The stunning victories of Mr. Schumer and Mr. Spitzer are now the stuff of local political lore. But those campaigns also heralded the arrival of the three unknown operatives who would become the consultant kings of New York. (These days, if you’re an A-list politician, you’re almost certainly employing at least one of them.)

"I wouldn’t advise running without them," said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who has employed both Mr. Isay and Mr. Pollock. "They are rewriting once again how to get elected in New York City. Right now they are the best."

"The three of us obviously occupy space in lots of campaigns," said Mr. Pollock. "People are looking to our firms to be the leading voices."

But the three men, all Jewish, all vaguely nerdy, all Democrats—though of varying degrees of liberality—have distinct personalities, expertise and, more often than not, clients.

Mr. Isay, 39, whose increasingly reclusive behavior has come to remind many insiders of his shabbily dressed former consultant-mentor Hank Morris, is widely considered the most effective media consultant in town.

Mr. Wolfson, 42, a strategist who also comes with his own package of quirks—a fear of flying, obsessions with baseball statistics and indie rock, a near-fatalistic approach to campaigns—is the most sought-after communications guy.

Mr. Pollock, 37, a likable, natural entrepreneur—and a onetime protégé of Republican consultant Frank Luntz, even though he is arguably the most progressive of the three—does polling for the top Democrats in the state.

They all work for different firms, but their careers paths in New York have repeatedly converged and parted, sometimes dramatically, and sometimes in very personal ways.

Mr. Isay and Mr. Wolfson, in particular, have been actors in a quiet feud—or, more accurately, holders of a meticulously observed grudge—for nearly seven years. Once best friends, they don’t speak. Neither do their families. And while there are signs of a thaw, thanks in part to the magical power of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s billions to bring them together in the same office of his reelection campaign, Mr. Pollock has essentially taken Mr. Wolfson’s place as Mr. Isay’s best political pal. Now it is those two who eat at each other’s houses. Now it is their wives who work out together.

But the real competition between the three consultants, is, of course, for business.

Name any major officeholder in recent years, and chances are they have at one time or another employed the firms of some or all of the three consultants.

Mr. Isay, a former chief of staff to Mr. Schumer, runs Knickerbocker SKD, which he founded in 2002 and made a fortune from after scoring Mr. Bloomberg as a client. They also have counted among their clients Mr. Stringer; District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; a handful of City Council candidates; and unions, including the powerful 1199 SEIU. Mr. Isay did campaign mail for Barack Obama in New Hampshire and North Carolina during the general election. In 2006, he worked on Joe Lieberman’s general election in Connecticut, and in 2008 made television spots for Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. This year, his firm counts as clients Manhattan district attorney candidate Leslie Crocker Snyder (who Mr. Isay’s former client, Mr. Morgenthau, despises) and comptroller candidate David Yassky, whom Mr. Isay helped crush in a 2006 bid for Congress when he worked for Yvette Clarke, now a representative.

"He’s an enormous asset to any campaign," Mr. Yassky said.

When he loses, the intense Mr. Isay loses hard.

Like, for example, when he ran Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous 2002 campaign. These days, multiple sources familiar with their relationship say, the two can’t stand each other and would never work together again. (Mr. Isay says the relationship has improved. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Mr. Isay has hired seasoned labor operative Jennifer Cunningham, who is considered a close ally of Mr. Cuomo.)

And the increasingly distant attitude of Mr. Isay, a former press secretary, toward the members of the media was decidedly not helpful during his botched public rollout of Caroline Kennedy as a candidate to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate.

The Senate seat has been bad luck for Mr. Isay altogether. News that he was informally advising Mr. Stringer and Carolyn Maloney during the posing phase of their ultimately aborted primary challenges resulted in his former boss, Mr. Schumer, a supporter of Kirsten Gillibrand, brushing him back.

