Paterson's poll numbers are low, and his fund-raising is anemic, but much of the talk about getting Paterson out of the race was, at least publicly, premised on the notion that a credible Republican candidate in the general election--that would be Rudy Giuliani--could snatch the governorship away from Democrats. And if Paterson went down, he could bring with him Senate Democrats, flipping control of that house into Republican hands right as lawmakers prepare to redraw legislative lines.

As one Paterson partisan put it, the anti-Patersons "have been holding up Rudy as a poster boy." Without that poster boy, they will no longer be able to affect an air of regret about having to push the governor aside for the sake of the party. No, those same critics will only be able to contend (not unreasonably, but more harshly) that Paterson has been such a failure as governor that he must give way to Andrew Cuomo. Either that, or they'll have to make the (somewhat tougher) case that New York will elect Rick Lazio.

Which doesn't necessarily change any outcomes, but will certainly serve to make things somewhat more awkward.

Paterson, in a scrum with Albany reporters after the reports came out about Giuliani not running, was reserved.

"I won't minimize that Rudy Giuliani served well as the mayor of the city of New York; he has a national reputation and he would be, obviously, an opponent that would have a lot of support," he said. "I don't know who's running. I don't even know why we're talking about this."

But what may have scared Giuliani out of the race is the same thing that may yet derail Paterson: Andrew Cuomo.

He's popular, has lots of money, and has refused to stamp out chatter about his ambitions for that office.

Cuomo even sent a private - and subsequently leaked - signal to Giuliani that he's prepared to run.

"Andrew's positioning is so strong, I don't think anything can happen to him," said Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

Ms. Minard, a strong presence on the Democratic donor circuit in New York and a supporter of Hillary Clinton and the DNC, will host a breakfast at her Upper East Side house in honor of David Paterson. It shouldn’t be courageous for a Democratic donor to fete the incumbent Democratic governor. But given Mr. Paterson’s current political standing—his job approval is less than 25 percent, and he faces a $3.2 billion midyear budget deficit—few are willing to stand by him. Those who do will likely be there until what some of them publicly acknowledge is likely to be a suboptimal end.

“They asked me,” Ms. Minard told The Observer. “He’s my governor, and there’s nobody else running at the moment, and he’s been a great supporter of projects, and I’ve been a supporter of his for a while.”

Ms. Minard is part of the increasingly small group of influential Democratic officials, operatives and activists who might be called loyalists, or dead-enders, or both.

“I’m a big fan of his. I like him very much, and I certainly recognize his difficulties,” she said. The event will feature the first lady, Michelle Paige Paterson, and seeks donations of $250 per attendee, the number of which Ms. Minard would not specify. “I’m delighted to host David. I think he’s a very fine person, and I wish him well. I’m happy to host for him.”

D-Day for Mr. Paterson, the latest one, at least, is now recognized to be Jan. 15—the day the State Board of Elections findings for the last six month fund-raising period are due. Mr. Paterson’s tacit rival for the governorship, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, has four fund-raisers on staff and is raising money at a steady clip, sources familiar with his efforts say. (Mr. Cuomo has said repeatedly that his only political plan “at this time” is to run for reelection as attorney general. He outraised Mr. Paterson by a margin of two to one in the last filing period.)

Mr. Paterson’s circle of supporters includes old acquaintances like Ms. Minard and State Senator Eric Schneiderman, as well as the scions of the Harlem political establishment he comes from: Assemblyman Keith Wright (who is also the Manhattan Democratic leader), Representative Charlie Rangel and Carl McCall, the former comptroller who won in a gubernatorial primary against Andrew Cuomo in 2002. Representative Greg Meeks of Queens and Assemblyman Darryl Towns of Brooklyn, both personal friends of Mr. Paterson, also stand with him.

Charlie King, the former executive director of the National Action Network, is still making fund-raising calls on behalf of Mr. Paterson and won’t work for Cuomo.

Bill Lynch, the political consultant, said he’ll be with Mr. Paterson “to the bitter end.”

“Because we’re a year out, and folks are really not focused on his record so far as governor—it’s unbelievable what’s gone on. I’ve been with him for 30 years; I’m going to stay with him until the end,” Mr. Lynch said. “It’s not just because he’s a friend. That’s one reason. The other reason is, I think he’s done a good job and he’s not getting credit for it.”

