But there are some very intriguing, if tentative, signs this could achieve the seemingly impossible balancing act that Democrats have been aiming for. Already, both Howard Dean and Ben Nelson—polar opposites in the Democrats’ intraparty public option debate—are indicating they could sign off on it.

This all comes just as the legislative process is entering its most precarious phase, with the Senate Finance Committee preparing to vote next week on a plan that—at least until now—would be directly at odds with the one approved this summer by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The process of merging those two bills—the Finance one, it has long been assumed, that would not include a public option, while H.E.L.P.’s does—into a unified bill has loomed as a hellish venture with no obvious solution.

That merged bill would then have to be reconciled with whatever emerges from the House—likely a bill with a more aggressive public option (i.e., one in which provider reimbursement rates are pegged to Medicare). This could be equally, if not more, brutal, particularly if the merged Senate bill doesn’t contain a public option—a bottom-line issue for House progressives, who have threatened to sink any reform plan that doesn’t include a “robust” government-run option for consumers.

And hanging over all of this is the reality that whatever bill the House-Senate conference produces will probably need a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, with Republicans sure to filibuster and Democrats still apparently resistant to the idea of using the filibuster-bypassing reconciliation process to push a bill through the Senate.

Unlike other public option compromises that have been floated—like the “trigger” championed by Olympia Snowe, or Max Baucus’ beloved co-ops, both acceptable to conservative Democrats but reviled by the left— the opt-out concept actually has the potential to unite these deeply divided factions.

Conservative Democrats (and, perhaps, Snowe and one or two other Republicans) would be able to claim that they stopped a public option from being forced on an unwilling public, since any state would, for any reason, be free to ban the public option from being offered on its insurance exchange.

At the same time, progressives could credibly tell themselves that something reasonably close to their vision has been preserved. The key is that, under the compromise as it’s currently conceived, the default for all 50 states would be to participate. In other words, a state would have to take formal action—whether through a referendum, act of the legislature, or gubernatorial decree—to opt out.

This is enticing to progressives because most states probably wouldn’t opt out. Certainly most of the population-rich states—Democratic bastions like New York, California and Illinois—would participate, while (most likely) only a scattering of smaller, Republican-dominated states would opt out. This would potentially give the new public option the power-through-numbers that it would need to provide meaningful, cost-reducing competition to private insurers.

Plus, the thinking goes, leaders in the states that initially opt out would soon face enormous pressure from their citizens to reverse course, once the cost-reducing benefits of the program become clear. It’s worth remembering that, for all the controversy over the “public option” (a term whose definition is unclear to most Americans), there is wide and deep backing for the concept behind it: 65 percent of voters in a recent poll said they want the government to offer “a health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.”

This explains how, for instance, Dean—who has said that any bill without a public plan is “less than worthless”—and Nebraska’s Nelson, a former insurance executive from a state with a major insurance industry presence, might both see potential in the opt-out idea.

That said, there’s still plenty left to be resolved. Conservatives like Nelson might insist on a different variation on the opt-out concept—one that starts out with no national public option but that would give states the option to create one. That might be a deal-breaking twist for progressives, since it would delay the implementation of a public plan and severely limit the number of people participating in it.

And even if a public plan is approved under the opt-out model, progressives might be overstating its significance. Even the most expansive, aggressive public option currently under consideration—the House version, with its Medicare rates—would allow only a relative handful of Americans to participate. Anyone with employer-sponsored coverage—the vast majority of insured Americans—wouldn’t be able to sign up for the public plan, even if he or she wanted to. To create a real public option, future reforms would be necessary.

Still, the opt-out idea has the feel of a workable legislative compromise.  And not surprisingly, Schumer seems to be the man behind it, having tweaked an idea first offered by Delaware’s Tom Carper, who is something of a public option skeptic.

Many Democratic senators (like, for instance, Jay Rockefeller) have loudly and forcefully advocated for a public option, refuting the G.O.P.’s talking points and railing against efforts to water-down it to the point of worthlessness. But none have taken such an aggressive and consistent role in trying to shape a workable compromise—one that would retain the basic integrity of a public option while actually securing those magic 60 Senate votes—as Schumer.

His maneuvering represents a fascinating mix of idealism and pragmatism. On the one hand, Schumer is simply fighting the good fight for a worthy policy idea. But, as is always the case with him, there is more to it than that. Schumer would also (very presumably) like to be the Senate majority leader, a spot that will open up at the end of next year if—as the polls now show he will—Harry Reid loses his reelection bid in Nevada. He can’t even informally campaign for the job, though, since any steps he takes would be construed as disloyal to Reid.

