That inspirational talk about standards and efficiency was enough to convince Aldon that Bloomberg should be president. In fact, Aldon said, he'd rather hang out with Bloomberg than any of the candidates running for office.

Barack Obama did get an honorable mention from Aldon because, like Bill Clinton, they’re all Leos. And as Aldon put it, “Leos make wonderful leaders. Fidel Castro is a Leo.”

(Bloomberg is an Aquarius. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, the author of this post is a Leo.)

There's a new biography about Rudy Giuliani coming out by a publisher called Wiley.

The president of the National Institute for Latino Policy went to hear Herman Badillo speak at the Harvard Club and found himself "in the midst of the 'Other New York.'"

Eliot Spitzer's former campaign manager Ryan Toohey is getting involved in the special election in Nassau.

So much for Joe Bruno's warning that he doesn't want Spitzer getting too involved in that race.

The Republican candidate in that race, Maureen O'Connell, is on the radio.

Robert Stein, the former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, wonders if Joe Lieberman will defect from the Democratic Party.

Larry King has been on the air for 50 years.

Dov Hikind's ad demanding the resignation of the Israeli Prime Minister may have violated the law.

Illinois may move the date of their presidential primary, which would be good for Barack Obama.

And pictured above is a chart from The Albany Project showing a slight discrepancy in spending on member items in the state Senate. The long red lines are for majority Republicans, the stubby blue ones are for minority Democrats. (Their chart for spending in the Democratic-held Assembly is in the works.)

-- Azi Paybarah

Mr. Berger is the chairman of the New York State Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, a high-powered panel created by Governor George Pataki and the State Legislature to rein in the state’s ballooning health-care costs. Modeled after the federal military-base-closing commission that made headlines last year, this commission has been charged with cutting costs by “right-sizing” New York’s hospitals and nursing homes. It is the most far-reaching health-care initiative to hit New York in decades, but not everyone is happy about it. For while Mr. Berger has vowed that his undertaking is essentially benevolent, that he is out to heal an ailing health system, critics fear that he will prove to be less a Mr. Fix-It than a Mr. Hatchet.

“Our concern is that he’s being driven by financial considerations,” said Louis Guida, co-coordinator of Save Our Safety Net Campaign, a coalition of labor unions and community groups formed in response to the Berger commission. “Given his history as someone who is sent in to do difficult jobs that no one else wants to do, we think he’s coming in with his knives sharpened to cut down on hospitals one way or another.”

The 18-member Berger commission got its start in June 2005 and is set to release its recommendations—which the Legislature must either accept or reject in full—on Dec. 1, 2006. As that day approaches, hospital workers and health-care advocates have begun a ghoulish guessing game of which hospitals will survive and which will not, which will be shrunk to freestanding emergency-care facilities and which will be left alone. (Rumors have circulated that the commission intends to close as many as 10 percent of the nearly 900 hospitals and nursing homes in New York, a figure Mr. Berger denied to The Observer.)

For concerned watchdogs like Mr. Guida, the biggest fear is that the first hospitals to go will be the hospitals serving low-income populations; after all, they tend to have some of the poorest operating margins (serving the uninsured is worthy, but not lucrative) and their boards don’t necessarily pack a punch in Albany. At one recent hearing in Queens, 44 witnesses spent four hours begging the commission to keep the borough’s hospitals alive.

“Everybody is very, very concerned … because we’re getting some vibrations,” said Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, rattling off statistics about the borough’s already-strapped medical services: five community boards with no hospital facilities, 1.2 beds per thousand residents, etc. “These hospitals cannot close because nobody can take their patient load, and as far as beds go, their beds are full.”

But Mr. Berger denies that he is out to slash and burn the state’s crop of hospitals and nursing homes. “This is not a quote ‘closing commission,’” he said, referring to one of the more popular nicknames critics have given the panel. “Do we think we may close [some facilities]? Yeah, but the answer is, it is a commission that is looking at issues of what is appropriate care …. Part of our mandate is not merely to look at costs, it’s to look at access to care and it’s to look at quality of care.”

‘A Little Task Force’

Nonetheless, Mr. Berger—who served as Governor Hugh Carey’s director of the emergency Financial Control Board during the city’s mid-70’s budget crisis, and whose name has rarely appeared in print without words like “sharp” and “aggressive” appended to it—is among the first to acknowledge that he is a fiscal tough guy.

