Mr. Schumer has been one of Mr. Reid's most ardent supporters, and has long insisted he's not thinking about replacing Reid as majority leader, but some observers think he and Senate Whip Dick Durbin are already angling for the position.

If you like a good Congressional leadership fight, then keep an eye on Jerry Tarkanian’s kid.

The 47-year-old Danny Tarkanian, a man best known to Nevadans as the son of the towel-chewing basketball coach who led UNLV to the 1990 national championship (and multiple N.C.A.A. probations), has emerged as the leading candidate for next year’s Republican Senate nomination, and this week a poll showed him opening a double-digit lead over Harry Reid, the Senate’s Democratic leader since 2005.

This says a little about the power of the Tarkanian name in Nevada (Jerry remains a revered figure in and around Las Vegas and maintains a blog for one of the city’s newspapers) and a lot about the backyard perils that face Democratic Congressional leaders who hail from swing and red states.

Mr. Reid, once an amateur prizefighter, is already pledging to raise tens of millions of dollars and may yet survive—like he did in 1998, when he eked out a 401-vote reelection victory after a campaign in which he was battered for pursuing a spot in the Senate Democratic leadership.

But the landscape for Democrats looks to be much different in 2010 than it was in 1998, when a humming economy and voter backlash at the G.O.P.’s drive to impeach Bill Clinton led to unexpected midterm election gains for Mr. Reid and his party. Even if today’s Democrats do ultimately reap political benefits for their efforts to revive the economy and reform health care, the ballot box payoff is more likely to come in 2012 than in ’10.

If Mr. Reid does go down next year, it would almost certainly create the first real race for the Democrats’ top Senate leadership slot since 1994, when Tom Daschle beat Chris Dodd by a single vote to become minority leader.

Publicly, of course, every Democrat in the Senate will pledge support for Mr. Reid (and confidence in his re-election prospects) between now and November ’10. But privately, there will be subtle (and not so subtle) jockeying among his would-be successors.

The most likely scenario would be a two-way contest between Illinois’ Richard Durbin and New York’s Chuck Schumer. Traditionally, Mr. Durbin would have the upper hand, since he’s served as the Democrats’ whip—the No. 2 leadership post—since 2005. Five Democratic whips since World War II have gone on to win the top job, including Mr. Reid, who held the job from 1999 until ’05.

But Mr. Durbin, 64, might not benefit from the same next-in-line perception that so many of his predecessors did. The reason: Mr. Schumer, who maneuvered his way into a brand-new Democratic leadership post—conference vice chairman, it’s called—after heading the party’s Senate campaign committee in 2006.

The spot was created specially for Mr. Schumer, in part as a thank-you for helping to win the Senate back and in part to entice him to stay on as DSCC chairman for the 2008 cycle (which he did). He is officially the third-ranking Senate Democrat, but in practice he’s been treated as Mr. Durbin’s equal, playing a key role in crafting Senate strategy, appearing with Mr. Reid and Mr. Durbin at press events, and often representing Senate Democrats on national news shows.

Past Democratic leadership fights have broken along generational lines. When George Mitchell retired from the Senate in ’94, for example, the party’s old guard—led by Robert Byrd and Kentucky’s Wendell Ford—rallied around James Sasser, who spent that summer and fall battling Mr. Daschle for commitments from their colleagues.

When Mr. Sasser lost his reelection bid in Tennessee, the old guard quickly turned to Mr. Dodd, who came agonizingly close to victory. (A 23-23 tie was broken by a proxy vote for Mr. Daschle from Colorado’s Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who just a few months later switched parties.)

A similar dynamic prevailed in 1988, when Mr. Mitchell, who had led the party’s 1986 Senate effort, won overwhelming support from newer senators, while the old guard split between Daniel Inouye and J. Bennett Johnston.

That same scenario in ’10 might work to the advantage of Mr. Schumer, who as DSCC chairman developed close working relationships with the (many) Democrats who won their seats in ’06 and ’08.

