That’s because Ms. Fuchs may be more responsible than any deputy mayor or commissioner for the issues the Mayor will tackle over the next four years, from charter schools to health benefits. Her influence stems from her stint as the Mayor’s special advisor for governance and strategic planning during his first term, and her role as the Mayor’s tutor on the issues and inner workings of city government during his first campaign.

In short, the 54-year-old Columbia University professor could be called the left hemisphere of the Mayor’s brain.

“He was very interested in new ideas, how to make things better,” Ms. Fuchs said over eggs and Earl Gray tea during a 90-minute breakfast at a diner close to her office. “I’ve never had trouble with new ideas.”

When Ms. Fuchs began her tutorials with Mr. Bloomberg, some supporters of his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, were horrified. Ms. Fuchs had been a sharp critic of Mr. Giuliani and was perceived to be precisely the sort of ivory tower leftist whose ideas had brought the city to near-ruin in the early 1990’s.

But by the time the Mayor released a statement on Jan. 12 announcing Ms. Fuchs’ resignation from city government to return to Columbia, where she runs the University’s Center for Urban Research and Policy, some of her critics had been won over.

“I thought she would be a radical, sort of a firebrand,” said Henry Stern, the Parks Commissioner under Mayors Giuliani and Koch. “But she turned out to be a very constructive member of the Bloomberg administration. She leaves with respect.”

The wariness of Giuliani supporters was understandable, given that Ms. Fuchs—who had served as an advisor to Mayor David Dinkins during his 1993 campaign—incessantly accused Mr. Giuliani of bullying the city’s disenfranchised. She penned articles like a 1993 Newsday column titled “Can Four White Guys Run New York?”

In 2000, Doug Schoen, a high-powered consultant to Mr. Bloomberg and an old friend of Ms. Fuchs, invited her to spend the Christmas break drafting issue papers for the then-unknown billionaire, who was planning an unlikely Mayoral campaign the following year. Mr. Bloomberg obviously liked what he saw and heard, and so did Ms. Fuchs, who admired his “quiet, outraged view that people didn’t have access to education” and marveled at his independence from moneyed interests. When he tapped her as a special advisor in 2002, Mr. Giuliani’s backers wondered aloud if the new Republican Mayor was veering sharply to the left.

“Principally, he brought her on because he was trying to make the point that he was going to have a broader ideological focus than Rudy did,” said Steve Malanga, an editor at City Journal and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Rudy was very much a true Republican. Bloomberg was really a moderate Democrat.”

In a proclamation that the Mayor gave to Ms. Fuchs after she left office last month, he joked that he was happy he could fulfill her lifelong dream of working for a Republican.

Kidding aside, Ms. Fuchs recognized that the Mayor had made a statement by hiring her in 2002 and applauded him for being “willing to have somebody like me come to City Hall—who was not viewed as sort of a shrinking violet.”

Though she refused to compare Mr. Bloomberg to his predecessors and bit her tongue when asked about Mr. Giuliani, she did criticize the lack of infrastructure that Mr. Bloomberg inherited when he came to office in 2002.

“The truth of the matter is that we came into City Hall and there was no e-mail. The Department of Information Technology was a shell. All the support agencies that you would have to help agencies do their work, much of the oversight capacity of the city—it didn’t work or it didn’t exist, or it worked minimally. And this is what the Mayor has spent a lot of time on with his commissioners and other people: building an operational infrastructure for the city.”

That reconstruction required an especially strong army of commissioners, which, Ms. Fuchs said, complemented the Mayor’s “flat management” philosophy. “He expected a lot of the policy and transformations to come directly from the agencies, from the commissioners themselves,” she said.

But few were as busy as she was in building the woodwork necessary for, to use her words, “governing a 21st-century city”— which happens to be the subject of a book she is working on.

During her four-year stint with the administration, she restructured the City’s Workforce Development program and the Out of School Time system by taking the seemingly logical but onerous step of joining the Department of Youth and Community Development, which has the primary responsibility for after school programs, with the Department of Education.