“I am,” said Mr. Berger, now 66, and then qualified himself a bit. “‘Tough’ is a very strange word,” he said. “I have a reputation of being honest with people, asking questions, and being willing ultimately to say what I think. I don’t think that’s particularly tough. I think that’s particularly what you need to survive in the world.”

And Mr. Berger is clearly a survivor. As a young politico managing campaigns in New York City, he made such an impression on rivals (and perhaps supporters) that he was rumored to be the inspiration for the wheeling, dealing campaign manager in the 1972 Robert Redford flick The Candidate. (Others say the role was modeled on legendary political consultant David Garth.)

Later, as the first director of the Financial Control Board from 1976 through 1977, he struck fear in the hearts of commissioners and labor leaders alike. “He really was the driving force [behind] the control board, putting a lot of pressure on the city to cut-cut-cut-cut-cut, to do all the things the city had promised to do in order to right the ship,” said Donald Kummerfeld, whose job as city budget director made him a frequent target of Mr. Berger’s criticism. As a member of the Metropolitan Transit Authority board, he nearly sparked a gray-haired revolution in 1979 when he suggested the city limit subway fare discounts for the elderly.

And as head of the Port Authority from 1985 to 1990, Mr. Berger has been accused by families of the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing of putting the bottom line before security—allegedly rejecting suggestions to secure the parking garage where the bomb exploded because of “the inconvenience to tenants and substantial loss of revenue,” according to court documents. (When The Observer attempted to contact Mr. Berger about these claims, he was on vacation and could not be reached.)

Mr. Berger’s sharp tongue, along with his bald head and beard (once worn pointy), inspired one old colleague to jokingly compare his looks to a devil. But, in fact, he looked more like a cross between Vladimir Lenin and Gordon Gekko as he sat in his office at Odyssey Investment Partners, where he is also chairman, his cobalt eyes holding steady beneath his smooth forehead. Dressed in a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt, cufflinks glittering at his wrists, a Starburst-orange tie around his neck, he looked every bit the power broker— except that his suspenders featured images of the Statue of Liberty. On a couch in the corner of his corner office sat a man-sized version of the red Muppet Elmo.

(“I keep Elmo around as a reminder that we humans are not infallible,” Mr. Berger said, digressing briefly into a tale of an ill-fated investment in the Sesame Street retail stores. “We did all the diligence, and it was one of the few investments we made in our history that did not make money.”)

The tenacious tactics of Mr. Berger, a Democrat, have undeniable bipartisan appeal; he ran the Republican Herman Badillo’s campaign for Mayor in 2001. Not long after, in 2002, the two men were having lunch when Mr. Berger happened to mention his latest financial disaster theory: that the expanding Medicaid budget is “going to absolutely swamp the state at some point.”

Mr. Badillo promptly mentioned the conversation to his friend, Mr. Pataki. About eight months later, the Governor phoned Mr. Berger to ask him to put together “a little task force” on Medicaid reform. When this task force (which included Mr. Badillo among its six members) recommended “right-sizing” hospitals and nursing homes as one of several solutions in its final November 2004 report, Mr. Pataki once again called on Mr. Berger to do the honors.

“The Governor could not have picked a better person to look into the questions of health-care costs,” said former Mayor Ed Koch, who goes back some 40 years with Mr. Berger and tapped him to advise his 1978 Mayoral campaign. “Lots of people would turn down a job like that, because it can only irritate people: managers, unions, advocates. You don’t make too many friends when you want to restructure.”

But Mr. Berger doesn’t mind making enemies. Indeed, he seems to enjoy the drama that comes from charging into a hive of competing interests.

“This is Rashômon squared,” he said, stubbing out his cigar in a large pewter dish and immediately reaching for another. “Providers look at it one way, institutions look at it a particular way, consumers look at it, the workforce looks at it, everybody sees the system from their point of view.

“But I don’t want anything out of this,” he continued. “So I may be right, I may be wrong, but I’m reasonably objective. And that’s a great advantage.”

Too Many Beds?

Not everyone, however, is convinced of Mr. Berger’s objectivity.