But if he can be the guy who delivers a public-option-saving compromise, it would be just as good: Not only would it win Schumer admirers on the left (in and out of the Senate), it would also show Democratic senators of all ideological stripes that he can break through even the most impossible legislative logjams—that he is, in other words, a natural Senate leader.

Just consider some of Schumer’s moves this year:

* In early May, when President Obama’s health care effort was in its early stages and before the contours of the public option debate were clear, Schumer sought to head off conservative fears by advocating what he termed a “level playing field” public option.

The basic idea: the public plan wouldn’t rely on taxpayer money, wouldn’t be able to set reimbursement rates at Medicare levels (as many liberals would prefer) and wouldn’t be managed by the same government officials who regulate the market. In other words, Schumer anticipated what has become the right’s main assault against the public option—the charge that it would have an unfair competitive advantage and would drive private insurers out of business.

* Over the summer, as it became clear the right was not open to any public option compromise, key Senate Democrats (and the White House) seemed to wobble on the necessity of a public plan and began exploring alternatives, such as Kent Conrad’s idea of nonprofit purchasing cooperatives. The left recoiled, and Schumer publicly promised that a real public option would be in the final bill.

* When Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus finally, after months of plodding along, unveiled his attempt at a health care compromise (one that included the dreaded co-ops), Schumer offered his level playing field plan (which had already been approved by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) as an amendment. A lively day of debate ensued, one that allowed Schumer to score points with the left by confronting the panel’s rejectionist Republicans while also earning praise from moderate Democrats (including Baucus) for trying to broker a good faith compromise. His amendment failed (as expected), but that hardly killed the public option, and the committee’s debate helped certify Schumer as one of its public faces.

* Now, with the Finance and H.E.L.P. Committee bills heading for a seemingly impossible merger, Schumer has stepped forward with the most intriguing compromise idea to date—a plan that would allow states to opt out of it. It stems from an idea floated by Delaware’s Tom Carper, which would have allowed states to join together to implement a public option, but is far more acceptable to public option advocates since it would create a national public option on day one. Most states, especially the biggest (and most Democratic) ones, probably wouldn’t opt out. Conservative Democrats (like, say, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson) could conceivably go along with it because they’d be able to tell their constituents that they saved their state from the public option—if the state chooses not to participate.

To put it Schumeresquely, there will be other "twists and turns" in the public option saga before it’s over. But Schumer has claimed the quest for a compromise as his own—and if he can deliver, the long-term payoff for him could be considerable

To say anything else would be to play directly into the right’s time-honored reform-killing warnings about “government takeovers,” “socialized medicine,” and government bureaucrats making life-and-death decisions for patients.

But, if we’re to be honest, it’s disingenuous. The public option that, in varying forms, Democrats in Congress are now pushing absolutely is a stalking-horse—either for (way down the road) single-payer or at least a much different, far more expansive version of the public option than anything that can possibly make it through Congress today.

If it wasn’t, there’d be no reason for so many on the left—both in and out of Congress—to make the inclusion of a public option in any final health care package a bottom-line issue.

Howard Dean, for instance, has warned that without a public option, reform would be “less than worthless” and “very painful and bad for America.” And dozens of progressive Democrats in the House are threatening to vote against any compromise that doesn’t include a “robust” public option, even if it means sinking the centerpiece item on President Obama’s first-year agenda.

But this posturing seems wildly disproportionate when you consider what any public option that Congress might pass this year would actually do. Right now, the public option exists in several different forms, depending on which side on Capitol Hill you’re on and which particular committee’s draft you’re looking at.

A more aggressive version is likely to emerge from the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi has apparently backed off a deal with conservative Blue Dogs and is now pushing a public option that would use Medicare to set reimbursement rates for providers—which would provide clear cost savings for consumers and which is opposed fiercely by the health care industry.

The Senate, as usual, is on a more cautious course. If a public option emerges there, it definitely won’t use Medicare rates—and it may include a “trigger” clause, meaning that it wouldn’t come into existence unless private insurers fail to meet a set of benchmarks over the next few years.

But no matter what version finally emerges, it won’t mean anything to the overwhelming majority of Americans. That’s because no plan that has any chance of passing Congress would allow more than 25 million Americans to participate. The public insurance option would be limited to individuals who can’t find private insurance and to small businesses with less than 20 employees. The other 280 million or so of us would be shut out, no matter how much we might want to participate.

And with so few Americans taking part, the public program wouldn’t have the power in numbers needed to negotiate deep cost reductions—meaning that private insurers wouldn’t face any competitive pressure to bring their own rates down.