Mr. Wolfson is a partner at the Washington-based firm the Glover Park Group. The firm has lost a significant amount of its influence in New York. It has closed its entire creative department, and senior partner Gigi Georges has reduced her client workload as she does a public policy fellowship at Harvard. But in the city, Mr. Wolfson still matters, and several insiders expect him to start something on his own. Over a recent lunch at Nobu, though, where he knew the menu well enough to order without looking at it, he insisted that he’s staying put.

"If I were a candidate, I would hire Jef to do polling, Josh to do media," said Mr. Wolfson. It went without saying that Mr. Wolfson would hire himself to do the communications.

Mr. Wolfson served as communications director for Hillary Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns. During the selection process to replace Mrs. Clinton in the Senate after she left to become secretary of state, he informally advised and promoted Ms. Gillibrand, whom he helped elect to Congress in 2006. Glover Park will work on the reelection campaign of Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who is expected to run for attorney general when Mr. Cuomo runs for governor. Mr. Wolfson’s only official business now is a $40,000-a-month-before-bonuses gig as communications director for Mr. Bloomberg’s reelection campaign. (The fee is paid to Blizzard Communications, Glover Park’s campaign arm.)

Mr. Pollock’s Global Strategy Group, which has generally thrived on business outside of the Schumer and Clinton orbit, has recovered from the inglorious departure of Mr. Spitzer by acting as an adviser and pollster to Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Cuomo, who may also use Global if he runs for governor.

Mr. Pollock worked for Freddy Ferrer in the last two mayoral elections, and in the presidential campaign, his firm worked for John Edwards. His firm now counts Mr. De Blasio, Ms. Katz and Manhattan district attorney candidate Cy Vance Jr. as clients. Global has never advised Israeli leaders but they are active in South America. Mr. Pollock was once hired to modernize government polling practices in Kazakhstan.

Sometimes the three compete. Often, they overlap.

In 2003, Mr. Pollock and Mr. Wolfson worked together on the effort to kill a referendum in favor of nonpartisan elections in New York. In 2006, they both found themselves being screamed at by Rahm Emanuel, who was urging them, forcefully, to do more to get Ms. Gillibrand elected to the House.

Mr. Pollock and Mr. Isay have worked together for Mr. Stringer, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and several other candidates and unions.

But the most astounding thing, for many political insiders in the city, is that Mr. Isay and Mr. Wolfson are now working together, sometimes in the same closed office, for Mr. Bloomberg.

"We talked about it," said Bradley Tusk, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign manager, referring to a conversation he had with Mr. Isay before bringing on Mr. Wolfson. He said that Mr. Isay told him, "You’d much rather have Howard working with you than against you."

At one time, it seemed only natural that the two would go into business together.

Mr. Isay, an Upper East Side native, was Mr. Schumer’s chief of staff on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Wolfson worked as a press secretary for Representative Nita Lowey. Mr. Isay dated a friend of Mr. Wolfson’s. The two sports fans (Isay, Mets; Wolfson, Yankees) talked on the phone all the time.

They bonded even further when Mr. Isay, who was Mr. Schumer’s campaign manager, called on his friend to come aboard Mr. Schumer’s 1998 Senate campaign as communications director.

"He gave me a huge opportunity," said Mr. Wolfson. "We had a lot of fun on that campaign."

In the end, Mr. Schumer outmaneuvered fellow Democrats with more famous names (Green, Ferraro) and beat Al D’Amato, a Republican institution, to get to the Senate, where he is now the most powerful legislator the state has seen in a generation. Mr. Wolfson went back to the Hill, as Ms. Lowey was expected to run for Senate herself. But when Mrs. Clinton entered New York politics with the force of a rare comet, Mr. Wolfson attached himself to her, and became one of the most trusted aides in her 2000 Senate campaign.

With so much experience under their belts, Mr. Wolfson and Mr. Isay often discussed going into business together, though they never had any formal arrangement.

In January 2000, Mr. Isay left Mr. Schumer’s office for a brief stint as the Silicon Alley lobbyist for the Web advertising firm DoubleClick. In early 2001, Mr. Wolfson joined the DCCC as its executive director. In the spring of 2001, Mr. Isay returned to politics to work with his mentor, Hank Morris, on Alan Hevesi’s 2001 race for mayor.