The Berger commission’s theory of New York’s health-care crisis rests chiefly on the idea that there are too many beds. Thanks to changes in medical treatment, the theory goes, people live longer and linger less in hospitals and nursing homes, leaving empty wards where there used to be full ones. Faced with the cost of keeping these ghost wards open, some hospitals have shifted their focus to providing lucrative but ultimately inessential services, while others have been forced to shut their doors. Meanwhile, the state’s health-care budget continues to grow.

“The competition to fill beds is taking dollars out of the systems and parts of institutions that ought to be supported,” Mr. Berger said. “So we’ve got to come up with some answers to core problems before we have a massive implosion.

“This is really important,” he said. “ I don’t want to see another situation like we saw in the mid-70’s where, because you delayed, you did disruptive things to the social fabric, some of which you might have been able to avoid.”

Few people disagree with this last point. But while most would agree that something needs to be done, some critics questions whether excess beds are the issue, and if “right-sizing” is the best way to tackle soaring medical costs.

“We’re concerned that there’s this idea that closing a hospital here or there is somehow going to be a panacea,” said William Van Slyke, spokesperson for the Healthcare Association of New York State, which released a report in November 2005 that placed the state’s excess bed capacity closer to 7,000 than the 20,000 cited by the Berger commission. “There are still significant, fundamental problems that are going to need to be addressed: We have woefully inadequate Medicaid reimbursements, ridiculous expenses in medical-malpractice liability, gross profiteering by health plans, gross profiteering by pharmaceutical companies. All those waves are not going to be settled by closing a hospital or two.”

But even if a few strategic nips and tucks could save the system, many of these critics said they would still worry about how Mr. Berger planned to wield his scalpel. Would he dare to take on the powerful institutions along, say, Manhattan’s Bedpan Alley along First Avenue? Or would he go after small ones with weak boards and poor bank statements?

Mr. Berger was patient with these questions at first, but eventually grew frustrated.

“This is not a closing commission,” he said. “The answer is, we understand that it’s appropriateness which is important.”

Pressed about rumors that he intended to close one major teaching hospital, he answered wryly. “Absolutely! I’m planning to close Presbyterian, Cornell—”

And then he interrupted himself: “Come on! I am not going to talk about any institution.”

"After jostling over the merits of Freddy and Mike," a witness writes, "Dean recalled a time when the Mayor was a true Dem."

"I worked for your campaign years ago, when I went to school in the Bronx. I used to go to your campaign headquarters, pick up lit, and hand it out on the street around the school," the Chairman recalled.

"Thank you," Koch replied graciously, before adding, "I think Herman still has a contract out on you for doing that!"

Herman Badillo, that is. In case you were wondering.

Freddy, the ad tells us: "is consistently progressive," "lacks the arrogance and self-righteousness of so many other politicians" and "will represent all of us: white, black, brown, red, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and others...."

Not exactly salsa trucks in Bay Ridge (a famous dirty trick played against Herman Badillo), but the Ferrer campaign must hope the Campaign Finance Board doesn't decide this is a campaign expense.

Relatedly, Democrats are smiling at a rare unforced error by team Bloomberg: a print ad focusing on crime in the latest West Side Spirit has Bloomberg's name in Hebrew letters and list the Borough Park Office. Because Jews on the Upper West Side like being grouped with Borough Park's Chasids. Really.

Our new intern, Leslie Kaufmann, did make it to the Bloomberg campaign's mainland event, in which Herman Badillo attacked Freddy on the steps of City Hall and appeared at times to be making the case for a vote for...Herman Badillo.

Also today, Freddy has another slick ad out, undeterred (says Jonathan Prince) by the Gray Lady's "Siskel-and-Eberting" of "It could be greater," and sounding incredulous on the city's dropout rate. And Mike has a sweet picture of himself with Hillary on the city's official homepage.

We hear Patrick Murphy, the Log Cabiner running for Council on the East Side, left a good impression on a crowd that included Bloomberg advisors Patti Harris, Kevin Sheekey, and Jonathan Capehart. Also there were Georgette Mosbacher and Herman Badillo.

Mike told the crowd that he knows the rap on him is that he used to be a Democrat, but that Giuliani was once a Democrat, and Reagan was once a Democrat.

"Badillo, weren't you one too?" he asked, and then called for a show of hands of lifelong Republicans, and found very few.

Also, if you don't want to read more than one piece on Benedict, Terry Golway knows a lot about this stuff.