But far more numerous are the fair-weather supporters and donors who will not publicly denounce Mr. Paterson because he remains, after all, the governor.

One Democratic bundler explained the prevailing Paterson dynamic this way: “He should do reasonably well in the next month, simply because they’re going to put on a full-court press, and there are people with business with the state who say, ‘Can I afford to offend him?’”

“The governor’s a friend, and you don’t walk away from a friend just because you’re down in the polls,” said Ryan Karben, a lobbyist and former assemblyman. And is he giving money to Cuomo? “Oh, of course. They’re both great public officials, they’re both friends. Obviously, the governor’s political challenges are no secret, and that affects the fund-raising climate, but the governor’s a friend, and you can’t measure friendships solely in election cycles.”

Ms. Minard said Mr. Cuomo was “doing an excellent job as an attorney general.” Asked if she would hold an event for him, she replied, “I plan them one at a time.”

“For some, there’s a personal connection, and everyone wants to see our first black governor be successful,” Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, a Bronx Democrat who has urged Mr. Paterson not to run, said of those supporting the governor. “You’re still, at the end of the day, a member of government. You want your governor to be successful so your state can be successful. I think that’s why people will stick with him in public, until he makes official whatever he makes official, either that he’s going to run all the way or he’s going to walk away in due course.”

A problematic narrative—Mr. Paterson was not elected to his position and has not always risen to its challenges—was cited by several donors as a problem. It has also not helped that the only public message Mr. Paterson is capable of promulgating that resonates even slightly with the public—that their legislators are acting irresponsibly, and are letting the state down—is one expressly designed to drive his remaining sympathizers in government away from him.

Hence, on Nov. 9, when Mr. Paterson called a rare joint session of the Legislature to lecture lawmakers on just how pressing the state’s fiscal problems were, he was very palpably alone.

He arrived late for the address, and walked to the rostrum without shaking hands with Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Senate Democratic Leader John Sampson or Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch. (Mr. Cuomo declined an invitation to the speech, citing what an aide described as a “scheduling conflict” that was neither readily apparent nor elaborated upon.)

“Frankly, we are running out of money,” Mr. Paterson said. “At this moment, all of us assembled in this chamber stand as the last defense between our state gong into a downward economic spiral that threatens to engulf generations of future New Yorkers. We cannot, we must not risk the future of our children and our children’s children to borrow money we don’t have.”

The legislators sat stoically, and Mr. Paterson’s coterie of aides lingered out of sight behind the podium.

“I realize that I will not be able to do it alone,” Mr. Paterson continued. “I will endure the heat of the special interests. I have mortgaged my political career on this plan, but I will not mortgage the fate of the State of New York.”

Most legislators did not linger afterwards.

Assemblyman Darryl Towns, one of the governor’s remaining stalwarts, did, chatting with an assembly colleague before walking into a closed-door conference. He said Mr. Paterson’s speech sounded the right message, and was responsible, given the fiscal and political climate.

“I think that I am with him as long as he is a candidate—I think the majority of New York Democrats are with him as well,” Mr. Towns said, gamely. “Yes, we are friends, but it’s also: Sixteen months ago, when he was talking about this economic storm was going to be the worst economic crisis that we’ve had to face since the Great Depression, a lot of folks thought he was being a little melodramatic. Now, over time, we see that he is dead on with that. Again: Sometimes it’s difficult to be the deliverer of bad news, and this is tough.”

jvielkind@observer.com

Did your head just explode a little bit? Bill Lynch—deputy mayor under David Dinkins, consultant to the Harlem political establishment, defender of David Paterson—owns Cuomo2010.com?

"You're aware of my record, right?" Lynch said when I called, noting he "fully" supports Paterson and saying this must be some kind of weird coincidence.

Which apparently it is!

It turns out that the Bill Lynch (we'll call him, for the sake of this exercise, the other Bill Lynch) who owns the site is a lawyer and self-described political junkie from Bayside.

"It's funny," Lynch2 told me by phone. "A lot of people confuse my name with his."

He told me he reserved the domain in 2007, with little notice, after hearing a speech. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who insists his only political plan "at this time" is to keep the title currently before his name, uses Andrewcuomo.com for his political activities. (Other Lynch told me no one on team Cuomo has reached out to him about purchasing the domain.)

