She'd have to give up her House seat to do so. (Which is actually quite a good reason to believe that, at the end of the day, she won't run for Senate, and that this will all have been more about David Paterson's decision to pass her over for a junior colleague than anything else. But for the sake of this exercise, let's assume she does it.)

Who would replace her?

In Maloney's Congressional district, according to the State Board of Elections, there are 264,561 registered Democrats, 72,088 registered Republicans, and 93,304 voters not registered in any party. In the 2005 Council races in the heart of the district, the Democratic candidates (Dan Gardonick and Jessica Lappin) crushed their moderate Republican challengers (Patrick Murphy and Joel Zinberg, respectively). 

So the next representative from her East Side-plus-a-bit-of-Queens district will almost certainly be a Democrat.

With that in mind, here are some possible replacements for Maloney if she doesn't run for reelection in 2010. They are presented in no particular order.

As always, if I'm leaving anyone out, let me know.

Dan Garodnick

He’s a hardworking city councilman, a lawyer who grew up in in Peter Cooper Village, the densely populated part of the district that is driven almost exclusively by one issue: affordable housing. Gardonick's Council district includes a chunk of this area, mirroring, somewhat, the Congressional district, and giving him an edge over other electeds who are mostly known in the midtown part of the district.

Jessica Lappin

She represents the district right next door to Garodnick's, and worked as the chief of staff to the previous incumbent, the former council speaker, Gifford Miller.

She generally avoids headline-grabbing gestures and confrontation, building a profile instead through diligent constituent service. When she considered a run for public advocate earlier this year, her good working relationship with Michael Bloomberg was thought to be an asset, especially among voters in her district.

A source close to Lappin said she could consider a run if the Maloney seat were vacant.

Jonathan Bing

He was elected to the Assembly in 2002, just a few years before Garodnick and Lappin got into office in 2005. His district doesn’t go as far south, or east, as the Congressional district, but it does include a chunk of it in midtown.

He has a close working relationship with Maloney, and the two share a political club, the Lexington Democratic Club, which is a focal point of establishment power in that part of Manhattan. He's been in Albany long enough to have a legislative record to run on, but not long enough, arguably, to be considered part of what makes Albany dysfunctional.

Eva Moskowitz

The former city councilwoman who now lives and runs a charter school in Harlem seems to miss politics pretty intensely.

Coming into the race off the bench could enable her to argue that her more recent experience gives her an advantage over other candidates. She lost a race for Manhattan borough president in 2005, but has residual name recognition and working-mom biographical credibility in the district. (Images of her pushing her stroller through the district are hard to erase from my memory, at least).

The teachers union will not be helpful to her candidacy.

Liz Krueger

She came into the State Senate as a liberal champion, having nearly ousted longtime Republican incumbent Roy Goodman in 2001, then, after he retired, vanquishing Goodman's protégé John Ravitz.

After that victory, she fended off an expensive challenge from Andrew Eristoff, a self-funded candidate who was, I believe, the last serious challenger she had.

She isn’t considered as close to the Maloney political operation on the East Side as some of the other potential candidates, which, in a primary in this district, doesn't help.

Eric Gioia

He’s an exceptionally energetic councilman from the Queens side of the district who will have just gone through a citywide campaign for public advocate by the time this seat opens up next year. Even if he loses—and right now he's polling last—the money and effort spent in that race could greatly help his name identification.

He’s good at raising money in small, publicly matchable increments, and he's exceptionally good at getting media attention. 

While only a small part of the district is in Queens—his personal narrative of growing up the son of a florist may not help so much on the Upper East Side—a divided field of Manhattan candidates, plus a near-perfect campaign, could get him there.

Michael Gianaris

He’s an assemblyman, also from the Queens side of the district. He’s a Harvard graduate and former counsel to Sheldon Silver who did an amazing job of early fund-raising for an attorney general race back in 2006.

He skipped the race then, but made valuable contacts. He's smart and has the everyman thing.

Again, the combination of a crowded Manhattan field and a near-perfect campaign—especially if Gioia isn't around—makes his candidacy a totally credible idea.

George McDonald

He's the founder and president of The Doe Fund. Spokesman Ken Frydman, who once worked for Rudy Giuliani, sent a statement to reporters saying McDonald "will form an exploratory committee to run in the Democratic primary for Carolyn Maloney's Congressional seat should she chose to run for the senate." He ran for the seat in 1988, when it was held by Republican Bill Green. Four years later, Green was defeated by Maloney.

Meet Kenneth Moltner, a Community Board 8 member and an attorney by trade.

"I'm seriously considering it," Moltner told me yesterday. "It is not a yes. It is not no. I'm seriously considering it." He declined to get into what factors would sway his decision.

His potential candidacy does prompt a practical question: Who would a Republican Assemblyman in Albany turn to for help with, well, anything?

"When we speak of allies, if I run, I would be there to work for the people of my district."

Moltner said he'd fashion himself in the mold of former lawmakers John Ravitz in the Assembly and Roy Goodman in the state Senate.

Brave.

-- Azi Paybarah

It's worth noting that due to prolonged negotiations in Albany, today's election is the big test for those voting machines, which will be rolled out in full next year -- when practically nobody is running.

In an email, Ravitz also said, "So far no major problems. Any problems dealing with machines and supplies have been fixed within a 45 min period."