There are other possible candidates, too. Not long ago, Mr. Dodd was considered a prime contender to replace Mr. Reid one day, but the Connecticut senator is now fighting for his political life and can’t be seen pursuing a leadership spot. North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan also briefly vied with Mr. Durbin for the whip’s spot a few years ago, then settled for the co-chairmanship of the Democratic Policy Committee—the same perch that Mr. Daschle used to launch his leadership bid in ’94. Many other names will be floated.

And assuming Mr. Durbin does run, it would open up the whip’s office. Robert Menendez, the current DSCC chairman, would presumably be interested. So would a lot of other Democrats.

Then again, if Mr. Reid somehow prevails in Nevada, Mr. Durbin and Mr. Schumer will remain in their current roles. To fight, perhaps, another day.

“We might have to give up the public option or go to a co-op,” Dick Durbin, the Democrats’ chief vote-counter in the Senate, told the New York Times last Friday. “I favor a public option. But I won’t say that I’d vote against a bill if it does not include the public option.”

And Chuck Schumer, who last month declared that Al Franken’s arrival as the 60^th Democratic vote in the Senate would make any further compromise on the public option, is suddenly expressing support for private “co-ops”—the public option alternative being pushed by some cautious Senate Democrats—provided that it’s not “a measly little thing that’s just a fig leaf.”

These sudden pronouncements strongly suggest two things: (1) that, despite their threats, Senate Democrats are not seriously considering using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to pass health care legislation; and (2) that the biggest obstacle to passing health care reform this year may now be posed by Democrats.

On the first point, Mr. Durbin’s and Mr. Schumer’s comments are clearly based on the assumption that 60 votes will be needed to pass any plan. If reconciliation, which would bar filibusters, were employed, the magic number would only be 51—and there’s little doubt Democrats would be able to hit it.

But 60 is far trickier, especially with Max Baucus and his “Gang of Six” Finance Committee members intent on replacing the public option with the co-op concept. By publicly moving toward co-ops, Mr. Durbin and Mr. Schumer are indicating that 60 votes is what they’re aiming for—even if it means giving up a concept the party base views as sacred.

This is where things could get very ugly for Democrats, because if a public option-less bill clears the Senate, it would then have to be reconciled with a House plan that will almost certainly include one. And literally dozens of House Democrats share the grassroots’ conviction: if there’s no public option, there’s no point. Would they actually vote for a final bill that gives it up?

Howard Dean, who has led the liberal grassroots campaign for a public option and who has significant influence with the party’s base, is probably a good barometer. I interviewed him last week, just after House Democratic leaders had watered down their version of the public option to accommodate the conservative Blue Dogs.

Surprisingly, Mr. Dean said he was fine with the compromise—but drew the line at the co-ops that Mr. Baucus and his friends are promoting.

“Without the public plan,” he told me, “this bill is less than worthless. It’s very painful and bad for America.”

On Monday, I emailed his spokeswoman and asked if, in light of Mr. Durbin’s and Mr. Schumer’s comments, Mr. Dean had adjusted his position. Not at all, I was told.

This sets up a huge problem for Democrats. Just a few days ago, Mr. Dean was positioned to play a key role in convincing House progressives—five dozen of whom had just threatened to vote against any House bill that included the watered down public option negotiated with the Blue Dogs—to go along with the compromise that their leaders had worked out.

But this was contingent on Senate Democrats also passing a similar public option plan. Now, though, they seem poised to do away with the public option in the interest of winning over Mr. Baucus and his crew.

Mr. Dean has another solution in mind: just use reconciliation. “The Republicans don’t have any credibility on this at all,” he said. “There wasn’t any cost to getting Medicare through with no Republican support. There wasn’t any cost to getting Social Security through with no Republican support.”

Those 60 or so House progressives who are already threatening to vote no would surely agree with this. Why, they will demand, should we be forced to compromise any further when the Senate can pass this with 51 votes? And they will be egged on by a grassoots base that could move to open revolt if the party’s Washington leaders give up on the public option altogether.