"I heard him speak back in the end of '06 shortly after he got elected, then I heard him again in mid-'07," Other Lynch told me. "The guy was really impressing me with everything that he was doing."

"I was kind of reading tea leaves," he said, Cuomo-esquely, when I asked him whether he supports Cuomo for governor. "I really gotta see what kind of policies he lays out. I think he's doing an excellent job as attorney general. Could I see myself supporting him? Yes. But it's too early to tell."

Bill Lynch of Harlem offered this statement: "The real Bill Lynch is with David Paterson."

Another is Bill Lynch, who was Dinkins’ campaign manager and deputy mayor. He isn’t just upset about what Giuliani said, but also about what Bloomberg hasn’t said.

“What I’m really concerned about is the mayor is silent on this. When he became, when he was elected mayor, back eight years ago, he kind of distanced himself” from this kind of rhetoric, Lynch told me in an interview just now. “And it looks like Giuliani is going back to the old days of racial polarization. And I would like for the mayor to disassociate himself from it.”

Bloomberg appeared to do that this afternoon, although he didn't explicitly criticize Giuliani or anything that Giuliani said.

Lynch, as deputy mayor, was criticized by opponents for his handling of the Crown Height riots between African-Americans and Orthodox Jews, which contibuted to Dinkins' loss to Giuliani in 1993.

Lynch said Giuliani’s comments went beyond the bounds of merely promoting one candidate over another.

“What makes him say that it’ll get worse under Billy Thompson? Because he’s a candidate of color?” asked Lynch. “What says that it’ll get worse under Billy Thompson? It surely seemed like it had racial overtones. Why would he say that? He could say 'my candidate would be better on this issue than your candidate,' but that’s not Rudy’s m.o.”

When I asked Lynch about Bloomberg invoking Detroit as an example of what could happen to New York, Lynch said, “I don’t understand what he’s saying there. Detroit went the way it did because those great automobile jobs in the city, left.”

Interestingly, Lynch said he didn't think Giuliani's comments would help Bloomberg or Thompson.

“I don’t think it helps anybody to have this debate again,” he said.

"I don't have any trouble getting through, I have trouble convincing them," said Alan Lubin, executive vice president for the New York State United Teachers. "They do hear from us, they do hear us. It's just we're not satisfied they're not paying attention to all of the issues."

A representative from NYSUT joined the heads of several other unions--32BJ, 1199, RWDSU, the UFT and the Building Trades Council--in Kingston to talk with the leaders of several major Democratic organizations about concerns that many of the progressive elements they're pushing for have been left by the wayside, and that they will not provide political support if that's not the case.

The discussion touched on the low poll numbers of Democratic officials--Paterson among them--and concerns about their electability. There was two-tiered thinking, according to people who were there: push the agenda, and figure out what to do (including a possible change in the batting order) to make sure Democrats stay in power.

Most of the attention has focused on the second question, and on Andrew Cuomo as a possible answer. But from the perspective of Paterson and other Democrats, the first question contains the path to revival.

One organized labor source described it as a "wake-up call" for the second floor. Since the meeting, top aides to the governor have been in touch with heads or representatives from many of the labor unions involved. Paterson spoke briefly with George Gresham, the head of 1199, at a meeting of the Democratic Governors Association last weekend in Saratoga Springs. According to Leah Gonzalez, an 1199 spokeswoman, the discussion was "cordial" and not out of the ordinary.

There has been a concerted focus on outreach, people on both ends of things say.

"I don't think there's as big a rift as people are trying to make it," Bill Lynch, a political consultant based in Harlem who has advised the governor. He said that Gresham is no foe of the governor, and that the other labor officials in Kingston aren't looking to "stomp" him.

But things are likely to come to a head soon. The state is facing a $2.1 billion deficit, Paterson's staffers say, which will be addressed in September. Paterson will be proposing more cuts, which unions will likely oppose. While Paterson and other Democrats may be sympathetic to the unions' wishes, they say that being a fiscal hawk is the only way to go.

"What Governor Paterson has done and will continue to do is, when appropriate, say no to certain things," Tracy Sefl, a spokesman for Paterson 2010, said. "And that's not always a popular thing. Is the going to back down from that? No. Is he willing to accept the fact that it is not always popular to be the one who says no? Yes."