Then, an opportunity presented itself.

With a governor’s race on the horizon, Andrew Cuomo, fresh off a résumé-building stint as Bill Clinton’s director of housing and urban development, wanted to run, and he was hungry for talent.

He called Dan Klores, a public-relations man who was an old friend and drinking buddy. Much of the exploratory work for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign was done within Mr. Klores’ Park Avenue South offices, where Mr. Cuomo said he wanted to put together an aggressive, battle-tested campaign team. Jonathan Prince, who had worked in the Clinton White House and knew Mr. Cuomo from his time at HUD, signed on. He suggested his friend Mr. Wolfson, an idea Mr. Cuomo liked.

According to several people involved with the negotiations, Mr. Wolfson was torn. He told Mr. Klores and Mr. Cuomo that his original plan had been to go into business with Mr. Isay, whom they did not know well. Most people involved at the time remember that Mr. Wolfson suggested to Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Klores and Mr. Prince that they meet with Mr. Isay. Mr. Wolfson ultimately decided to return to Washington and the DCCC. Mr. Isay, according to several sources, also expressed his reluctance about joining the firm.

Soon after, though, an incredulous Mr. Wolfson caught wind that Mr. Isay, unbeknownst to him, had decided to go for it after all. He became a founding partner of the firm of Isay, Klores, Prince, with the intention of working as campaign manager for Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. Wolfson called Mr. Isay to see if the rumors were true.

They were.

Mr. Wolfson told Mr. Isay that they would never speak again.

And for a very long time, they didn’t. The two men were married within days of each other in June 2002—Mr. Isay to Cathie Levine, a former Schumer operative and a publicist at ABC News, and Mr. Wolfson to Terri McCullough, now the chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—but they didn’t attend each other’s weddings. Their wives didn’t speak. Their friends got caught in the crossfire.

For an elite circle of consultants and political insiders, the feud has provided an unmissable subplot to many of the city’s races. One consultant said that it was a cross between a "soap opera and the Bloods and Crips."

"It’s ancient history," said Mr. Wolfson. "I’m thrilled to be able to work with him now. For my part, I certainly regret what happened, and if I could do it differently, I would, and I blame myself."

"I regret what happened and wish that we could get back the years that we were not friends," said Mr. Isay. "But we have a long time to make up for it, starting with this campaign, and I know that we both want to."

As it turned out, the Cuomo campaign was an unmitigated disaster, and the new firm quickly disbanded. Mr. Prince became more interested in John Edwards, for whose 2004 presidential campaign he played a key role. Mr. Klores, bitten by the film bug, began concentrating on making documentaries. Mr. Isay stayed, and he suffered for it.

Despite having been frozen out of important decision-making relatively early on, his burgeoning reputation as a political tactician took a serious hit.

He started over. Partnering with Micah Lasher, then a 20-year-old senior at N.Y.U. who had done field work for Mr. Cuomo during the campaign, he formed Knickerbocker Partners, and started calling prospective candidates all over the city and state.

Their first client, Ken Bishop, who was running for Congress, was referred to them by, of all people, Mr. Wolfson at the DCCC.

(Several people with knowledge of the feud viewed the help as a peace offering. It didn’t work.)

Then, in 2005, they landed Mr. Bloomberg as a client. Since then, Mr. Isay’s firm has become one of the biggest in town.

Also, Mr. Isay changed.

As a young consultant, he was sociable and talkative and emotional. (His mother was the author of Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents.) Now he’s reluctant to speak the press, on the record or off. He has quit smoking and lost weight. He eats salads.

Raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, where his father owned pharmacies and his mother was a lawyer, Mr. Pollock interned for Representative Charlie Rangel when he was in high school, and then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he enrolled in a class taught by the Republican operative Frank Luntz called Candidates, Consultants and Campaigns. (He now teaches a similar course at Columbia University.)