Mr. Durbin and Mr. Schumer may have found the easiest way to move a bill through the Senate. But doing so could spark a backlash in the House that would kill health care.

The signs are unmistakable: The Senate’s Democratic leaders are laying the groundwork to compromise away the “public option” that, to much of their party’s base, is the litmus test of whether any health care reform plan is worth enacting.

“We might have to give up the public option or go to a co-op,” Dick Durbin, the Democrats’ chief vote-counter in the Senate, told the New York Times last Friday. “I favor a public option. But I won’t say that I’d vote against a bill if it does not include the public option.”

And Chuck Schumer, who last month declared that Al Franken’s arrival as the 60^th Democratic vote in the Senate would make any further compromise on the public option unnecessary, is suddenly expressing support for private “co-ops”—the public option alternative being pushed by some cautious Senate Democrats—provided that it’s not “a measly little thing that’s just a fig leaf.”

These sudden pronouncements strongly suggest two things: (1) that, despite their threats, Senate Democrats are not seriously considering using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to pass health care legislation; and (2) that the biggest obstacle to passing health care reform this year may now be posed by Democrats.

On the first point, Mr. Durbin’s and Mr. Schumer’s comments are clearly based on the assumption that 60 votes will be needed to pass any plan. If reconciliation, which would bar filibusters, were employed, the magic number would only be 51—and there’s little doubt Democrats would be able to hit it.

But 60 is far trickier, especially with Max Baucus and his “Gang of Six” Finance Committee members intent on replacing the public option with the co-op concept. By publicly moving toward co-ops, Mr. Durbin and Mr. Schumer are indicating that 60 votes is what they’re aiming for—even if it means giving up a concept the party base views as sacred.

This is where things could get very ugly for Democrats, because if a public option-less bill clears the Senate, it would then have to be reconciled with a House plan that will almost certainly include one. And literally dozens of House Democrats share the grassroots’ conviction: if there’s no public option, there’s no point. Would they actually vote for a final bill that gives it up?

Howard Dean, who has led the liberal grassroots campaign for a public option and who has significant influence with the party’s base, is probably a good barometer. I interviewed him last week, just after House Democratic leaders had watered down their version of the public option to accommodate the conservative Blue Dogs.

Surprisingly, Mr. Dean said he was fine with the compromise—but drew the line at the co-ops that Mr. Baucus and his friends are promoting.

“Without the public plan,” he told me, “this bill is less than worthless. It’s very painful and bad for America.”

On Monday, I emailed his spokeswoman and asked if, in light of Mr. Durbin’s and Mr. Schumer’s comments, Mr. Dean had adjusted his position. Not at all, I was told.

This sets up a huge problem for Democrats. Just a few days ago, Mr. Dean was positioned to play a key role in convincing House progressives—five dozen of whom had just threatened to vote against any House bill that included the watered down public option negotiated with the Blue Dogs—to go along with the compromise that their leaders had worked out.

But this was contingent on Senate Democrats also passing a similar public option plan. Now, though, they seem poised to do away with the public option in the interest of winning over Mr. Baucus and his crew.

Mr. Dean has another solution in mind: just use reconciliation. “The Republicans don’t have any credibility on this at all,” he said. “There wasn’t any cost to getting Medicare through with no public support. There wasn’t any cost to getting Social Security through with no Republican support.”

Those 60 or so House progressives who are already threatening to vote no would surely agree with this. Why, they will demand, should we be forced to compromise any further when the Senate can pass this with 51 votes? And they will be egged on by an active base that could move to open revolt if the party’s Washington leaders give up on the public option altogether.

Mr. Durbin and Mr. Schumer may have found the easiest way to move a bill through the Senate. But doing so could spark a backlash in the House that would kill health care.