Al Sharpton had just stepped out of a meeting with Barack Obama.

It was January 2007, and he was down in the Obama Senate office during a trip to Washington to meet with a number of Democratic presidential contenders. Mr. Obama had been almost uncannily pitch-perfect, Mr. Sharpton thought, hitting every talking point and preempting every question.

As he was leaving, he caught sight of a familiar face in the reception area of the office.

“I said, ‘That looks like Patrick.’ And Patrick starts laughing,” Mr. Sharpton said. 

At the airport on the way back to New York, he said, he had a further revelation.

“It hit me when I got to the shuttle that a lot of what Obama was saying meant that he must have been talking to Patrick Gaspard," Mr. Sharpton said. "Obama made me feel like he knew every move I made. I said, ‘Patrick did it again.’”

Earlier this year, Mr. Gaspard, a Brooklyn-based, 41-year-old Democratic operative, succeeded Karl Rove as the White House director of the office of political affairs. Unlike Mr. Rove, Mr. Gaspard is at his most comfortable making his presence felt without actually being seen.

“He’s become a real player in the White House, the president himself told me,” said Representative Gregory Meeks.  “He’s a low key, behind-the-scenes, no-fingerprints kind of guy. I need something, I call Patrick. And if he calls, it’s a big deal. He’s close to the president.”

Mr. Gaspard’s official responsibility is to provide the president with an accurate assessment of the political dynamics affecting the work of his administration, and to remain in close contact with powerbrokers around the country to help push the president’s agenda.

In practice, he’s something of an all-purpose fixer, if not the carte blanche policy architect that Mr. Rove was for George W. Bush, or the number-one politics guru that David Axelrod is for Mr. Obama.

And while he looks after the president’s interests in Washington, he also uses his position as a lever to manage politically messy situations closer to home.

Earlier this month, for example, when a Republican coup in the State Senate threw Albany into chaos—with potential implications for the congressional redistricting process in 2010--Mr. Gaspard began making calls.

Mr. Gaspard was in touch with Governor David Paterson, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations. He also called Hiram Monserrate, one of the two Democratic legislators whose defection cost his party its 32-30 majority in the Senate.  

The two, who have known each other for years, spoke continuously in the hours and days after the coup. According to one source familiar with the substance of the calls, Mr. Monserrate twice asked for Mr. Gaspard to get the White House involved, and was twice rejected.

Soon after, Mr. Monserrate declared himself back in the Democratic fold.

Mr. Gaspard’s political sensibilities were formed in part by his cosmopolitan (almost Obama-esque) personal background.

He was born in present-day Democratic Republican of the Congo to Haitian parents, but raised in America, in Manhattan and Queens.

He writes poetry and considers as a personal hero Aimé Césaire, the pioneering black-pride poet and politician who taught the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon. He also likes Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet of the Acmeist school.

He has acted in plays and performed spoken word, holds strongly positive opinions about Otis Redding and collects Marvel comics. (His prize possession is the first issue of Conan the Barbarian.) He is a big Mets fan. He was married on the grass of Prospect Park; his wife and two children are about to join him in Washington after living for years in Park Slope.

He jogs regularly and lives cleanly.

“Let me put it to you this way,” former city councilwoman Margarita Lopez, an old boss of Mr. Gaspard, recalled telling Obama vetters who asked her if he ever used drugs or alcohol. “That man doesn’t drink Coca Cola.”

 He can be brutal, though.

“Don’t be mistaken about him being a gentleman--don’t even go there,” said Ms. Lopez. “When a situation got to a point that there was no resolution I would reach Patrick and say, ‘Go for it, and bring me no hostages, this battle is going to be won with no hostages.’ And I can tell you Patrick delivered every single time.”

Mr. Gaspard declined requests to be interviewed for this article.

Mr. Gaspard’s father moved with his wife from their native Haiti to post-liberation Zaire, when its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, appealed to French-speaking academics of African descent to teach there. Three years after Mr. Gaspard’s birth, the family moved to the Upper West Side, where they lived until Mr. Gaspard turned 11.