After class, Mr. Luntz and his best students would go to drink at Smokey Joe’s, a bar where Mr. Luntz, an Oxford-trained debater, would argue just about any side of any issue with them. At 2 a.m., when the bar closed, Mr. Luntz and his acolytes would head to the local IHOP, where they’d talk about polling. Mr. Luntz always ordered himself a steak.

Mr. Pollock was enthralled.

In 1992, as a senior in college, Mr. Pollock and other students accompanied Mr. Luntz to the New Hampshire primaries. During the campaign, Mr. Pollock was hoping his mentor would set him up with a job with Bob Shrum, a guest lecturer at the campaign class and a Democratic legend, but was instead farmed out to work as a pollster for Ross Perot. Mr. Perot dropped out, and Mr. Pollock finished school. After graduation, he took a job with Mr. Luntz, with the understanding he not work on any Republican campaigns.

In 1993, Mr. Luntz worked on Rudy Giuliani’s campaign with David Garth, the city’s most successful and powerful consultant. After Mr. Luntz wrote the "Contract With America" with Newt Gingrich, Mr. Pollock left the firm and started doing more work back in New York with Mr. Garth, and moved in with his girlfriend, Deborah Brown, at Columbia University.

There, he started his own firm, called Strategic Research Team. (The stationary he had printed read "Stragetic Research Team." He was the team’s only member.)

He had a single client, which he inherited from Mr. Luntz: Pedro Rossello, the Puerto Rican governor. In 1995, as he polled for Mr. Rossello’s re-election campaign, he was introduced to John Silvan, who also had business in Puerto Rico and who had started Global Strategy Group in the rent-controlled Washington Square Village apartment of his recently deceased grandmother. The two businesses merged.

They were successful right away, helping Bill Murphy, a candidate for district attorney in Staten Island, defeat beloved Republican Guy Molinari. They helped elect Carolyn McCarthy to the House, and in 1997, they started getting business from Freddy Ferrer.

Then in 1998, Mr. Pollock’s last-minute polls correctly predicted that Mr. Spitzer would beat Dennis Vacco by about a single percentage point.

"At that point, we certainly became a much more well-known commodity," said Mr. Pollock.

These days, Mr. Pollock’s firm has a local and national presence. Through a merger with consultant Harrison Hickman, they worked on John Edwards’ 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. They have polled for Chet Culver in Iowa and, recently, for Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. They have also been at the vanguard of the Democratic retaking of Albany, first with Mr. Spitzer, and now that he is gone, with Mr. Cuomo, who hired Global for his 2006 attorney general’s race.

"I used to say, ‘Andrew, you are winning by 25 points,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s not enough.’"

On a personal level, Mr. Pollock is now close to Mr. Isay. They take their kids to synagogue together. Their wives climb steps and exercise together in the morning along Riverside Park. Their children play together.

At Mr. Pollock’s birthday party a couple of years ago, Mr. Isay stood up and made a surprise announcement. His family intended to move just down the block from Mr. Pollock on the Upper West Side.

"What a wonderful friend and wonderful family," Mr. Isay said. "And we’re going to be neighbors."

“What makes me so successful is that I’ve developed so many relationships,” she said in a phone interview on Jan. 27, hours after being sworn in as a U.S. senator, as she walked to the Senate floor to cast her first vote. “Because I did fund-raising and organizing in New York for 10 years before I ever ran for office, I developed so many great relationships with all the people that care about elective politics. From the public servants to the donors to the community organizers.

“These were all the relationships I called upon when I decided to run,” she continued. “When I did my first poll I asked Hillary Clinton to review it. I asked Andrew Cuomo to review it. I asked Eliot Spitzer to review it. These are all people that I had worked with helping them to get elected, working on their causes, so they all had become friends through my 10 years of organizing in New York.”  

Ms. Gillibrand, who replaces Hillary Clinton as New York’s junior senator, has been portrayed, alternately, as an apple-fed upstate yokel and a grasping Tracy Flick.

Both ideas underestimate her.

She is a leviathan—a Schumer-esque fund-raising monster with a political pedigree; a careerist overachiever who has studiously cultivated ties to a surprising number of the most powerful Democrats in the state and the country; a fearsome campaigner who, despite her wholesome appearance, is comfortable in the mud.