Home sales had dropped annually by double-digit percentages in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. On the commercial side, investment sales had dried to a trickle. Office leasing had turned anemic, with leasing activity down in downtown, midtown and midtown south. Even the mighty hospitality industry had started to suffer compellingly—hotel room rates were receding; tourism, too.

So, with the boom over this year, what of 2009?

Investment Sales: Talk to commercial brokers, and most will say, in a somewhat leaning-forward, hushed tone, that there’s a lot of money on the sidelines waiting to see what happens. What happens with what, exactly? With the credit markets in particular; and with the economy in general.

Recent rate cuts by the Federal Reserve and a bottoming-out in the housing market nationwide, which most analysts expect sometime in 2009, at the earliest, could spur the sort of lending that leads to a higher volume of building and portfolio deals. Still, investment sales for 2009 are not likely to match those of the boom years—for instance, at least $42.4 billion in Manhattan trades in 2007’s first nine months, according to Cushman & Wakefield (compared to $18.7 billion the same time in '08.)

Laborious financing aside, the shorter-term incentive is no longer there. For hotels, room rates—and revenues from rooms—have begun to drop, tumbling from record highs in 2006 and 2007. Rents, office and apartment, are static or falling (see below). New leases—again, commercial or residential—will be signed in 2009 at amounts lower than in the boom years, when the prospects of ever-burgeoning returns might justify highly leveraged deals.

And that debt, landlords and developers know all too well, must be paid back in an environment now wherein lenders are particularly bullish on getting repaid—and bearish about lending (or refinancing), especially for the longer term.

Bonus trend watch: defaults and commercial foreclosures. Research firm Real Capital Analytics released a now-notorious list earlier this month showing 268 properties in the New York area in some form of financial distress. At the same time, local commercial brokerages have begun to birth new teams to deal in these distressed assets.

Office Leasing: It’s all about the jobs. And the city’s unemplyment rate now stands at 6.3 percent, its highest since 2005, with more job cuts on the way—the city comptroller predicts as many as 165,000 private-sector ones into late 2010.

It’s important to note that it’s not just the numbers of jobs lost, but the kinds of jobs. After all, city employers shed over 300,000 jobs during the recession of the early 1990s. This time around, the kinds of jobs being lost are those in the city’s premier industries: financial services and its attendants, like corporate law, advertising and marketing (and, yes, media). These industries are the top leasers of prime Manhattan office space. Take them away, and landlords are left wanting for the types of tenants who can afford to rent their top-flight space.

Needless to say (but we’ll say it anyway), asking and taking rents will come down, even for the Class A office space. For a while there in 2007 and early 2008, it seemed $200 a square foot might become the norm in some parts of midtown. Not anymore. No way.

Bonus trend watch: subleasing. The amount of tenants subletting space they no longer need, due to layoffs, outsourcing and other factors, will increase in 2009. Indeed, it's started already, including in Class A towers.

Housing Market: The volume of home sales dropped throughout 2008. The number of Brooklyn sales, for instance, fell over 38 percent annually in the third quarter, according to Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman. In Manhattan, the number was down 24.1 percent.

The slide should continue into 2009. “The fourth quarter has had the lowest transactions of the year, lower than I have ever seen,” Jonathan Miller, author of the Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman reports, told The Observer earlier this month.

With sliding sales—a sign, to say the least, of the ebbing of once voracious demand—will come price drops, perhaps to levels not seen since the earlier years of this decade, when the average Manhattan apartment—ye gods!—could be had for under $1 million.

Keep a particular eye on condos, especially in Manhattan. Sales of these dropped more steeply than those of co-ops in 2008, and there’s still a robust inventory of new-development condos either recently online or getting there. If enough of these newer condos don’t sell, enormous price chops—20 percent or more—could become the norm, enough to drive down prices across the city.

The silver lining for sellers and developers (and brokers): absurdly low mortgage rates, spurred in no small part by a federal government concerned about stabilizing the housing market nationwide in order to improve the entire economy. By the 3rd of December, the benchmark on the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was down to an average of 5.17 percent.