He fell in love with the 1973 Mets, and especially Tom Seaver. Soon the Gaspards, including his brother Michael, who currently works as a consultant for the Advance Group, moved closer to Shea Stadium, to St. Albans in Southeast Queens, from which Mr. Gaspard commuted to high school at Brooklyn Tech. 

He attended the School of Visual Arts and later Columbia, but like Mr. Rove before him, Mr. Gaspard left college early to submerge himself in politics. He interned in the office of Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins.

He got his first taste of campaign work doing advance for the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, during which time his energy and affinity with local political organizations caught the notice of Harlem-based consultant Bill Lynch, whose office floor Mr. Gaspard got in the habit of crashing on. 

Mr. Lynch later brought Mr. Gaspard on to Mr. Dinkins’ first mayoral race, and then to City Hall.

“He was smart and loyal and really knew his way around,” Mr. Dinkins recalled.

By the time Mr. Gaspard left the Dinkins administration to do consulting for unions and political campaigns, he had already cemented a lasting reputation as an organizer with extraordinary political and sartorial sense.

Councilman Bill DeBlasio, who worked with Mr. Gaspard in Mr. Lynch’s shop, remembered his friend helping him pick out a new wardrobe when he went to work as state director for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.

“He took me to Barneys and showed me how to dress well,” said Mr. DeBlasio. In 1997, outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger enlisted Mr. Gaspard for her doomed campaign against Rudy Giuliani. Now, as the head of the American Jewish World Service charity, she still seeks his help, recently meeting with him in the White House to discuss Darfur aide programs and policy. 

“His job is to connect people,” she said.

After working on outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger’s extremely unsuccessful mayoral campaign against Rudy Giuliani in 1997, Mr. Gaspard became chief of staff to Ms. Lopez, a radical feminist from the Lower East Side who was one of the mayor’s most raucous critics.

She once declared on the floor of the City Council that Mr. Gaspard was “an honorary lesbian,” and recalled that, at times, he outdid her.

“One time we have a staff member who saw this man, and when she saw this man, she said, ‘Oh my god that man is so handsome, it’s so sad that he’s gay,’” Ms. Lopez said. “Patrick looked at her and said, ‘What did you say?’ And she said, ‘He’s gay, that is so sad. Because he is so gorgeous.’ And Patrick said to her, ‘You mean to tell me that because he is so gorgeous, he should not be gay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it’s not useful to women!’ And he said, ‘You are the biggest homophobe I have ever met in my life, and you don’t even know it.’”

(Just this week, on June 22, Mr. Gaspard led an administration call with LGBT activists frustrated with President Obama’s incremental approach to gay rights.)

In 1999, Ms. Lopez loaned Mr. Gaspard out to help 1199 SEIU, the politically powerful labor union, to organize a march in protest of the police shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant. Mr. Gaspard impressed them.

“He knows what buttons to push and in what order,” said Jennifer Cunningham, who was then the union’s political director, and who went on to work closely with Mr. Gaspard for the next eight years.

George Gresham, the current president of 1199, said that Mr. Gaspard often took a “statistical” interest in candidates, just as he did to baseball box scores and farm systems, wanting to know not just their vision or why they should hold office, but how they expected to win.

“Patrick could distinguish between those who were serious and those who weren’t,” he said.

Several of his former colleagues said the most difficult time for Mr. Gaspard during that period was in 2002, when the union supported Republican Governor George Pataki over Carl McCall, then a two-term state comptroller who was attempting to become the first black governor in the history of the state.      

“All of us developed a political maturity at that time,” said Mr. Gresham. “We say we don’t have permanent friends, we have permanent interests.”

In 2003, Mr. Gaspard went national to work as the deputy national field director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, and after Mr. Dean was knocked out of the race, as the national field director for George Soros’ political action group America Coming Together.

In 2005, he took a leave from the union to work for another underdog Democrat, Freddy Ferrer, in a landslide loss to Michael Bloomberg. A year later, when 1199 played a major role in backing Andrew Cuomo, who had challenged Mr. McCall in the 2002 Democratic primary, in his run for Attorney general, Mr. Gaspard worked on races in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington, DC. 

He also worked on local races.

“Without Patrick Gaspard, Yvette Clarke would not be in Congress,” said Josh Isay, a consultant to Mr. Bloomberg who worked with Mr. Gaspard on that heated race, a four-way primary in 2006 for a House seat in Brooklyn vacated by Major Owens.