Which brings us back to the stalking-horse concept. Democrats have decided that passing a real public option—one that all Americans can buy into if they want—is too radical to achieve now. But they also know that, if they can get some watered-down, skeletal version on the books now, the door will open for future expansion.

This explains why Chuck Schumer, known for his pragmatic legislative savvy, initially led the charge a few months ago to water down the public option to a passable form. But more recently, as conservative Democrats like Max Baucus have pushed to do away with it altogether, Mr. Schumer has drawn the line, insisting that it be included in some form.

This, as Mr. Schumer is surely aware, is how it usually works with socially and economically transformative legislation: the first domino is the toughest one to make fall. Congress, for instance, failed for nearly a century after the Civil War to pass civil rights legislation—until finally a watered-down, toothless bill cleared both chambers in 1957. That law didn’t achieve much—except to set in motion an eight-year march to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That example, and many others like it, is surely on the minds of many liberals today. Real change has to start somewhere. Enacting a feeble, watered-down public option this year will make it possible to come back in a few years and turn it into a real one. 

“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.

The fate of Barack Obama’s health care agenda may hinge on a man who, when it was time to assemble a White House team, the president pointedly ignored.

That would be Howard Dean, whose desire to run the Health and Human Services Department—and, thus, to be the administration’s most visible face on health care—was never seriously entertained by Obama and his advisers.

Dean’s role now is that of a peacekeeper. The reform effort is under threat from 60 members of the House Progressive Caucus positioning themselves in opposition to the compromise bill that party leaders hammered out last week with the conservative Blue Dog Coalition. Too much was bargained away, the progressives fear—especially when it comes to the public option.

That’s not how Dean sees it. To craft a final bill that will appeal to all Americans, the input of moderates and conservatives is needed, he says, and since Republicans don’t want to participate, “the Blue Dogs are actually not just the next best thing, but the best thing, because they are loyal to the idea of having a bill and they are Democrats.”

The House compromise, he insists, left the most critical aspects of reform alone.

“The public option, which is the essential part of reform, was left intact,” Dean said. “I think it was somewhat improved; you really can’t pay Medicare rates. They did a lot for small businesses, which was an original part of Obama’s plan.

“They hiked the payroll ceiling to $500,000, and exempted small business from having to pay any kind of mandate underneath that—which is very, very important because small business creates 80 percent of all new jobs.”

To be sure, many on the left vehemently disagree with this assessment. But this is why Dean’s attitude is so significant, and potentially critical.

To the Democratic grass roots, he’s not just another public figure; he’s a folk hero, a reputation he earned with his early opposition to the Iraq war and enhanced during his four-year run as D.N.C. chairman, when he stood with grass-roots activists and weathered the enmity of the party’s Washington establishment. So if there’s anyone who can hold the hand of progressives and coax them into accepting compromise with the Blue Dogs, it’s probably Dean.

Dean’s appetite for compromise ends the instant a public option is taken off the table. So he’s happy to blast the bipartisan alternative that members of the Senate Finance Committee are drafting at a snail’s pace—a plan that would utilize nonprofit cooperatives instead of a government-run insurance option.

“The compromise that’s being proposed by these six senators is destructive, foolish and would be a very bad bill,” he said, stressing that he wants the Senate to adopt the plan already approved by the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee.

And he’s willing to write off any further outreach to Republicans—“The Republicans are interested in using this as a wedge to hurt Obama. Last time I looked, that didn’t come under the heading of serious public policy”—and to declare, “We’re going to this inside the Democratic Party.”

The inclusion of a public option in any final plan is a bottom-line issue for progressives, and they know Dean shares their view. In fact, Dean’s Web site, which features a running tally of Congressional opinion on the public option, has become a vital tool for grass-roots activists. To those who fear the House compromise defeats the purpose of the public option, Dean replies that the most important thing is that the fundamental concept be part of the final package.

“In general, the individual market has a lot more problems than the big group market, and as long as you allow people to have a choice in the individual market, that’s a good start,” he said. “Ultimately, the employer-based health care system harms our economy. But people are not ready to give up the employer-based system, and that’s why this choice is so important.”

There is, of course, a long way between here and a White House signing ceremony. The House still has to vote on the compromise bill, which if it passes would then have to be reconciled with a Senate version—which could be the HELP Committee’s bill that Dean supports or the Finance Committee compromise that he opposes. Or, if Republican obstructionists get their way, there might be no Senate bill at all.