Still, the local economy will likely offset any loosening in mortgage lending. The city’s seven largest investment banks gave out a total of over $33 billion in year-end bonuses in both 2006 and 2007. Estimates have that payout dropping by half for 2008. And that’s just one example: again, the job numbers. They’re bad.

Bonus trend watch: foreign buyers. At one point in 2008, it was estimated that foreigners made up as much as one-quarter to one-third of Manhattan new-development buyers. That estimate’s surely a peak. Europe and East Asia are in the grips of their own recessions, and, while the likes of Russian oligarchs and Arab sheikhs may still be able to buy big at the Plaza, most foreigners will join most Americans in sitting out the housing market for a while.

Rental Apartments: "I have heard everything from ‘anything for a lease’ to ‘just bring me bodies,’” Daniel Baum, COO at the Real Estate Group New York, said earlier this month. “Concessions have become standard and price drops are happening across the board."

Indeed, the apartment market’s all about the jobs, too, and the grim employment projection for 2009 can only mean less demand for rentals. And this curbed demand will translate into increasingly cheaper rents, particularly in areas of Manhattan where rents jumped by leaps and bounds during the boom years.

Also, concessions from landlords will likely become more commonplace throughout next year, including payment of brokers’ fees and months of free rent. At the same time, the stern tenant requirements for some buildings—for instance, requiring that prospective tenants make 40 times the monthly rent annually—will be relaxed in a lusting atmosphere that seeks not just the well-compensated tenant but the merely compensated.

Bonus trend watch: Those new-development condos that come online and sit empty next year without buyers—look for more of those to turn rental, however temporarily. Rents for these will likely be higher than for typical apartment stock, but the same concessions should be available.

tacitelli@observer.com

It's time to apply the same thinking to the violence in Israel/Palestine, which has grown out of territorial disputes and political rights for more than 80 years now...

“Judges are the most important,” said Mr. Schumer, who orchestrated the implausible Democratic takeover of the Senate last week. “One more justice would have made it a 5-4 conservative, hard-right majority for a long time. That won’t happen.”

From now on, all the President’s judicial appointments will need to meet the requirements of Mr. Schumer, the Park Slope power broker who has happily accepted the mantle of chief architect for the Democrats’ effort to build a majority for the 2008 elections and beyond.

The Senator also intends, in the coming months, to rework the federal government’s funding priorities in New York’s favor, to steer the Democrats toward a radically new position on Iraq and, while he’s at it, to cement his position as the unofficially declared tactical guru for the national party.

And in case anyone’s wondering, yes, Mr. Schumer is entirely comfortable with this sort of power.

With his Gold Toe–stockinged feet dangling, the 55-year-old slumped in his armchair on Friday morning as if it were a leather throne. On his apartment’s front door, a neighbor taped up a front page of The New York Times heralding the Democrats’ success and scrawled “Congratulations Schumers!” across the cover.

The candidates that Mr. Schumer recruited, groomed and bankrolled had won a comprehensive victory over the incumbent Republicans, giving the Democrats a narrow majority in the Senate to complement a rout in the House. Since the election, Mr. Schumer has been awash in attention from the media, his Democratic colleagues and even from the President, who called, quite sportingly, soon after the results were finalized.

For Mr. Schumer, who was installed on Tuesday as Vice Chairman of the Democratic caucus and officially reinstated as head of the DSCC, the attention couldn’t be coming at a better time.

“I am writing a book, about how to build a permanent—a long-term majority,” Mr. Schumer said during an early-morning interview in the pink den of his apartment near Grand Army Plaza. He sat between a view of lower Manhattan and portraits of Democratic icons Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Al Smith. “I generally have an eye toward longer-term strategy and politics, and I think my colleagues rely on me for that.”

His book, Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Family at a Time, will be released right around the President’s State of the Union address, and will fit neatly into the role that Mr. Schumer now envisions for himself as tactician in chief for the newly ascendant Democrats.