Sheekey won't confirm it, but he does point out that "Herman Badillo y Willie Colón ya son co-presidentes de la campaña."

Mr. Bloomberg, who was projected to win about 65 percent of the vote in defeating Herman Badillo, will now have to wait two more weeks to learn the identity of his eventual Democratic opponent. Public Advocate Mark Green and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, the top two finishers among the Democrats on Sept. 25, will face each other in a runoff on Oct. 9. At press time, Mr. Ferrer had a slight lead over Mr. Green, 36 to 33 percent with about 25 percent of the vote counted, but it was clear that neither man would finish with 40 percent or more. Under state election law, a first-place candidate who takes less than 40 percent of the vote must face a runoff against the second-place finisher in two weeks. Mr. Green vowed that the runoff campaign would be "positive." His campaign manager, Richard Schrader, said that he had expected a runoff all along, with four veteran Democrats competing for the nomination.

For the two other major Democratic candidates, Sept. 25 very likely marked the end of their long careers in politics and government. Council Speaker Peter Vallone, who was in a distant third place as of press time, emerged several weeks ago as a possible contender for second place and a berth in the runoff. But he began dropping back when Mr. Ferrer jumped from fourth place to second after winning the endorsement of the Reverend Al Sharpton and other African-American leaders. Mr. Vallone will leave the Council on Dec. 31, along with 35 of the Council's 51 veteran members, after serving in the city's legislature for nearly three decades.

Meanwhile, City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, the onetime darling of the city's political and financial establishment, seemed destined to finish last among the major Democrats. It was the end of a long, difficult and painful campaign for the Comptroller, who was first elected as an Assemblyman from Queens in the early 1970's. Mr. Hevesi was considered a front-runner a year ago, but his campaign never took off and began to falter in late summer, especially when his longtime consultant, Hank Morris, almost overshadowed the candidate as he tried to find loopholes in the city's campaign-finance law. Mr. Hevesi will remain on the general-election ballot in November as the Liberal Party candidate.

A smiling and composed Mr. Hevesi conceded at about 10:45 p.m., praising his staff for running a "sophisticated" campaign. "I made some mistakes … [they] were my miscalculations," he said. "I know we're really good in government, we're just not quite as good at politics."

It was one of the most extraordinary election days in New York history, and for all the wrong reasons. The campaigns had been frozen in place for two weeks, overtaken by horror and overshadowed by the inspired performance of the lame-duck incumbent, Rudolph Giuliani. With rescue teams still searching the remains of the World Trade Center, candidates who had thought of little else except this day, this vote, sadly recused themselves from politics. Gone from the subway stations on Primary Day were smiling candidates and their cadre of aides. Gone were posters reminding people to vote. Gone from most of the hotel ballrooms were festive buntings and copious amounts of liquor.

Even as voters went to the polls, the talk in city and even national political circles was the once-sealed fate of Rudolph Giuliani, barred by the city's term-limits law from reelection. By not ruling out maneuvers to either overturn or find a way around term limits, Mr. Giuliani put himself at the center of a primary election that was not supposed to be about him, but about his eventual successor. Demands that the city suspend the coming general election or quickly change city law to accommodate Mr. Giuliani were met not with Shermanesque pronouncements ("If elected, I will not serve") but Clintonesque evasions ("I need time to reflect on what I'm going to do. And it would not involve the primaries, anyway").

About the only place that wasn't buzzing with the latest Rudy rumors was, fortunately, the disaster command center on the West Side piers. There, in the late afternoon of Primary Day, Mr. Giuliani gave a straightforward briefing to the press and then introduced the Reverend Jesse Jackson, dressed in a white hard hat and Red Cross jacket. Mr. Jackson had toured ground zero earlier in the day, and the two men spoke not about politics, but about New York's grief and its pride in the city's rescue personnel.

Green Arrives

Mr. Green arrived at the New York Sheraton, where he monitored the results, at about 7 o'clock. The candidate did a quick television interview in the lobby, then left for his suite. On the verge of a partial victory few would have foreseen a year ago, Mr. Green had to contend with several questions not about his campaign, but about Mr. Giuliani's future. "We have united behind this Mayor who is skillfully leading a rescue-and-recovery effort," Mr. Green said. "Just as the city will unite behind the next Mayor, who … will lead in the rebuilding of New York." Later, former Mayor David Dinkins took a shot at Mr. Giuliani's jockeying. Asked if he thought the Mayor would try to get on the ballot in November, Mr. Dinkins said: "Well, I think that's his right. But of course, I hope he does not. He can leave on a high."

