the high point of the Bradley campaign. It was on life support by the time it reached New York, and the former Senator pulled the plug after getting routed here, there and everywhere on Super Tuesday, March 7. But New York Democrats clearly retain a soft spot for the man who once wore No. 24. In fact, according to a survey of the state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention, New York Democrats believe Mr. Bradley should be Mr. Gore's choice for Vice President. The Observer reached 234 of the state's 294 delegates, and 55 of them said that Mr. Bradley was their first preference for the No. 2 slot. In second place was that hero of many an indifferent battle, General Apathy: More than 40 delegates expressed no preference in Mr. Gore's eventual choice. The remaining votes were split among House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Senator George Mitchell. New Yorker Robert Rubin, President Clinton's former Treasury Secretary, was the choice of a scattered few, as were Connecticut Senator Joseph Leiberman and Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, among others. And Mr. Clinton's Defense Secretary, William Cohen, has the support of Representative Charles Rangel of Harlem-even though Mr. Cohen is a Republican. "It would show just how big our tent is in the Democratic Party," Mr. Rangel told The Observer.

As of July 25, when George W. Bush presented Dick Cheney to the electorate as his running mate, Mr. Gore had yet to drop a hint about his choice for the Vice Presidency. During his campaign stops on July 23, however, he did express delight-in a scripted kind of way-in asserting that he would be running with the environmental movement and with the "workin' people" of America. Whether or not membership in the latter group is a prerequisite for the Vice Presidency remains to be seen.

While Mr. Bush made a safe choice in Mr. Cheney, a comforting figure who inspires memories of pre-Clinton days (Mr. Cheney was running Gerald Ford's White House when a certain future Senator from New Jersey was in short pants), Mr. Gore's selection of Mr. Bradley would make a powerful statement about the post-Clinton era. With a reputation for integrity, candor and probity, Mr. Bradley could neutralize the taint-by-association that has haunted Mr. Gore's campaign. Mr. Bradley's unsuccessful primary campaign had about it more than a touch of anti-Clintonism-it was hardly a coincidence that Mr. Bradley had the support of Mr. Moynihan and Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, men who would not list the President, as Mr. Gore did during the impeachment debacle, on any list of great White House tenants.

And with Mr. Cheney as his opposite number, Mr. Bradley might, might, seem charismatic, if only by contrast. Mr. Cheney spent his youth training to be a bureaucrat. Mr. Bradley spent his on the polished floor of Madison Square Garden. Advantage, Mr. Bradley.

Assemblyman Roberto Ramierez, who runs the Democratic county organization in the Bronx, was among the respondents who admitted that Mr. Bradley's presence on the ticket would please him enormously. Mr. Bradley, he said, "will always be a candidate in my heart." The Assemblyman also noted that while New Yorkers like him will always associate Mr. Bradley with the Knicks and an era in New York history, in fact he was a senator from and remains a resident of New Jersey-a crucial swing state. So vital is New Jersey that the four candidates for national office figure to spend more time shaking hands on the Jersey Shore, browsing the shopping malls of Bergen County and stalking the streets of downtown Newark than they'll spend in New York, a state considered a lock for Mr. Gore. Mr. Bradley, Mr. Ramierez noted, "is from a state we would welcome into the Democratic Party."

Countering Ralph Nader

He also represents a bloc of votes the Democratic Party must retain-serious, policy-oriented liberals who support campaign-finance reform and who are giving Green Party candidate Ralph Nader a look-see. Mr. Bradley's famous declaration that "politics is broken"-made when he announced that he would not seek a fourth Senate term in 1998-resonates with potential Nader voters in the Democratic Party. His palpable disillusion with status-quo politics and Clinton-era centrism, along with his own kind of personal asceticism (off-the-rack suits, modest lifestyle), could make Mr. Bradley a perfect antidote to the party's Nader problem.

The question, of course, is whether Mr. Bradley's pox-on-politics style would grate on career politician Al Gore, who has spent his life training for that moment in Los Angeles when he accepts his party's nomination for President. For Mr. Ramirez, however, chemistry doesn't matter all that much. "Did [Ronald] Reagan and [George] Bush get along? Did Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy get along?" he asked, recalling two rocky marriages of convenience in recent political history. "The objective is not [simply] to have a fuzzy, warm relationship," he said. "The idea here is to win a Presidential election."

That, of course, begs the question that skeptics raise once every four summers: Is the Vice Presidential candidate actually worth a bucket of warm spit on Election Day? And, if so, does Mr. Bradley have the, er, juice?