“I’ve always had some influence, and I guess now, because of what we’ve been able to accomplish, I have some more influence,” Mr. Schumer said. “So when I say we shouldn’t do this or we should do that, I guess people will pay a little more attention. Or go along with it, even if they don’t agree.”

Certainly, the party wasn’t united behind Mr. Schumer’s election strategy this year. He championed a traditional approach: directing the bulk of the party’s financial and logistical resources toward handpicked candidates in a few competitive races. Howard Dean, who heads the Democratic National Committee, advocated a “50-state strategy,” spreading money around toward the longer-term goal of making the party viable even in areas that have been Republican strongholds.

After the victory—the Democrats picked up six Republican-held seats and defended every Democratic one—Mr. Schumer hardly seemed ready to concede the point.

“Fifty-state is a good thing to do, but it didn’t help us in this election,” said Mr. Schumer. “My only disagreement with Howard is that he should help us fund taking back the majority, because it would make a difference with things like the Supreme Court. And he came through—he ended up giving us $7.5 million. We tried the honey approach rather than the vinegar approach, and it worked.”

So what’s the immediate payoff of his success?

For one thing, Mr. Schumer said, New York will soon be “disproportionately” enjoying the spoils of last week’s victory.

He said that the formula for determining which areas receive homeland-security funding will be changed to benefit places of high risk, like New York, and that more money will be sent to the city for health care and education, including the “No Child Left Behind Act” and special-education programs. He predicted increased federal funding for a proposed tunnel between New York and New Jersey and the Second Avenue subway line, and said that his own bill making college tuitions tax-deductible—which the Republicans refused to renew in May—would be passed in the “first month or two” of the next session.

On the subject of Iraq, Mr. Schumer has essentially taken a pass until now. He has argued that an opposition party’s responsibility—at least in an election season, and in an area that has proven so politically troublesome to the Bush administration—is to critique foreign policy and not set it.

Now, Mr. Schumer said, he hopes that a controversial plan strongly advocated by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware—which essentially calls for the dissolution of Iraq into three autonomous ethnic enclaves (and which Mr. Schumer quietly supported last year)—will emerge as a concrete Democratic alternative to current administration policy.

“It may actually move into play,” said Mr. Schumer. “I’ve always believed that the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds hate each other more than they will ever love any central government.”

Outside of Iraq, Mr. Schumer echoed his colleagues’ calls for more multilateralism and said the climate of greater comity would help in North Korea—“We are totally dependent on the Chinese,” he said—and in the Middle East.

“I really dislike the Syrians,” Mr. Schumer said. “That’s the problem here. But it probably ends up being better to talk to them than not.”

Mr. Schumer wanted to make clear that these will not be mere suggestions to be considered or discarded by the White House as the administration sees fit.

“Bush will be a lame duck unless he has a dramatic change of course—unless the Rasputin-like influence of Cheney goes. You could see Cheney, just by his body language, is just angry,” said Mr. Schumer. “If Bush doesn’t budge, he will be a lame duck.”

As far as working with his Republican colleagues in the Senate, Mr. Schumer said that, at least in one way, victory has made life easier.

“One good thing for me: All the people who I opposed, who I haven’t talked to, are not there,” he said, leaning forward with a sharp cackle. “Every single incumbent that we targeted is not there—so I breathed a sigh of relief. Some of them would just glare at me. I don’t blame ’em.”

One day earlier, on an unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon in Washington, Mr. Schumer, along with fellow Senators Harry Reid and Richard Durbin, was set to speak at a rally on the “Senate Swamp” outside the Capitol. A few miles away, Republican George Allen conceded his tight Virginia race and officially gave the Democrats control of the Senate. On the Senate lawn, carpeted with fallen red oak leaves, an intern in khakis hunched over a podium and conducted a sound test by reading Bob Dylan lyrics.