Mr. Green said he felt "content" and "serene" as he prepared to take results, although he said that he was "sad," too, because of the World Trade Center attack. He conceded that voters were not as enthusiastic about the primary as they might have been.

The mood at Mr. Green's headquarters in the Sheraton ballroom was amazingly quiet and low key. There was none of the buzz associated with a front-runner's campaign. Instead, small groups gathered in circles, talking in soft tones. Upstairs, in Mr. Green's private suite, there were no balloons, no drinks or food-nothing more than a bare table and a couch. Mr. Green and his wife, Deni Frand, were wearing American flag lapel pins. When asked about racial profiling by New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who had written a Primary Day column proclaiming Mr. Giuliani the day's real winner, Mr. Green said: "Racial profiling is wrong except for columnists around your height." It was one of the evening's few laughs.

Alone among the four leading Democratic candidates, Mr. Ferrer had a full schedule of Primary Day events, and by mid-afternoon, the effort was written on his drawn, tired face. At a social services center on the West Side, a reporter asked him if this 11th hour campaign push would help get his supporters to the polls. "Well, now everyone's writing that I'm tanking," he said without completing the thought. A few minutes later, he brightened a bit as he spoke to a small crowd and complained about Gov. George Pataki's suggestion that voters write in Mr. Giuliani's name on Primary Day. He said the Governor had created unnecessary chaos. "I swear to God, as long as I live, I won't understand all this," Mr. Ferrer said to state Comptroller H. Carl McCall, a key supporter who was at Mr. Ferrer's side during the event.

Mr. McCall joined Mr. Sharpton at Mr. Ferrer's campaign headquarters in the Puck Building, probably the most festive site with white lights on pillars and a free-flowing bar. Mr. Sharpton had praise for Mr. Giuliani's handling of the terrorist crisis, but plugged his candidate with a typically colorful turn of phrase. "You have one person who runs the ambulance to the hospital, but you need a surgeon in the hospital to revive and bring the body back to life." Sounding a theme voters can expect to hear in the days leading to the runoff, Mr. McCall said Mr. Ferrer was the right man to rebuild the city because of his successes in rebuilding the Bronx.

Another one of Mr. Ferrer's key supporters, hospital workers union leader Dennis Rivera, looked subdued as the results came in, even though his candidate probably was going to live to fight another battle. Asked if he thought Mr. Ferrer would have done better if the primary had been held on Sept. 11 as planned, he said, "I have no doubt about it. On Sept. 11, we had this incredible momentum. We had dozens of people who wanted to come out and work for the Ferrer campaign. I didn't see that excitement this time around." He said he thought Mr. Ferrer would have gotten 40 percent on Sept. 11, thus avoiding a runoff.

On the Republican side, on an evening marked by low-key gatherings, perhaps the most low-key, indeed, the most desolate, place was the National Women's Republican Club, where Herman Badillo was awaiting results. He arrived shortly before 8:30 p.m. and was ushered to a fourth-floor library. Downstairs, only about 20 people were on hand to watch the results. One Badillo supporter, John Spavins, said that Mr. Pataki's suggestion to write in Mr. Giuliani's name caused confusion and hurt Mr. Badillo. "The combination of money and four of the five Republican county organizations going for Bloomberg made it an uphill battle" for Mr. Badillo, he said.

A gracious Mr. Badillo, delivering what will probably be his last campaign speech, conceded just after 10 p.m. He thanked his campaign staff, and particularly singled out Republican State Senator Guy Velella of the Bronx, his campaign chair. The candidate took note of the low turnout, which he blamed on a city still in shock.

Mr. Bloomberg delivered his victory speech at 10:20, arriving on stage to shouts of "Mike! Mike! Mike!" With a huge flag in the background, Mr. Bloomberg said: "I know we will win in November, and then we're going to put together the best team this city has ever seen." He promised to release a redevelopment plan for downtown in the coming weeks, and he vowed to retain many members of Mr. Giuliani's administration.

Additional reporting by Petra Bartosiewicz, Andrea Bernstein and Andrew Rice.