Education Commissioner Joel Klein said that she had done “great work” in managing that collaboration. She also streamlined 13 human-service agencies as the head of the Integrated Human Services project, which made social service benefits more accessible to eligible welfare recipients. As chair of the 2005 Charter Revision Commission, she produced two ballot initiatives on ethics and fiscal policies, both of which passed easily last year.

Yet, for all her activity, Ms. Fuchs stayed mostly behind the scenes, acting as the connective tissue between the flexing muscles of the Bloomberg commissioners.

“It’s always good to have one person who has no formal line of responsibility, because that’s the person who could think more out of the box,” said Ms. Fuchs. “I ended up doing a lot of stuff on what looks like the periphery, but would be very supportive of the main event.”

Indeed, Ms. Fuchs attributed a reference in Mr. Bloomberg’s recent State of the City address to a six-month job-training and union-apprentice program to structural changes she helped make during the Mayor’s first term. Those changes, she said, faced sharp opposition from the more conservative voices within the administration.

“I had a very hard time. They tried to kill my projects—literally. But in the end, the Mayor supported me,” she said. “These are my babies, and I nurtured them.”

Like the Mayor, Ms. Fuchs hailed from a Jewish middle-class family in a leafy neighborhood. She grew up in Bayside, Queens, the third of five children raised by her mother, who stayed at home, and her father, a Polish immigrant and diamond cutter. He also sang as the cantor in the local Orthodox Jewish center. Ms. Fuchs still keeps Sabbath.

She said that her first political memory was of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, when she was 11. Soon after, she began developing a worldview that tilted to the left.

“When you go into government and your name is in the newspaper, people who went to elementary school find you,” she said. “Somebody sent me my eighth-grade yearbook—you know you have the quote [adjacent to your portrait]—and my quote was, ‘It’s not fair.’”

She took that sense of indignation to Bayside High School, where she excelled and graduated at age 16. She went to Queens College, where she joined the reform Democratic club and was elected to the county committee.

“The person running against me had fraudulent signatures on the ballot. You only needed like 30 signatures,” she said, laughing.

She said she resisted the more radical elements of campus politics after attending a meeting hosted by the leftist Students for Democratic Society.

“It was so rabidly anti-Israel. I grew up Orthodox and a very big Zionist, and I was involved in Soviet Jewry—I had to leave,” she said.

Yet Ms. Fuchs still had her moments of activism, participating in a demonstration that closed down the Long Island Expressway to protest the Vietnam War. She took a few lumps on the head from police nightsticks.

“It’s hard to change your view about the police—which I have—if you were a student in the 70’s and did any activism,” she said.

After graduating in 1972, she worked on George McGovern’s Presidential campaign as a volunteer before heading off to Brown University for a master’s degree and then to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. After teaching at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., for a few years, she came back to New York and met her future husband, Daniel J. Victor, at a bris. He is now an executive at Sesame Street.

They married in 1983 and have three children. Since then, she has taught at Barnard and Columbia, and has written several books, including Racial Politics in New York State. In addition, she edited New York City: The End of the Liberal Experiment and the prescient Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago.

She says that from an early age, “I really understood you have to be inside it to fix it.” But, after four years inside City Hall, she grew eager to get back to academia.

“You sort of have to be true to who you are,” she said. “And I had this extraordinary opportunity that most academics never get. I feel like I have an extraordinary lens to bring back to the classroom.”

That’s because Ms. Fuchs may be more responsible than any deputy mayor or commissioner for the issues the Mayor will tackle over the next four years, from charter schools to health benefits. Her influence stems from her stint as the Mayor’s special advisor for governance and strategic planning during his first term, and her role as the Mayor’s tutor on the issues and inner workings of city government during his first campaign.

In short, the 54-year-old Columbia University professor could be called the left hemisphere of the Mayor’s brain.

“He was very interested in new ideas, how to make things better,” Ms. Fuchs said over eggs and Earl Gray tea during a 90-minute breakfast at a diner close to her office. “I’ve never had trouble with new ideas.”

When Ms. Fuchs began her tutorials with Mr. Bloomberg, some supporters of his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, were horrified. Ms. Fuchs had been a sharp critic of Mr. Giuliani and was perceived to be precisely the sort of ivory tower leftist whose ideas had brought the city to near-ruin in the early 1990’s.