In that race, as in most other matters, he did his work quietly.

In December 2006, Mr. Sharpton asked Patrick Gaspard to help him assemble an emergency meeting of about 300 activists, black nationalists, union and political leaders to decide on an appropriate response to the police shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed young black man.

At one point, things got ugly¸ with one activist criticizing the attendance of the teacher’s union president Randi Weingarten at the meeting.

“One guy who nobody knew got up and said, ‘I don’t know why we got the head of the teachers union here, these white teachers are destroying our community,’ and went off on her,” recalled Mr. Sharpton. “And Patrick ran over to me and said, ‘I think you should call for unity and talk about how important it is that whites, blacks, everybody march together. I could say it, but I think it is better for your to say if, for the crowd, and for your own beliefs.’

“And I got up and said it,” Mr. Sharpton continued. “And as I said it, he was whispering something in Randi’s ear, and Randi got up and started talking about how committed she was and she didn’t care who didn’t appreciate her working with Reverend Sharpton. And it occurred to me that Patrick was going around the room telling everybody what to say.”

As the presidential election neared, it became increasingly clear that Mr. Gaspard’s home senator, Hillary Clinton had designs on the White House. Friends of Mr. Gaspard said that he was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, whose inclusive campaign was, as Mr. DeBlasio put it, the “clear and pure” iteration of the pan-racial “gorgeous mosaic” Dinkins campaign of 1988. Publicly, Mr. Gaspard remained neutral, but as early as January 2007, he was involved.

After unofficially helping out Mr. Obama, Mr. Gaspard met with the Illinois senator and Mr. Plouffe in Washington in February of 2007 to discuss coming aboard.

“President Obama and I met with him and really liked him, because he wasn’t your traditional political schmoozer,” Mr. Plouffe said. “There was a depth to him that we found attractive.”

(According to the New Yorker, this was the meeting during which Mr. Obama famously told Mr. Gaspard, “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”)

As Mr. Plouffe noted, Mr. Gaspard turned them down.

But true to form, Mr. Gaspard pushed Mr. Obama’s case behind the scenes within the union, and played a critical and active role in blocking an endorsement of John Edwards before the Iowa caucus. That paved the way for SEIU to endorse Mr. Obama, and when they did, Mr. Gaspard openly expressed his support, heading to Wisconsin and eventually leading the union’s volunteer efforts in primary states like Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

He eventually joined the campaign as political director, and shared a long table in a small office in Chicago with Jen O’Malley and Jon Carson, where they’d pore over maps and manage activity in the states.

He was responsible for notifying many of the country’s leaders that Mr. Obama had selected Joe Biden as his vice president, and during the Democratic convention in Denver, he joined Mr. Plouffe and a few others in working out the exact logistics of Hillary Clinton’s campaign role and choreographing her casting of New York’s convention ballots for Mr. Obama.

During the presidential transition, influential New Yorkers had already started stepping up efforts to catch his ear.

In October of 2008, Kevin Sheekey, Michael Bloomberg’s closest political aide, wrote Gaspard asking if he could make some time for him, and they stay in touch on issues relating to the city. Lots of local officials have done the same.

“From the delegation point of view, if need be, we know we have a person,” said Representative Joseph Crowley. “We have access.”  

In May of this year, Al Sharpton went back to Washington, this time for a meeting with the president about education policy.

At one point, as Mr. Sharpton waited outside the Oval Office with Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, Mr. Gaspard stopped by to say hello.

As Mr. Sharpton tells it, he turned to Mr. Duncan and said, “You guys are real shrewd in this administration.”

He motioned to Mr. Gaspard and said, “It’s hard for me to march against you if I ever get mad, because you’ve got our best organizer.’”

“I cannot think of a major issue in the City in the last decade that Eric hasn’t been deeply involved in,” Lynch said in a public statement released by the campaign. “And he has spent more time in more different communities getting to know the diverse people of our town than anyone.”

Certainly, there's something of a convergence of interests here on the merits. Gioia is planning to court the black vote aggressively, and he often mentions the challenges faced by residents in Harlem--where Lynch’s office is based, and where his influence is the strongest.