But the House Democratic leadership’s deal with the Blue Dogs last week confirmed that the “pure” public option that many on the left dream of won’t be part of any final bill. There are simply too many moderates insisting that it be watered down. But the bill won’t get anywhere if the members of the Progressive Caucus follows through on its threat and digs in its heels. How to soothe them?

Pelosi got off to a very bad start last week, when she seemed to ridicule the progressives’ threat at a press conference. But Dean may have the clout and credibility to keep them on board and to stave off an intraparty brawl that would jeopardize reform. If he can pull that off, the White House will owe him, for starters, a big thank you.

This week, it's Keith Olbermann's turn to take a vacation. And today, MSNBC officials announced the names of those who will fill in on Countdown while Mr. Olbermann is away.

Lawrence O'Donnell will kick things off tonight, and Richard Wolffe will close out the week, anchoring on Thursday and Friday night.

In between, MSNBC will be turning over Mr. Olbermann's usual hour to another famous screamer—namely, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.

Mr. Dean will substitue-anchor Countdown, where he is a frequent guest, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Seeing Mr. Dean, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, anchoring an MSNBC show will no doubt inspire additional teeth-gnashing from conservative critics, who since the 2008 presidential campaign have taken to calling the cable news network MS-DNC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He jogs regularly and lives cleanly.

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

 He can be brutal, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also worked on local races.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of mass images is not a new thing. In the 1960’s and onward, images of wealth in the west eventually exposed the weakness of the communist regime running the old Soviet bloc. There is the story, perhaps apocryphal; of Nikita Khrushchev narrating a film of Harlem in the 1960’s to demonstrate poverty in America. Instead, his poor, beleaguered constituents focused on the nylons hanging on backyard clothes lines and the number of fine autos in the street, and saw wealth rather than poverty.  Then there was that famous video of the “tank guy” darting to and fro in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, literally placing his body in the path of the machine of state.  The transformative power of the mass media has changed governance and made it more difficult for the state to wall off the outside world.

 In the past two years, we’ve seen the transformative impact of the internet and cellular technology. Instead of a handful of news photographers hiding to capture images at Tiananmen Square, we now see millions of people in the street, cell phones in hand, taking increasingly high quality videos and photos of state oppression. Every day the pictures from Iran appear in graphic detail on our screens. In the book 1984, George Orwell prophesized that Big Brother would watch over us. Now, it looks like we get to watch over Big Brother too. The benefit of a world with no privacy may very well be a world with no secrecy.
 
There are now four billion cell phones in use throughout the world, and many of them can capture and transmit images. When coupled with social networking websites, they make millions of people both producers and consumers of information. While the information on the web is difficult to verify and easy to manipulate, it is a fact of modern political life.
 
In the Obama presidential campaign here in the United States we saw another example of the transformative impact of the World Wide Web. According to the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas:
“…3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.”   
 
The mobilization of the public through the web has managed to overcome the anti-democratic impact of money in our electoral system. When the United States Supreme Court ruled that political campaign contributions were a form of speech that could not be limited, our ability to regulate the role of money in politics was effectively ended. The use of the web to raise campaign cash first came to prominence during Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and was raised to an art form during the Obama campaign. The impact of the web on political fundraising is the most significant change in political campaigning since JFK beat Nixon in their first TV debate back in 1960. 
 
The impact of technology on political communication is not a new phenomenon. Obama, like Jack Kennedy before him, managed to master a new technology before any other politician. FDR set the pattern when he learned to use the radio to communicate directly with the public during his fireside chats throughout the Depression and World War II.
 
The internet and cell phones add a new dimension to political technology; they are interactive media. In addition to the images presented on the web, the internet allows people to quickly spread ideas, information and organize political protest. Information comes to the public and from the public as well.  Efforts to jam and shut down these technologies are nearly always overcome by hackers and clever political organizers. In the case of Iran, no one can predict the future or even the immediate outcome of this conflict.  But something is changing in politics.  Perhaps it is as President Obama remarked recently, quoting  Dr. King:
 “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’ “I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian people’s belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”

Bearing witness may not be enough, but it’s a start.

After a rousing introduction and brief speeches by Dean and Skaller, the first question was, surprisingly, about Skaller’s opponent in the race, Brad Lander. It seemed that Dean had endorsed one too many candidates.

“Well, yes, thank you, get right to the point,” Dean said with an uncomfortable laugh.

Dean explained that he met Skaller at a fund-raiser a few months ago, and—given Skaller’s work on his campaign and his involvement with Democracy for New York, which was derived from Dean’s Democracy for America organization—he agreed to endorse Skaller.