But by the time the Mayor released a statement on Jan. 12 announcing Ms. Fuchs’ resignation from city government to return to Columbia, where she runs the University’s Center for Urban Research and Policy, some of her critics had been won over.

“I thought she would be a radical, sort of a firebrand,” said Henry Stern, the Parks Commissioner under Mayors Giuliani and Koch. “But she turned out to be a very constructive member of the Bloomberg administration. She leaves with respect.”

The wariness of Giuliani supporters was understandable, given that Ms. Fuchs—who had served as an advisor to Mayor David Dinkins during his 1993 campaign—incessantly accused Mr. Giuliani of bullying the city’s disenfranchised. She penned articles like a 1993 Newsday column titled “Can Four White Guys Run New York?”

In 2000, Doug Schoen, a high-powered consultant to Mr. Bloomberg and an old friend of Ms. Fuchs, invited her to spend the Christmas break drafting issue papers for the then-unknown billionaire, who was planning an unlikely Mayoral campaign the following year. Mr. Bloomberg obviously liked what he saw and heard, and so did Ms. Fuchs, who admired his “quiet, outraged view that people didn’t have access to education” and marveled at his independence from moneyed interests. When he tapped her as a special advisor in 2002, Mr. Giuliani’s backers wondered aloud if the new Republican Mayor was veering sharply to the left.

“Principally, he brought her on because he was trying to make the point that he was going to have a broader ideological focus than Rudy did,” said Steve Malanga, an editor at City Journal and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Rudy was very much a true Republican. Bloomberg was really a moderate Democrat.”

In a proclamation that the Mayor gave to Ms. Fuchs after she left office last month, he joked that he was happy he could fulfill her lifelong dream of working for a Republican.

Kidding aside, Ms. Fuchs recognized that the Mayor had made a statement by hiring her in 2002 and applauded him for being “willing to have somebody like me come to City Hall—who was not viewed as sort of a shrinking violet.”

Though she refused to compare Mr. Bloomberg to his predecessors and bit her tongue when asked about Mr. Giuliani, she did criticize the lack of infrastructure that Mr. Bloomberg inherited when he came to office in 2002.

“The truth of the matter is that we came into City Hall and there was no e-mail. The Department of Information Technology was a shell. All the support agencies that you would have to help agencies do their work, much of the oversight capacity of the city—it didn’t work or it didn’t exist, or it worked minimally. And this is what the Mayor has spent a lot of time on with his commissioners and other people: building an operational infrastructure for the city.”

That reconstruction required an especially strong army of commissioners, which, Ms. Fuchs said, complemented the Mayor’s “flat management” philosophy. “He expected a lot of the policy and transformations to come directly from the agencies, from the commissioners themselves,” she said.

But few were as busy as she was in building the woodwork necessary for, to use her words, “governing a 21st-century city”— which happens to be the subject of a book she is working on.

During her four-year stint with the administration, she restructured the City’s Workforce Development program and the Out of School Time system by taking the seemingly logical but onerous step of joining the Department of Youth and Community Development, which has the primary responsibility for after school programs, with the Department of Education.

Education Commissioner Joel Klein said that she had done “great work” in managing that collaboration. She also streamlined 13 human-service agencies as the head of the Integrated Human Services project, which made social service benefits more accessible to eligible welfare recipients. As chair of the 2005 Charter Revision Commission, she produced two ballot initiatives on ethics and fiscal policies, both of which passed easily last year.

Yet, for all her activity, Ms. Fuchs stayed mostly behind the scenes, acting as the connective tissue between the flexing muscles of the Bloomberg commissioners.

“It’s always good to have one person who has no formal line of responsibility, because that’s the person who could think more out of the box,” said Ms. Fuchs. “I ended up doing a lot of stuff on what looks like the periphery, but would be very supportive of the main event.”

Indeed, Ms. Fuchs attributed a reference in Mr. Bloomberg’s recent State of the City address to a six-month job-training and union-apprentice program to structural changes she helped make during the Mayor’s first term. Those changes, she said, faced sharp opposition from the more conservative voices within the administration.

“I had a very hard time. They tried to kill my projects—literally. But in the end, the Mayor supported me,” she said. “These are my babies, and I nurtured them.”