Dozens of Senate interns and staffers—the men in khakis, the women in black pantsuits and white blouses—began filing toward the lawn. A flier publicizing the rally had been sent to many of the Democratic offices in the capital. A multicultural selection of supporters was chosen to stand on risers behind the podium, and an aide in a dark suit reminded the group that the microphones on the podium could pick up “every whisper.”

Other rally organizers lined up scores of beaming Democrats on both sides of a sidewalk and handed out miniature American flags. Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good” played on the loudspeakers, and the lines formed a cheering, flag-waving corridor for the three Senators to walk through. Wearing a dark suit and a blue tie spotted with white ducks, Mr. Schumer marched on Mr. Reid’s right side and made no effort to conceal his utter elation. “I felt like one of three generals who had liberated a country,” Mr. Schumer later said.

“Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” the crowd chanted when Mr. Schumer was introduced by Mr. Durbin as “our hero.”

“If we can keep our focus on the average family, we will stay a majority for a generation,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what we aim to do.”

“Judges are the most important,” said Mr. Schumer, who orchestrated the implausible Democratic takeover of the Senate last week. “One more justice would have made it a 5-4 conservative, hard-right majority for a long time. That won’t happen.”

From now on, all the President’s judicial appointments will need to meet the requirements of Mr. Schumer, the Park Slope power broker who has happily accepted the mantle of chief architect for the Democrats’ effort to build a majority for the 2008 elections and beyond.

The Senator also intends, in the coming months, to rework the federal government’s funding priorities in New York’s favor, to steer the Democrats toward a radically new position on Iraq and, while he’s at it, to cement his position as the unofficially declared tactical guru for the national party.

And in case anyone’s wondering, yes, Mr. Schumer is entirely comfortable with this sort of power.

With his Gold Toe–stockinged feet dangling, the 55-year-old slumped in his armchair on Friday morning as if it were a leather throne. On his apartment’s front door, a neighbor taped up a front page of The New York Times heralding the Democrats’ success and scrawled “Congratulations Schumers!” across the cover.

The candidates that Mr. Schumer recruited, groomed and bankrolled had won a comprehensive victory over the incumbent Republicans, giving the Democrats a narrow majority in the Senate to complement a rout in the House. Since the election, Mr. Schumer has been awash in attention from the media, his Democratic colleagues and even from the President, who called, quite sportingly, soon after the results were finalized.

For Mr. Schumer, who was installed on Tuesday as Vice Chairman of the Democratic caucus and officially reinstated as head of the DSCC, the attention couldn’t be coming at a better time.

“I am writing a book, about how to build a permanent—a long-term majority,” Mr. Schumer said during an early-morning interview in the pink den of his apartment near Grand Army Plaza. He sat between a view of lower Manhattan and portraits of Democratic icons Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Al Smith. “I generally have an eye toward longer-term strategy and politics, and I think my colleagues rely on me for that.”

His book, Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Family at a Time, will be released right around the President’s State of the Union address, and will fit neatly into the role that Mr. Schumer now envisions for himself as tactician in chief for the newly ascendant Democrats.

“I’ve always had some influence, and I guess now, because of what we’ve been able to accomplish, I have some more influence,” Mr. Schumer said. “So when I say we shouldn’t do this or we should do that, I guess people will pay a little more attention. Or go along with it, even if they don’t agree.”

Certainly, the party wasn’t united behind Mr. Schumer’s election strategy this year. He championed a traditional approach: directing the bulk of the party’s financial and logistical resources toward handpicked candidates in a few competitive races. Howard Dean, who heads the Democratic National Committee, advocated a “50-state strategy,” spreading money around toward the longer-term goal of making the party viable even in areas that have been Republican strongholds.

After the victory—the Democrats picked up six Republican-held seats and defended every Democratic one—Mr. Schumer hardly seemed ready to concede the point.

“Fifty-state is a good thing to do, but it didn’t help us in this election,” said Mr. Schumer. “My only disagreement with Howard is that he should help us fund taking back the majority, because it would make a difference with things like the Supreme Court. And he came through—he ended up giving us $7.5 million. We tried the honey approach rather than the vinegar approach, and it worked.”