"Bill Bradley didn't even do well in Jersey," scoffed Mr. Rangel, although it would seem incumbent to point out that the New Jersey primary took place on June 7, by which time Mr. Bradley had retreated to the political desert to contemplate his future. "We thought Bradley could be a spoiler, and he wasn't even that."

And it's certainly possible-probable, even-that he won't be a savior, either. While pundits enjoy ruminating over the strengths and weaknesses that running mates bring to national tickets, voters make their decisions based on who's on first, not what's on second. Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Dukakis' running mate, humiliated Dan Quayle, George Bush's running mate, in 1988, but Mr. Dukakis spent Election Night rehearsing a concession speech, and Mr. Bush went on to chase the Iraqis out of Kuwait and provide Maureen Dowd with a target who had "kick me" attached to the back of his navy blazer.

Still, at a time when Bush Republicans are updating their résumés and inquiring about real estate prices in Georgetown, New York Democrats cling to the thought that a Gore-Bradley ticket could make a difference among undecided voters and the prodigal sons and daughters in their own camp. "[Mr. Bradley] personally adds a lot to the ticket, in integrity and honesty," said Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello. "And he's not a Washington insider."

The outside shot, he might have added, always was Mr. Bradley's specialty.

(Reporting by Jonathan Goldberg, Ted Diskant, Gabe Oberfield, Alex Pasternack and Charles Forelle.)

But there is an ugly irony in Mr. Gore's statement about the G.O.P.'s inability to see racism even when it is staring them in the face. The Republicans, said Mr. Gore, "looked at that State Capitol in South Carolina … But they didn't see a symbol of prejudice and injustice … They turned their heads and pretended they didn't see." That's precisely what Mr. Gore and Mr. Bradley did. They stared at the face of racism right in front of them, the face of the Rev. Al Sharpton, and pretended they didn't see.

You would never know this from the candidates or the extensive press coverage of the Apollo debate, but the famous theater is located diagonally across the street from the site of the racial arson instigated by Mr. Sharpton at Freddy's Fashion Mart five years ago. It took eight lives. The murderous rampage was set in motion when the United House of Prayer, one of the largest black landlords on 125th Street, raised the rent on the Fashion Mart owned by a Jew, Freddy Harari, who then raised the rent on his subtenant, Sikhulu Shange, who ran a record store. Recognizing that the quickest way to gain support in a landlord-tenant dispute is to turn it into a racial issue, Mr. Shange went to Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, which in turn knew that the quickest way to build a crowd in Harlem is to rouse racial hatreds. Mr. Sharpton and the daily picketers did their job brilliantly. He opened his public campaign against Freddy's on WWRL radio, warning: "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street."

After two months of rhetorical violence, protester Roland Smith ran into the store with guns blazing and burned it down. When it was over, Smith had killed himself and seven others. Armed with a .38-caliber revolver, he shot three whites and a Pakistani in cold blood-he had mistaken the light-skinned Pakistani for a Jew, and then set the fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one black, a security guard whom the protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover."

I've gone into the horrid details because Mr. Gore and Mr. Bradley might well claim that they knew nothing of the massacre since, Stalinist-style, the story of Freddy's has been largely effaced from the public record. Many of the recent profiles of Mr. Sharpton mention Freddy's either not at all or only in passing.

The memory hole into which Freddy's disappeared fits the pattern of Mr. Sharpton's political career. After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he's really reformed. The first New Sharpton, complete with fawning profiles in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker , came after the Tawana Brawley hoax.

Then, when a young rabbinical student was murdered by a racist mob in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. Sharpton did his best to stoke the anger. At the funeral for Gavin Cato, the young boy whose death in a traffic accident set off the rampage, Mr. Sharpton eulogized in full Farrakhan mode about Jewish "diamond merchants" and "no compromise."

A New Sharpton emerged when he ran in the Democratic Party Senate primary in 1992. He remained piously above the fray as the real candidates went at each other tooth and claw, emerging with his reputation refurbished.

But in 1993, it was back to business. Mr. Sharpton introduced the Nation of Islam's maximum leader, Louis Farrakhan, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, saying: "We will stand together. Not in some private midnight meeting … but in the daylight.… Don't ask who don't like it; we love it! Don't ask who's mad, we're glad!" By 1994, the Farrakhan connection was brushed aside and yet another Al Sharpton, Sharpton III, ran a primary campaign against Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Sharpton III told people he was evolving, and promised to make amends. A year later there was the massacre at Freddy's followed by the fourth New Sharpton. Sharpton IV, a candidate for Mayor in 1997 was, for the most part, on his best behavior. But Evan Mandery, a staff member of Ruth Messinger's campaign, reveals in his recent book The Campaign that after Mr. Sharpton lost the Democratic primary to Ms. Messinger, he tried to shake down her campaign in return for an endorsement.