Like the Mayor, Ms. Fuchs hailed from a Jewish middle-class family in a leafy neighborhood. She grew up in Bayside, Queens, the third of five children raised by her mother, who stayed at home, and her father, a Polish immigrant and diamond cutter. He also sang as the cantor in the local Orthodox Jewish center. Ms. Fuchs still keeps Sabbath.

She said that her first political memory was of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, when she was 11. Soon after, she began developing a worldview that tilted to the left.

“When you go into government and your name is in the newspaper, people who went to elementary school find you,” she said. “Somebody sent me my eighth-grade yearbook—you know you have the quote [adjacent to your portrait]—and my quote was, ‘It’s not fair.’”

She took that sense of indignation to Bayside High School, where she excelled and graduated at age 16. She went to Queens College, where she joined the reform Democratic club and was elected to the county committee.

“The person running against me had fraudulent signatures on the ballot. You only needed like 30 signatures,” she said, laughing.

She said she resisted the more radical elements of campus politics after attending a meeting hosted by the leftist Students for Democratic Society.

“It was so rabidly anti-Israel. I grew up Orthodox and a very big Zionist, and I was involved in Soviet Jewry—I had to leave,” she said.

Yet Ms. Fuchs still had her moments of activism, participating in a demonstration that closed down the Long Island Expressway to protest the Vietnam War. She took a few lumps on the head from police nightsticks.

“It’s hard to change your view about the police—which I have—if you were a student in the 70’s and did any activism,” she said.

After graduating in 1972, she worked on George McGovern’s Presidential campaign as a volunteer before heading off to Brown University for a master’s degree and then to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. After teaching at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., for a few years, she came back to New York and met her future husband, Daniel J. Victor, at a bris. He is now an executive at Sesame Street.

They married in 1983 and have three children. Since then, she has taught at Barnard and Columbia, and has written several books, including Racial Politics in New York State. In addition, she edited New York City: The End of the Liberal Experiment and the prescient Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago.

She says that from an early age, “I really understood you have to be inside it to fix it.” But, after four years inside City Hall, she grew eager to get back to academia.

“You sort of have to be true to who you are,” she said. “And I had this extraordinary opportunity that most academics never get. I feel like I have an extraordinary lens to bring back to the classroom.”

Jason talks to Bloomberg policy advisor Ester Fuchs, who offers one of the clearest looks yet at the ideological shifts away from the Giuliani years.

Also in the Observer's political pages, Martin Luther King, Franklin Delano Roosevelt...and Bush.

But it may be time to put away that hoary cliché. This year’s Mayoral election, like others in the recent past, has shown that New Yorkers prefer competence and results to ideology and partisan assertion.

And if you’re Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this turn of events is a good thing.

At a recent campaign rally, Mr. Bloomberg stood on a stage between his predecessors, Republican Rudolph Giuliani and Democrat Ed Koch, and declared to great applause, “People know this election is not about partisanship, it is about leadership.”

While it’s crucial for the nominally Republican Mr. Bloomberg to convince Democratic voters in a Democratic city to think beyond party affiliation, the familiar refrain from his campaign speeches also reflects a deeper truth about this election. Partisanship, ideology and a clear divergence of vision are largely absent from the race. In their place is technocratic talk that doesn’t do much to stir the passion of partisans, but may be the new language of New York politics in the 21st century.

As the election nears, Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent, Democrat Fernando Ferrer, has tried desperately to differentiate himself from the Mayor, resurrecting the controversial “Two New Yorks” mantra in the debates and slapping a “He’s not like Mike. He’s more like you” tag line on his television ads.

But the differences that Mr. Ferrer highlights have more to do with personality and personal finances than any radical difference in which direction he’d like to take the city. In that respect, New York—which has often been the country’s incubator for new ideas, for both the left and the right—is now similar to many other big cities in America.

Increasingly starved of federal or state aid, urban governments now have less tolerance for the nuances of ideological debate. Money is short and political leaders need to get things done, so the emphasis has shifted to problem solving. Into that new paradigm has stepped Mr. Bloomberg, perhaps the leading iteration of a new class of successful technocratic mayors.