Ms. Gillibrand is the pure, unadulterated political creature that a state like New York demands. And now that she is a senator, it seems impossible—naïve, even—to picture her as anything else.
“Like Schumer, her eye has been on that prize for a long, long time,” said Jonathan Schiller, a founding partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where Ms. Gillibrand worked as a partner early in the decade. “She is no hayseed, she is no newcomer, she’s no shy, reclusive country girl. She is someone who grew up in a political family.”

Her wont to travel in elite circles isn’t news to the political cognoscenti.

Last year, Anthony Weiner thought he had scored as the only member of Congress to make it into an exclusive Hillary Clinton event with New York’s top fund-raisers and power brokers at the Museum of Modern Art.

That is, until he looked around the room and noticed that a junior colleague, Representative Kirsten Gillibrand from the yonder Hudson Valley, was already there, going from one bigwig to the next collecting business cards, shaking hands and extracting campaign contributions.

“She’s working the tables,” he recalled. “She’s shmoozing. It was chutzpah, but you’ve got to admire it. She represents Hudson. It’s not like she happened to be at the bar at the Modern. And even more interesting, from my perspective, is that she seemed to know a lot of those people already.”

Ms. Gillibrand is clearly resented by some of her former House colleagues (though not, Mr. Weiner made clear, by Mr. Weiner). She probably doesn’t much care.

Born into an elite Albany political clan—she is the daughter of an influential lobbyist with Republican ties and the granddaughter of a close aide to Erastus Corning, the longtime mayor of Albany—the 42-year-old has nurtured deep Clinton ties and Cuomo connections. She is the pick of the Patersons and a favorite of Rahm Emanuel.

Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director and now a key aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, acted as media guru for her 2006 campaign. Her longtime pollster is Jefrey Pollock, of Global Strategy Group, which represents the governor and Mr. Cuomo. She counts as friends the city’s top lawyers and fund-raisers.

“From very early on, she would say that the family was from upstate and that she would one day go home and run for Congress,” said Ann Lewis, a close aide to Mrs. Clinton who first met Mrs. Gillibrand in 1999. “I think her family was better connected than I knew.”

She went to college at Dartmouth, studied in China, interned in Austria and then came home and worked at a prestigious law firm. Later, she worked as a special counsel to Andrew Cuomo when he served in the Clinton administration as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  

Even after she went back into the private sector to work as a lawyer at a white-shoe firm, the public sector was never far from her mind.

Mr. Schiller said that “throughout the time she worked here, and closely with me on complex federal litigation, she was in touch with Hillary Clinton, she was in touch with the Democratic Party. She never stopped thinking about and planning her career.”

“This was when email was emerging as a political tool, and she was very organized, always hosting meetings, and storing information about events that were going on around the country,” said Ryan Karben, a former assemblyman who worked across Lexington Avenue at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett when Ms. Gillibrand worked at Davis Polk Wardwell in 2001 and 2002. “She clearly had great political organizational skills.”

“She was one of the early volunteers for Hillary and was one of the original volunteers of women for Hillary,” Ms. Lewis said.  (Karen Persichilli Keogh, Clinton’s former state director, is already advising the new senator, and Ms. Lewis said she would gladly help, too, if asked.)

And Ms. Gillibrand, running in a race in 2006 that nearly no one expected her to win, was a much more vicious campaigner than anyone knew. She savaged Republican incumbent John Sweeney--once again, in a style eerily reminiscent of Chuck Schumer, who dismantled incumbent (and onetime Gillibrand mentor) Al D’Amato in 1998.

“Early on you could see that she was a tough cookie,” said Jen Psaki, who worked on the Gillibrand race in 2006 for the DCCC.  
Ms. Psaki, now a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, recalled that Ms. Gillibrand essentially forced the race onto the DCCC’s radar, and that she became a favorite of the psychotically aggressive DCCC chair Mr. Emanuel, who is now Barack Obama’s chief of staff.