So what’s the immediate payoff of his success?

For one thing, Mr. Schumer said, New York will soon be “disproportionately” enjoying the spoils of last week’s victory.

He said that the formula for determining which areas receive homeland-security funding will be changed to benefit places of high risk, like New York, and that more money will be sent to the city for health care and education, including the “No Child Left Behind Act” and special-education programs. He predicted increased federal funding for a proposed tunnel between New York and New Jersey and the Second Avenue subway line, and said that his own bill making college tuitions tax-deductible—which the Republicans refused to renew in May—would be passed in the “first month or two” of the next session.

On the subject of Iraq, Mr. Schumer has essentially taken a pass until now. He has argued that an opposition party’s responsibility—at least in an election season, and in an area that has proven so politically troublesome to the Bush administration—is to critique foreign policy and not set it.

Now, Mr. Schumer said, he hopes that a controversial plan strongly advocated by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware—which essentially calls for the dissolution of Iraq into three autonomous ethnic enclaves (and which Mr. Schumer quietly supported last year)—will emerge as a concrete Democratic alternative to current administration policy.

“It may actually move into play,” said Mr. Schumer. “I’ve always believed that the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds hate each other more than they will ever love any central government.”

Outside of Iraq, Mr. Schumer echoed his colleagues’ calls for more multilateralism and said the climate of greater comity would help in North Korea—“We are totally dependent on the Chinese,” he said—and in the Middle East.

“I really dislike the Syrians,” Mr. Schumer said. “That’s the problem here. But it probably ends up being better to talk to them than not.”

Mr. Schumer wanted to make clear that these will not be mere suggestions to be considered or discarded by the White House as the administration sees fit.

“Bush will be a lame duck unless he has a dramatic change of course—unless the Rasputin-like influence of Cheney goes. You could see Cheney, just by his body language, is just angry,” said Mr. Schumer. “If Bush doesn’t budge, he will be a lame duck.”

As far as working with his Republican colleagues in the Senate, Mr. Schumer said that, at least in one way, victory has made life easier.

“One good thing for me: All the people who I opposed, who I haven’t talked to, are not there,” he said, leaning forward with a sharp cackle. “Every single incumbent that we targeted is not there—so I breathed a sigh of relief. Some of them would just glare at me. I don’t blame ’em.”

One day earlier, on an unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon in Washington, Mr. Schumer, along with fellow Senators Harry Reid and Richard Durbin, was set to speak at a rally on the “Senate Swamp” outside the Capitol. A few miles away, Republican George Allen conceded his tight Virginia race and officially gave the Democrats control of the Senate. On the Senate lawn, carpeted with fallen red oak leaves, an intern in khakis hunched over a podium and conducted a sound test by reading Bob Dylan lyrics.

Dozens of Senate interns and staffers—the men in khakis, the women in black pantsuits and white blouses—began filing toward the lawn. A flier publicizing the rally had been sent to many of the Democratic offices in the capital. A multicultural selection of supporters was chosen to stand on risers behind the podium, and an aide in a dark suit reminded the group that the microphones on the podium could pick up “every whisper.”

Other rally organizers lined up scores of beaming Democrats on both sides of a sidewalk and handed out miniature American flags. Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good” played on the loudspeakers, and the lines formed a cheering, flag-waving corridor for the three Senators to walk through. Wearing a dark suit and a blue tie spotted with white ducks, Mr. Schumer marched on Mr. Reid’s right side and made no effort to conceal his utter elation. “I felt like one of three generals who had liberated a country,” Mr. Schumer later said.

“Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” the crowd chanted when Mr. Schumer was introduced by Mr. Durbin as “our hero.”

“If we can keep our focus on the average family, we will stay a majority for a generation,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what we aim to do.”

And, coincidentally, Chuck Schumer will be rallying with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin for the "dawning of a new Democratic Majority in the United States Senate" half an hour later.

--Jason Horowitz