“In the difficult work of making progress in a big American city, there is a tremendous opportunity to move beyond the old labels of the past and to move into the new age of performance-driven politics,” said Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who has brought a similar problem-solving approach to government in his own city. “I think we are ushering in a new era of politics from the ground up. It is more data- and results-driven than anything before.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s aides note that there’s a significant difference between ideology and inventive ideas, and that the current administration is brimming with ways to build up the city’s infrastructure and concretely improve New Yorkers’ lives. His supporters note that under Mr. Bloomberg, crime rates have continued to drop, public-school test scores have improved, and the city’s bars have become free of cigarette smoke. They also point out that rezoning has allowed the city to reclaim its waterfront, the 311 information line has improved citizen access to City Hall, and the streamlining of city agencies has fostered a greater sense of accountability in government.

“In order to be successful as a mayor in the 21st century, you have to transcend ideology,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor of public affairs at Columbia University and a special advisor to the Mayor on policy.

Ms. Fuchs said that decades of urban breakdown helped to create the post-partisan emphasis on fixing what’s broken. Tired ideology no longer suffices, so Mr. Bloomberg has set out to “create the infrastructure for opportunity,” said Ms. Fuchs.

While the results-driven philosophy to which Mr. Bloomberg subscribes has had obvious advantages, it also seems to have muted the once-raucous debate over big ideas that added intellectual substance and spice to New York’s election campaigns. This year’s Mayoral campaign has sometimes felt like the candidates could be swapping scripts.

Instead of attacking Mr. Bloomberg’s housing plan, Mr. Ferrer complained that it was his idea first. When the two candidates responded to a Citizens Union Candidate Questionnaire sent out this summer, the answers could have been written in an echo chamber. They both promised to confront budget deficits by demanding that Albany take on more of the Medicaid burden; they both called for equal education funding from the state; and they both claimed that affordable housing was the city’s “most pressing” issue.

“In the Mayor’s race, it is pretty clear that Ferrer and Bloomberg are pitching similar ideas about the issues that matter to them,” said Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at New School University. “Their differences in ideology are expressed in how they propose to fund those very similar policies. But that’s pretty subtle for the average viewer.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s name will appear on the ballot under the Republican, Independence and Liberal Party lines, and even Bloomberg supporter Ed Koch conceded, “I believe that these candidates generally convey that they see the particular issues in the same way.”

But in recent days, Mr. Ferrer has tried to mark the contrast in ideology, not by noting his liberal stock-transfer tax, but by attempting to equate Mr. Bloomberg to President George W. Bush, arguing that the Mayor’s $7 million donation to the host committee for the Republican National Convention constituted the largest donation in the history of the Republican Party.

Mr. Bloomberg’s camp argues that the gift was intended to garner favor with the White House for much-needed national funding, but it’s the very fact of the Mayor’s money that has proved most divisive.

Buying an Election?

According to Mr. Bloomberg’s most recent expenditure filing, the Mayor has spent more than $63 million on his campaign, including more than $10 million on television ads, more than $2 million on campaign workers and $11 million on consultants. The campaign event where Mr. Bloomberg declared that the election was about leadership, not ideology, a breakfast for Jewish supporters at the Hyatt, cost more than $100,000.

That has led some critics to recall his assertion to a group of corporate executives that the city is a “luxury product,” and to charge that this election has less to do with ideas on how best to lead New York than it is about the Mayor’s willingness to use his vast financial fortune to essentially buy the election.

“One of the things he has tried to keep out of this is ideology,” said Tom Ognibene, the Conservative Party candidate for Mayor who criticized Mr. Bloomberg for taking instruction from polls. “It’s no longer about Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative—it’s about who has the most money.”

Others argue that, with the exception of William F. Buckley Jr.’s largely experimental run in 1965, the conservative challenge to John Lindsay’s re-election in 1969 from John Marchi and Mario Procaccino, and Mr. Giuliani’s emphasis on crime and welfare in the 1990’s, the ideological differences between candidates has generally been negligible, mainly because liberal Democratic ideology has prevailed for so long.