On Election Night last year, when thousands of people gathered outside the federal office building to see Barack Obama win the presidency, Gioia was the only candidate now running for public advocate who went there to speak to the crowd.

As Liz pointed out, the hire is a bit of a slight to Bill de Blasio, who worked under Lynch in the Dinkins administration.

But it also creates an intriguing dynamic involving the best-known candidate in the race, former public advocate Mark Green. Green’s last citywide race was in 2001. That campaign ended very badly: Green lost to Bloomberg in the general after a primary against Freddy Ferrer that was so racially divisive that a number of the Democratic Party's most influential leaders effectively shut down their turnout operations on Election Day. Throughout, Lynch, who was an adviser to Ferrer, was one of the most assertive critics of the Green campaign's tactics.

So far, Gioia has deliberately set out to contrast himself with Green by suggesting that he's looking to move past old political battles, and to be something other than a reflexive critic of the mayor. He's presenting himself, in other words, as the anti-Green.

The Lynch hire hardly represents a break with the past. But maybe, in this case, that's the whole point.

This morning brings news of yet another positive indicator: a Siena college poll showing him with a garish 67-17 point lead over David Paterson in a hypothetical primary for governor next year.

But as he sails along on his undeclared but unmistakable quest to become governor, there's at least one uncomfortable issue he'll have to reckon with, at least as long as David Paterson is around: race.

"Aside from taking on a sitting governor in his own party, who I think will be a great governor, the biggest obstacle to Andrew running is it is going to remind people of when he ran against Carl McCall, which is not fair, but it is history," said Charlie King, the executive director of Al Sharpton's National Action Network who was Cuomo's running mate in that ill-fated run in 2002. "If Spitzer was going through the same rough patch as Paterson, there is little doubt in my mind that Andrew would challenge him."

In that insurgent and disastrous primary, Cuomo made a gross miscalculation of banking on the near-saintly status his family name enjoyed with black voters in New York. But, in a prelude to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary, Cuomo's lead among black voters in early polls disappeared once those voters engaged with the history-making African-American candidate. Cuomo eventually dropped out.

Now, after a resoundingly successful rehabilitation effort that featured a thumping victory in the 2006 attorney general race—a contest in which King, Cuomo's onetime partner, was a candidate—and two impressive years in the attorney general's office, Cuomo is in a better place than ever to bid for the state's top job.

There is even reason to believe that he will be able to do so from a stronger position with black voters than he enjoyed in 2002.

As Siena pollster Steven Greenberg explains: "Currently—and with a long time to go before any election—Andrew Cuomo is viewed very strongly in the African-American community, with a 75-14 percent favorable rating.  For the first time ever, Governor Paterson has a negative favorable rating (44-46 percent) among African-Americans. And right now, Cuomo is beating Paterson better than two-to-one in a potential gubernatorial primary."

(Coincidentally, Greenberg was an aide on the 2002 McCall campaign. He is speaking here only in his capacity as a pollster.)

But if Mr. Cuomo has made ground among black voters, much of New York's black political leadership, at this point, doesn't seem to be on board.

In a series of interviews with black officials and operatives for a story about their view of Paterson's plummeting fortunes, the thing that seemed to prompt the staunchest expressions of support for the current governor was the mention of Cuomo's name.

"Everyone is clear on the ambition of Andrew Cuomo wanting to be governor; he ran before," said Yvette Clarke, a congresswoman from Queens.

"I think Andrew will make his own judgment," said David Dinkins, the former mayor. "I don't know that one can stop him or not stop him. I think from David's perspective, what he's got to do is get some good competent people on whom he can rely. I'm satisfied that if he has that, where judgments are required, in most instances he will make the wise choice among those presented to him."

"If [David] turns it around, I don't think Andrew Cuomo will run," said Bill Lynch, a leading black consultant who used to advise Paterson. "And I guarantee he will turn it around."

Representative Charlie Rangel, the dean of the New York delegation, wouldn't even go so far as to concede that Cuomo is looking to run.

 "I'm not gonna assume that Cuomo is going to be a challenger," said Rangel, who warned against speculating on a potential primary. "You shouldn't do that to Cuomo; you might have him politically crippled.".  

When asked what he thought about Cuomo bulking up his fund-raising operation, Rangel replied, "He's Andrew Cuomo. That's what he does."