Last summer, after Khallid Abdul Muhammad threatened to kill Bill Perkins, a City Council member of Harlem, Mr. Sharpton, alone among New York's African-American leaders, spoke at the annual hatefest of a man so extreme he had been expelled from the Nation of Islam. Writing in The Observer , Joe Conason expected reasonably enough that "the only likely loser at Khallid's carnival is the Rev. Al Sharpton." But Mr. Conason overestimated the intelligence and integrity of the New York press corps. Mr. Sharpton has moved beyond criticism. His attacks on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have earned him the status of a liberal icon. But when I appeared with City Council member Ronnie Eldridge of the West Side on New York 1, she talked about how Mr. Sharpton was "worried about the little people," and then gushed that she wished she were "as smart and witty as Reverend Sharpton."

In the wake of the Diallo verdict, Mr. Sharpton's relative restraint has produced almost Eldridge-like praise in the press, which is grateful that the city has been spared Mr. Sharpton's wrath. Mr. Sharpton and his enablers count on our remembering the history of racial oppression in America and forgetting Mr. Sharpton's history.

New Yorkers, myself among them, take great pleasure in mocking the credulity of the Tammy Faye Bakker, Jesus-speak and Southern racist Holy Rollers. How, we ask ourselves, can these people be played for suckers time and again? But New Yorkers have to ask the same kind of question of themselves. How is it that Mr. Sharpton has been able to put his con over time and again? It turns out that we are just as susceptible to the appeal of political militance mixed with racial guilt as some Southerners are to white identity politics in religious guise. In a city where institutional liberalism collapsed under the pyre of the Dinkins administration, liberals in the press and politics need the gestural radicalism of Mr. Sharpton to maintain their own identity.

If Sharpton V has yet to appear, it's because, having already gotten away with so much, he no longer has a need to feign contrition. The Confederate flag will probably be taken down from the State Capitol in South Carolina by the end of the year. But we in New York, who have already had more New Sharptons than there were New Nixons, will have Mr. Sharpton for a long time to come.

And for the résumé hawks of Washington, D.C., no one's future is more worth watching than that of Donna Brazile, the conquering Vice President's campaign manager.

"I still have to secure the nomination," said Ms. Brazile, reached on Sunday, March 5, at Gore headquarters in Nashville. She was responding to rampant rumors that after Super Tuesday, she was off to clean up the mess at the Democratic National Committee, and that it was Massachusetts son Michael Whouley who was digging his heels into the center of the Gore action for the long haul. "We still have to get to 2,169."

Naturally. But once that number of delegates necessary for the Democratic nomination is a foregone conclusion, and the funeral meats of former Senator Bill Bradley's Presidential aspirations have had time to grow cold, what will be on Ms. Brazile's agenda? It is a question that has the Beltway on full alert, and it's not hard to understand why: Now that Team Gore has, like the candidate himself, evolved from a beefy bumbler to a leaner, keener and very much meaner specimen, what will become of its uncommonly high-profile captain, the first African-American woman to manage a Presidential campaign? Will Ms. Brazile be rewarded as the history-making warrior who slashed spending, whipped the troops into shape and rallied the reliably Democratic masses? Or, in the media blackout after the saturation coverage of Super Tuesday, will she be decanted as a loose-lipped liability, best known for insulting Republicans in general and black war-hero Republicans in particular? "The Republicans bring out Colin Powell and [Representative] J.C. Watts [Republican of Oklahoma] because they have no program, no policy," Ms. Brazile told Bloomberg.com in January. "They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them."

Less outrageous but, in some quarters, more politically bothersome, Ms. Brazile also admitted, last November, that the old Democratic proclivity for partitioning the electorate into discrete pleats of panderability has never died; it has just fallen further down on the press releases. "The four pillars of the Democratic Party are African-Americans, labor, women and what I call other ethnic minorities," Ms. Brazile told The Washington Post in January, instantly evoking a collective New Democratic wince. "The emerging constituencies are environmentalists, gays and lesbians and those with physical disabilities." Or might her fate dovetail into both–with an assignment to be Mr. Gore's eyes and ears and, of course, his soft-money spender–with the Democratic National Committee?

However high-octane she has been on other questions, Ms. Brazile was low-keying this one. "Why would you plan on what to have for dinner next week when you don't even know if you'll be hungry?" she asked. Several top Gore campaign aides also insisted that no decisions on such matters have been made.