But Mr. Bloomberg is different. His critics say he is nonideological to the point of aimlessness. They point to his reliance on people like Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Daniel L. Doctoroff and Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden as unprecedented, and argue that he keeps his commissioners on such a long leash that they actually end up leading him.

His supporters say that while he hires good people, the notion of his being led is just plain wrong.

“A lot of the best ideas come from him,” said Ms. Fuchs. “There isn’t a thing that he doesn’t look at.”

Some policy experts said that the Mayor’s lack of ideology has allowed him to move the city beyond the ethnic, geographical and racial politics that have long dominated elections here.

“I don’t think that Mayoral elections have ever been about ideology,” said Susan Fainstein, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “They were about race, ethnicity and class. Perhaps Bloomberg’s greatest achievement is that he has calmed down that conflict.”

Calmed the conflict, maybe, but not the competition for ethnic votes. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Ferrer have both actively pursued the black swing vote, though they have so far mostly avoided doing so on blatant, and divisive, ideological terms.

Ms. Fainstein noted that as national politics has become more and more divisive, there is more of a preference in big cities for inoffensive, technocratic personalities.

“The future is that, unless you get a regime in Washington that cares about cities, local governments are going to pay less attention to ideology and are just going to be minding their own gardens,” she said.

Jason Horowitz looks at a Mayoral race without ideology, noting that Freddy and Mike are as likely to argue about who had an idea first as they are to differ on substance. Interesting observations on the death of ideology in city politics from everyone from Ester Fuchs to the Mayor of Baltimore, Martin O'Malley.

Relatedly, perhaps, Jess Bruder finds that all four candidates in the East Side Council races have ambivalent relationships either with party (Republican) or nominee (Freddy).

Gabe Sherman and Anna Schneider-Mayerson stay ahead of the Judy Miller curve, reporting that she may be back in the Times newsroom soon.

In an op-ed, Niall Stanage warms Stu Loeser's heart.

Conason goes after the GOP on cuts.

The topic: "The New York City Mayor's Race: Post-Election Reflections."

On hand to hear the speech were Columbia's broad-shouldered President, Lee C. Bollinger, campaign aides Patty Harris and education expert Ester Fuchs, and Peter Law.

Mr. Law, 19, is the executive director of the Columbia University College Republicans, a group of 600 that helped organize the event, which Mr. Bloomberg, with the slightest hint of a smile, recognized in his opening remarks.

The extremely earnest Mr. Law said that he had heard that his shaggy-haired counterparts, the College Democrats, had tried to shut down a burgeoning Democrats for Bloomberg chapter, and confided, with visible excitement, that another guest speaker was in the works for November.

"John Ashcroft," he said. "We're going to need a lot more security."

The font is familiar: a simple sans serif, synonymous with the Bloomberg name, ubiquitous on bus sides and taxi tops. So is the decor: simple, clean, the bowl of fresh fruit and bagged snacks in the reception area, the closely spaced work stations (no office for you!), a Bloomberg terminal on every desk.

Bloomberg the business has morphed into Bloomberg the candidate–right down to the look of what is described as the "exploratory campaign office" just down the block from the shiny black tower that is headquarters to Bloomberg News. Everything appears set for an official campaign announcement soon after Memorial Day.

There's one other familiar thing, too: To launch this venture, Michael Bloomberg has assembled the most eclectic team of political all-stars that money can buy–and, if you listen to the critics, probably did. Mr. Bloomberg's lineup is the political equivalent of those $100-million major-league payrolls.

There's the portly and seasoned David Garth, 71, the political consultant who helped get John Lindsay, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani elected Mayor. There's the puckish Frank Luntz, the pollster whose diverse clientele has included Mayor Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

There's Doug Schoen, a pollster who has worked for the Bloomberg company, and who played a big part in another big-money campaign: the election of New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine. And Maureen Connelly, the savvy public-relations executive who used to work for Ed Koch.

Speaking for Mr. Bloomberg is the silver-haired Billy Cunningham, whose extensive political pedigree is most often associated with former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And also boasting a diverse and long political history: Lawrence Mandelker, the mustachioed and tenacious lawyer for former Republican Party chief William Powers, who tried–and failed–to block Senator John McCain from getting on the Republican ballot in last spring's New York Presidential primary. None of these people work for peanuts, and most campaigns usually can afford only one or two home-run hitters. Mr. Bloomberg, by contrast, has hired an entire wing of the political Hall of Fame.