According to another Democratic aide who worked on the campaign, when Mr. Sweeney demanded that Ms. Gillibrand release her tax returns to demonstrate whether she paid New York City residency fees—a tactic intended to frame her as a rich, Brit-marrying cosmopolitan elitist—she demanded that Mr. Sweeney release his police records. According to the aide, the campaign knew Mr. Sweeney had several arrests to his name dating back to the ’70s, including an episode in which wine, Mr. Sweeney’s car and an electric pole combined to leave several people stranded on a ski lift. She never released her tax returns, and with the help of Mr. Sweeney’s subsequent run-ins with the law, won the race by a healthy margin.

Once in the House, her votes on gun, immigration and gay issues frustrated many of her Democratic colleagues. But even more infuriating to some members, including Nancy Pelosi, was her attempt to jump ahead of more senior members to fill a vacant seat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
But even colleagues who disagree with her policies can’t help but marvel at her political acumen.

“As a freshman, to come in and be put on the Steering and Policy Committee, that’s huge,” said Yvette Clarke, who came into the House with Ms. Gillibrand in the 110th Congress.
When asked how that happened, Ms. Clarke said, “If I had the answer to that, I’d be on Steering and Policy.”

There is every reason to expect that Ms. Gillibrand will be equally hard to ignore in the Senate. Asked how she expected the dynamic to work between her and Mr. Unignorable himself, Chuck Schumer, she said, “I really feel like our areas of expertise are complementary. Yes, he will always be senior and I will be junior, but I don’t see that as a relationship of one lesser than the other. I just think he has much more experience, which obviously is going to make him very effective and powerful.”

(Her initial Senate committee assignments, for the record, are Public Works and Environment, Foreign Affairs and Agriculture.)

If she remains a work-in-progress on the issues, Ms. Gillibrand has the routine of actually being a winning politician down.

“She was an accomplished attorney, so there’s that whole world she could tap into in,” said Ms. Clarke. “Bill and Hillary both went to support her in her run; that in itself opens the door to a whole other cadre of donors. She knows how to establish those relationships and cultivate them. And from those relationships you get to move on to other relationships.”
She added, “She just parlayed whoever she knew into influence.”

To be sure, the Park Avenue penthouses and townhouses of New York’s rarified fund-raising community is familiar terrain to Ms. Gillibrand.

Hassan Nemazee, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser who served as a co-finance chair on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said he had first met Ms. Gillibrand before her 2006 race and was impressed by the case she made as to why she could win in a reliably Republican district. The down-home upstate routine, he suggested, was only part of the picture.

“Look how successful she has been at raising money in Manhattan,” Mr. Nemazee said. “If you are just a parochial candidate you are not as successful as she has been.”

“She’s fabulous,” said Ellen Chesler, a prominent donor and early fund-raiser for Ms. Gillibrand, who was introduced to her by mutual friends in the Clinton universe. “She raised close to five million dollars for a seat where nobody who gave her money lives.”

Sometimes, the admiration is grudging. But, at least in process terms, it’s always there.

Teachers union head Randi Weingarten, the apparent runner-up to Ms. Gillibrand in Mr. Paterson’s post-Kennedy senate search (she was the last candidate to receive word that she would not be a senator), said Ms. Gillibrand was something of a “star” among female Democrats.

Asked about the various complaints having to do with Ms. Gillibrand’s win-at-all-costs reputation in the House, Ms. Weingarten did say, “One of the things that Hillary taught everyone was how much she was a team player. Ultimately collaboration becomes very important for getting things done.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 23, Ms. Gillibrand put on her team-player hat as she stood in Meeting Room 6 in the Capitol building. That didn’t stop all the state’s power brokers from jostling for a coveted place in the camera shot at her side.
Onstage, Mr. D’Amato alighted over his old intern’s right shoulder. Mr. Schumer signaled for her to shuffle closer to him. The Albany legislative triumvirate of State Senator Neil Breslin, Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari, and Assemblyman Jack McEneny entered the room just before Ms. Gillibrand’s family.