Later, Dean ran into Lander at a party for Representative Jerry Nadler. Lander, like Skaller, had worked on and donated money to Dean’s presidential campaign. Dean duly promised to “stay out” of the 39th District race. He did not realize at the time that it was Skaller’s district.

After phone calls to both campaigns, Dean decided to let them both use his name. “I think that’s only the fair way to do it,” he told the 30 or so Skaller supporters packed into the small office of the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats. “Had I been a little more research-oriented and done my homework a little better, we wouldn’t have gotten in this situation, but we did, and I think that’s the fairest way out of it.” (Dean made a point of adding that the endorsement from Democracy for America, which is now run by his brother, applied only to Skaller.)

Skaller, who is running as a reform candidate, called Dean “a perfect fit for us.” Asked about sharing the former Vermont governor with Lander, Skaller would say only, “We are really, really happy to have Governor Dean stand with us today and we’re really proud that he’s endorsing our campaign.”

The dual endorsement did little to dampen the enthusiasm. One local resident told the former physician that he had only taken down his “The Doctor Is In” sign—left over from Dean’s 2004 campaign—after Barack Obama’s election in November.

Asked about yesterday’s turnover of the New York State Senate, Dean got mythical. “Sometimes it’s like Sisyphus pushing the rock, it rolls back on you a little bit.  But we’ll get it over the top.  I understand one of them is under indictment and the other one is heading for it,” he said, to laughter from the crowd. He later said that both would have to answer to voters eventually.

He and Skaller made their way to the 9th Street subway stop, where a few passers-by recognized Dean, who said he was reminded of his first campaign, working for Ed Koch on his first mayoral run. Several people signed a petition to put Skaller on the ballot; others looked annoyed as they fought their way through the crowd of Skaller supporters and reporters.

At 10 a.m., Dean excused himself and descended alone, save for a lone reporter (me), into the station, looking more or less like any other morning commuter. Dean said he always takes the subways in New York City, and blamed the A train for making him late this morning, when he was coming from J.F.K.

Waiting for the F train to Manhattan, Dean talked about the 50-State Plan, which he undertook while chair of the D.N.C. The plan was controversial at the time—donors and party insiders hated it—but it turned out to be right.

“There were lots of people who didn’t agree with it, but that was the old guard. Washington is always the last place to change, and they always resist change, no matter who’s there because they always want to do things their way. The thing they don’t get is that 99.7 percent of the people in the country live outside Washington,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Dean praised the Obama campaign, which executed something like a 50-state plan of its own. “I was very admiring about what Obama did across the country, particularly in Florida, which is the most complicated state in the country to run in. I was just stunned how they won Florida. It was just all organizing, because the Democratic Party is not that strong there.”  

It was “the most disciplined organization I’ve ever seen in a presidential race,” he said, adding that Obama picked up more states than Dean would have predicted. “My plan when I got to the D.N.C. was—as an insurance policy against losing Ohio and Florida—was to win in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.” Dean said he wasn’t shocked that Obama won Virginia, but, “Florida was just a stunner.”

Dean said poor organizing was one of two fundamental problems that doomed his own presidential campaign. “The [other] was that I needed—not to change my message—but to change the delivery of my message. It’s great to be an insurgent, but when you get out front, you have to act presidential. I knew I should have done it. We had big debates, and a lot of people in the campaign were afraid that if I did, we would lose our core supporters and all that stuff. But it was one of the few times I let the staff influence my decision, and it was the wrong thing to do. But it was my fault, not theirs. I’m the one who ultimately had the say, and I just didn’t make the right call,” Dean said.  

On the train, Dean reclined against the doorway with his bag and his umbrella, posing for pictures when a few well-wishers recognized him.

One was Rob Hatch-Miller, who established a Facebook group lobbying to get Dean appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services after Tom Daschle withdrew his name from consideration.

“That was quite well-known and it caused all kinds of trouble in Washington, which is good,” Dean said of the Facebook group.

“With almost no promotion, we had like 6,000 members,” Hatch-Miller said.

“You actually had 4,996,” Dean replied. “And the reason I know that is because you can’t cross the 5,000 mark. The site doesn’t take more than 5,000,” he said.  

His precise knowledge of Facebook, however, does not mean Dean wants to run for elected office again. Probably. “You never say never in politics, but no, I don’t have any plans to,” he said.

“Democracy for America is endorsing Josh and Josh only,” Dean told a group of supporters this morning.

“However, my situation is different.” Dean said he ran into Lander at a party for Jerry Nadler and “promised him I would stay out of the race, before I knew this was the district and Josh was the guy. So, I am going to let Brad Lander use my name.”