The team also includes Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former editorial writer for the Daily News , on leave from his weekly national-affairs column at Bloomberg News, and–strangest of all to some–Ester Fuchs, the lefty Barnard political-science professor who has thrown a few impassioned lobs at Mayor Giuliani in her day, and some wet kisses to former Mayor David Dinkins now and again.

Exactly how much they're getting paid is a closely guarded secret–at least until the Board of Elections filing on July 15. But there's no doubt that this is a no-expenses-spared campaign: The Bloomberg terminals alone cost up to $1,640 a month each. "We pay full price!" insisted Mr. Cunningham, the campaign spokesman.

New York City has had career politicians, an accountant and a career prosecutor for Mayor in the last half-century, but it has yet to try a career businessman–and certainly not one worth an estimated $4 billion, and willing to fund his own candidacy. Assembling his campaign team, Mr. Bloomberg may be signaling exactly what having a billionaire for Mayor will mean (only without the big bucks to throw around).

It's his modus operandi: get a disparate group, mix them up, pay them a lot. It's a departure from the usual campaign approach, which usually revolves around a hired gun or two and a lot of passionate and underpaid acolytes hewn from some ideological cloth.

It might show a man who is willing to try anything that works–a sort of business-model-based, post-partisan approach.

"This is what you can expect from a Bloomberg Mayoralty," said Mr. Cunningham. The team, he said, "is a direct function of Mike Bloomberg–the way he will choose people based on their talents. He starts with no preconceived notions of what works and what doesn't."

Or it might reveal a man (the same man who jumped party lines purely for expediency, he freely admits) who has no core beliefs and no real vision of what he wants to accomplish as New York's next Republican Mayor.

"He is repeating all of the mistakes self-made billionaires make when they run for office, which is replicating their success in business and following their gut–none of which could possibly work," said consultant Norman Adler, who has become something of a one-man anti-Bloomberg quip machine.

"Why not work for Mike Bloomberg? It's good to get a paycheck," sniffed Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who said he was speaking on his own behalf, not for Mark Green, for whom he is a strategist. "If the guy is paying you–they're all making a lot of money."

It is not, consultants like Mr. Sheinkopf assume, because Mr. Bloomberg's team members think the mogul can win–and the polls indeed look grim. A recent Daily News poll, for example, showed Democratic candidates who are barely in the single digits in polls of their own party members walloping the media mogul in a general election by margins as big as three to one.

Of course, Mr. Bloomberg has tons of money to spend, and money can buy things in politics. Still, "look at all of the people who worked for Forbes, and they knew he was going to lose," said Mr. Adler, the consultant. "The political-consultant community follows the Biblical saying, 'He was a stranger and we took him in.'"

Privately, the language gets even more heated: "They are sucking him dry," said one prominent politico. "They are taking him for a ride."

Mr Cunningham would not comment on his or his colleagues' payment arrangements, except to say, "People do sign up, so they must be getting close to what they want." He would not make Mr. Bloomberg available for comment.

"He came to me ," Ms. Fuchs said in a Woody Allen-esque admission, in her cramped, book-filled office at Barnard College. "He wanted my opinion. So he gets credit for that." Still, on talk radio, the 49-year-old Ms. Fuchs has already been accused of "selling out for $100,000." She denies she is being paid that amount.

Mr. Cunningham himself left a nice lobbying job at Fleet Bank, and his wife and three teenage children behind in Albany, to crash at a small Manhattan apartment during the week. "This is going to shape up as a very interesting adventure," said the 50-year-old spokesman. "People in New York are going to respond to Mike Bloomberg's message. His personal history is compelling. His story will work wonderfully for him."

This is the kind of thing members of Mr. Bloomberg's team say. They are excited about the opportunity. Mr. Bloomberg is a fresh face. And yes, yes, yes, they insist, we do all get along. There is, for example, that open-door policy: In his corporate offices a few blocks away, Mr. Bloomberg himself sits at a work station in a cornerofthe Bloomberg newsroom.