When Ms. Gillibrand spoke, she turned on the folksy charm. Wearing a black pantsuit and pearls, she expressed bewilderment at the mass of reporters assembled before her and deferred to Mr. Paterson in the running of the question-and-answer session. When her young son hopped onto the stage, she put her hand on his head. She affected an oh-my-gosh air and talked about licking envelopes in her grandmother’s office. The audience, aware that her grandmother was a power player in the capital’s Democratic machine, nodded knowingly.

“She comes from a very important political family in Albany,” said State Senator Neil Breslin after the event.

On Jan 26, Ms. Gillibrand kept doing the modest thing. Without any apparent security detail, she walked into the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. Two reporters behind her didn’t immediately realize who she was. She again deferred to Mr. Paterson during the press conference, but in her answers, she made it clear she was a player to be reckoned with. She talked about dining with Harry Reid and said she’d sit on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee. When asked about her stance on immigration, which has been criticized by Latino and other immigrant groups as cynically nativist, Ms. Gillibrand indicated that she’d maintain a less-than-lenient line.

“My view has always been that we need to right-size immigration,” she said, adding that she believed in a need to “have a database in the Department of Labor of immigrants who have been cleared, who are legal, that are part of our system, and the number has to be the right number.”

“I’m going to be a voice to solve this problem,” she said.

Ms. Gillibrand knows the cold realities of politics. But she also knows there is time for softballs and smiles.

At the end of the Hyde Park event, as reporters swarmed Ms. Gillibrand with questions, she thanked them for the work they did and promised to speak with them in the near future. As she left the room, a diminutive elderly woman came up to greet her.

“I’ve met you once before,” said the woman. “Congratulations.”

“Oh, it’s good to see you. Thanks for your support,” Ms. Gillibrand said. “God bless you!”

“She’s being portrayed as a lightweight,” Tom Poelker, a party chairman in a neighboring county, who has watched Ms. Gillibrand closely, said after attending the event in Hyde Park.

“My opinion is that there’s not much that gets by Senator-designee Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s very sharp—very perceptive. Extremely perceptive. Very perceptive politically.”

And how does Ms. Gillibrand herself respond to those people who say that she is, in fact, an overblown lightweight? Or an overambitious climber?

“It doesn’t bother me at all, because at the end of the day, this is just the short term,” she said in the phone interview. “I think all of this will smooth out as I demonstrate my effectiveness and my work ethic and as I partner with all the constituency groups in our state and make a difference for them.”

"To: Friends of Fernando Ferrer
From: Jefrey Pollock, Ferrer Campaign Pollster
Date: March 22, 2005

"The polls are in, and Fernando Ferrer continues to dominate in both the general election and the Democratic primary. In the most recent NY1/Newsday poll, Ferrer leads Mike Bloomberg by an astonishing 49% to 35% and leads in all 5 boroughs. In the WNBC/Marist survey released today, Ferrer is also capturing 49% of the general election vote and the Mayor's approval rating has dropped by a net 5 points since December. On the issues Ferrer has been discussing -- public schools, transportation, taxes, helping those in need and the West Side stadium -- a majority of voters believe Bloomberg is failing to get the job done, according to WNBC/Marist.

"For Ferrer to be this close to the magic 50% mark this far away from the election portend tremendous challenges for a Republican Mayor in a Democratic city, his sizable pocketbook not withstanding. In addition, in the Democratic primary, there has been little movement in the polls over the last year with Ferrer showing consistently strong support and the other candidates struggling to gain traction. Ferrer continues to overwhelm his primary opponents -- garnering as much of the vote as the other three candidates combined in the NY1/Newsday poll and standing at 39% in the WNBC/Marist poll, just one point below the 40% he needs to win the primary outright.

"While we know that polls will go up and down over the coming months,there is little doubt that Freddy sits in a tremendous position to win both the primary and the general election."

The person who forwarded this to us wasn't quite buying it.

"This is like the Cubs having a World Series parade in April to celebrate a 12-6 start," he wrote.