In any event, if Ms. Brazile is hungry next week, it need not be for humble pie. First of all, whatever her shortcomings in the public relations field, she has just helped to engineer a whistle-clean sweep of 16 primaries by a candidate who was viewed, not so long ago, as a human sacrifice to the god George W. Bush–and for that matter who was viewed, incredible as it now seems, as a desperate, wind-up-Ken contrast to that walking tower of cool, Bill Bradley. For purposes of that endeavor, while the "pillars" strategy was not smart for her to state, it was, many argue, essential for her to execute–particularly given Mr. Bradley's attempts to reach around Mr. Gore's left shoulder and scoop up votes from the seven constituencies she mentioned. Though Ms. Brazile cannot claim credit for Mr. Gore's fortunes turning so favorably as to invert the classic principle of the polarizing primary. That distinction lies with Mr. Bradley: Rather than forcing the front-runner to the politically problematic left, the former Senator, in the end, served only to glide Mr. Gore to the vital, indeed politically magical, center, by attacking Mr. Gore for being–or rather, having been–a conservative Democrat, who voted against Medicaid funding for abortions and such. Manifestly failing to kill him, that move as manifestly made Mr. Gore stronger going into the general election.

"Bradley not only tacked to the left, he pushed us to the right," said a senior Gore adviser. "He certainly helped push us into the mainstream."

"We went to the Apollo Theater and argued for welfare reform and attacked quotas," said another adviser. (It also didn't hurt that Spike Lee, in his capacity as famous, if way off-message, pre-debate spinmeister for Mr. Bradley, speculated to reporters that Bill Clinton just might be the most popular President among African-Americans since Emancipation.)

Of course, all this occurred at a debate where the questioning was led off by the Rev. Al Sharpton, a figure who has fast become the left-wing "tat" for Republicans needful of a response to the right-wing "tit" that is Mr. Bush's visit to Bob Jones University. It is here that the aggregate of Ms. Brazile's remarks achieve some significance in the discussion of her future–and not because of the remarks per se. It's what those remarks say about her style as a political operative and her substance as a political thinker, and where that combination fits into a general election campaign for President of the United States.

"We hope Donna Brazile's sketch of the 'pillars' of Democratic strength does not represent the genuine blueprint for the Vice President's campaign," said the centrist Democratic Leadership Council at the time of the remark. "This 'base-constituency-group' strategy was central to the failed Democratic Presidential campaigns of the 1980's. By contrast, the Clinton-Gore victories in 1992 and 1996 focused on a broad message based on common values and new ideas that appealed both to the 'base' and to the swing voters who usually decide elections." This is one theory of Democratic hegemony, but there is an opposite theory, espoused by the likes of Ms. Brazile, and the two are still very much at odds in the Democratic Party.

"One of the reasons that I think Bush lost in '92 is that Bush could not put together a winning coalition: women, unions, African-Americans," said Bill Lynch, a D.N.C. vice chairman with close ties to the Gore campaign in general and with Ms. Brazile in particular. "The way [Republicans] win is, large components of those coalitions stay home." Democrats would, of course, be quick to point out that this choice is hardly an either-or–they want inner-city blacks and Michael Eisner–but, in the day-to-day, hand-to-hand campaign combat of firing messages and deploying resources, it does become at least a question of emphasis. And in a race where the newly minted John McCain Independents and Democrats will be the key, it might become a good deal more than that.

If Ms. Brazile decamps to the D.N.C., she will do so after a job well done, and in the interest of a job that very much needs to be done. She will also be following in the footsteps of many a campaign operative before her. (She could also, as many point out, be forgiven for wanting to sleep from now to November.) But where she goes, and what she ends up doing, will say a great deal about the direction of the Gore campaign going forward. And as important as what happens is how it happens.

"She committed to getting through to the nomination," said a Gore aide, who praised Ms. Brazile as a great "institutional Democrat" with valuable connections throughout the Democratic base.

Those things are all true, but they can sound funny–and therefore, in this case, what might be a matter of course can become a matter of some delicacy.

"'You're good for a black person,' or 'You're the best of the black operatives,'" said Mr. Lynch, who was careful to emphasize that he was addressing the kinds of remarks that are sometimes made by way of dismissing African-American strategists, not anything he knew to have been said about Ms. Brazile. "When they talk about white operatives, they never say that all they can do is work the white community."

For that, among other reasons, is why no operative, white or otherwise, is saying anything other than that Ms. Brazile will leave the campaign on her own terms–if she leaves at all.

"If she decides she wants to stay," said a top adviser, "she stays."