In the conference room on East 56th Street, Team Bloomberg meets regularly, sometimes with Mr. Bloomberg, sometimes without, sometimes in smaller subsets. But there is no campaign manager–Mr. Bloom-berg eschews titles–so whoever jumps in can set the agenda. "It's not unlike the Knights of the Round Table," Mr. Cunningham said. Or as another participant put it: "There are a lot of very strong personalities–and no lack of opinions."

But how this will play out in the context of a campaign remains to be seen. When discussing polls, for example–which tend to be the most closely held secrets in campaigns–there was an argument about whether the door should be shut. It finally was.

Then there is the question of whether, having hired all this talent, Mr. Bloomberg will actually listen to it. Quite a few press noses have been knocked out of joint, for example, by his rather selective media policy. Mr. Bloomberg gave an interview to The New York Times , for example, but not to the Daily News . He broke news (of his willingness to accept $1 a year as Mayor) in the national press–in Newsweek . He chose to say "I'm running" to a gossip columnist: Liz Smith of the New York Post (but not to her colleague, Cindy Adams, who had reported weeks earlier, without the ultimate source himself, that Mr. Bloomberg was indeed in the race). Journalists wonder whether Maureen Connelly and Billy Cunningham, two of the savviest P.R. pros around, could possibly be advising Mr. Bloomberg to cherry-pick this way.

And will Mr. Bloomberg, the business shark, take the time to clue everyone in on the agenda? Take Ms. Fuchs. She can give an impassioned rationale for why Mr. Bloomberg should be Mayor: "I have a vision about how to make this city work better, which is also Mike Bloomberg's vision. People experience this city through their neighborhoods–their schools, their libraries, their parks. Making this city work is about making the neighborhoods work, not just midtown Manhattan. I myself, to this day, think of myself as a Bayside girl."

But this is Mr. Bloomberg on neighborhoods: "I don't think that knowing the details of every single little program, law, neighborhood–whether you're running for President or Governor or Congressman or City Council or Mayor or whatever–those aren't the issues," he said in an un-broadcast interview with Charlie Rose at a conference for television-industry professionals. You have staff for those things, Mr. Bloomberg said.

So much for the people of Bayside.

Then there is the question of how will they all get along? Beyond the well-known egos of the Luntzes and Garths and Schoens there are … even more egos.

Ms. Fuchs, dark-haired and dark-eyed, is the kind of person who speaks in exclamation points. "Dictator" is a word that tends to trip off her lips when she mentions Mayor Giuliani, for example. But Mr. Capehart, as a Daily News editorial writer and columnist, was supportive of most Giuliani policies. Young (he's 33), black and gay, he made a splash early in his career, for example, with a series of columns about unsafe sex taking place in New York bathhouses. But in the loose hierarchy that makes up the campaign, he and Ms. Fuchs will work closely together.

Mr. Capehart insisted that he and Ms. Fuchs were not really that far apart ideologically. And with a few clicks on his Bloomberg terminal in the office he shares with Kathleen Cudahy, a former aide to City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, he retrieved a letter responding to one of his columns that accused him of wandering "the angry and bitter landscape of the left."

Next to Ms. Fuchs, Mr. Capehart has generated the most buzz in his new role. (Much of this stems from skepticism about how Mike Bloomberg, the candidate, can possibly separate his radio and wire operations from his campaign.) Mr. Capehart had only just assumed writing a weekly column when he struck up a conversation with someone he described as "one of Mr. Bloomberg's people."

"And I said, 'Why is he thinking about doing this?' And I said, 'He's really going to have to have issues.' And I was told, 'Well, we were kind of hoping you'd help with that.'" Mr. Capehart said it took him a month to come to this conclusion:

"If it's good enough for [William] Safire and [David] Gergen to jump the fence, it's good enough for me. And I don't think you can ever really understand this stuff until you've done it. After November, I want to go back to my column, and I'll go back with more insight, more understanding."

The campaign already has on board field workers and someone to organize the petition effort. There are more hires to come, to be sure; a Mayoral race does take an infrastructure. Even the general phone message solicits résumés.

For, unlike any of the other campaigns, this one does have an unlimited budget.