Sounds pretty good. Anybody with a different experience?

-- Azi Paybarah

The Executive Director of the state's Board of Elections, John Ravitz, confirmed in an email that, "Sequoia has sent both their DRE and Opscan machines to the State Board of Elections for certification."

Just one more scandal storyline to follow.

-- Azi Paybarah

There was the usual, somewhat awkward, generally enthusiastic three-way endorsement of Freddy, following his praise of each of his rivals.

It was, said Denny Farrell, "The worst nightmare for the present Mayor," which overstated it of course, but wasn't entirely wrong. Freddy is politically stronger, and more on his game, than many expected.

Freddy, however, was on to other enemies: the run-off, he alleged, is being advanced "by people who want to foster division in this party."

(Which seemed a bit premature, as at the moment seems to be the product of voters who didn't vote for him, but never mind.)

Anyway, asked who exactly he was accusing (one assumes Republican Board of Elections chief John Ravitz) Freddy replied with a classic of his sometimes cryptic style: "If the shoe fits, anyone can wear it."

Asked what that meant, he offered to repeat it in Spanish.

Mr. Ravitz's desk at the board's lower Broadway headquarters is adorned with action figures of the Incredible Hulk, to whom the 6-foot-3 Republican bears a passing resemblance. After starting work early last year, he didn't have to wait long for his first comic-book challenge: the mysterious Case of the Two Strokes.

The first stroke victim was Jerry Vedral, a receptionist at the board's headquarters. Mr. Vedral had been asked to remove an extensive collection of Americana-notably, a mat with pictures of the Presidents-from the reception counter. According to his supervisor, he responded by launching into a racist tirade against another of the agency's top managers, a black woman whom he apparently suspected of masterminding the cleanup. This sort of thing-using the N-word in particular-might be thought a firing offense at some organizations. Mr. Ravitz certainly thought so, and he recommended to the board's 10 commissioners that Mr. Vedral be fired.

But Mr. Vedral and his union chief pled ill health. The receptionist, it turns out, had suffered a stroke several weeks before. "Jerry hasn't been quite right," said the folksy union president, Richard Wagner. So a majority of the board's commissioners rejected Mr. Ravitz's recommendation and settled on a two-week suspension and a transfer to Queens as punishment.

It was a setback for Mr. Ravitz, and the scandal was a stain on the institution. Things were just getting back to normal at the time of the second stroke.

This time, the victim was a Brooklyn Democrat named Anthony Santulli. His stroke, oddly enough, had similar symptoms: racist slurs directed at the same senior Board of Elections official, Pamela Green Perkins. Investigators traced racist messages on Ms. Perkins' voice mail to Mr. Santulli.

Mr. Santulli, too, cried stroke.

"I know I sound like a broken record," his union leader, Mr. Wagner, told The Chief , a newspaper which covers civil-service issues, "but a stroke removes your inhibitions, so you're liable to do strange things."

"People are having strokes over there all the time," grumbled Ms. Perkins' husband, Harlem Councilman Bill Perkins. "Whenever they get in trouble."

The second time around, the commissioners stood by Mr. Ravitz when he recommended firing Mr. Santulli.

But by now, the kind of problem facing the new chief election official was clear to many critics: the board's strange hiring system. The only qualification needed for one of the agency's 316 jobs is loyalty to the Democratic or Republican organizations. The hiring, like all of board policy, is determined within state legal guidelines by the commissioners, themselves chosen by county Democratic and Republican leaders in each of the five boroughs. (One commissioner and one county leader are currently under indictment.)

The board's system of bipartisan control was designed in 1894-before the consolidation of Greater New York-to prevent the ruling party from fixing elections. But while it has succeeded in that end, its effect on competence has been, perhaps, predictable. With a starting salary of $21,132 for a clerk, the Board of Elections has turned into a downmarket patronage mill.

Mr. Ravitz needs to tell the commissioners one thing, according to one frustrated board official: "You can't send us your little old ladies or people who can't work anywhere else."

That would be an unusually confrontational stance for Mr. Ravitz, 43, best known as a genial, floppy-haired Assemblyman from the Upper East Side, perhaps the last of the borough's liberal Republican representatives. He served briefly as chairman of the Manhattan Republican Party before taking the elections job, but he said that his partisan days are over. "I made a conscious decision when I took this job: I'm really not going to be a partisan individual in the future," he said.

Mr. Ravitz insisted that he's up to the job of shaking up the agency.

"I'm going to piss off the Republican county leaders, and I'm going to piss off the Democratic county leaders," he said. "Patronage is always going to be seen as one of the words associated with the Board of Elections. But patronage and performance have to be at the same level."

The patronage, of course, goes all the way up. Mr. Ravitz was the beneficiary of a deal between Republicans and Bronx Democrats that put him into the top slot. One side effect of patronage is that it favors characters, of a sort, over dull bureaucrats. Mr. Ravitz's deputy is the choice of the Bronx Party, George Gonzalez, who gained some fame for setting records for overtime compensation as an assistant to a previous board chief. Ms. Perkins holds the No. 3 position at the agency, and appears to do much of the day-to-day management with a firm hand that shows no sign of wavering in the face of the racist tirades. The board's spokesman, Chris Riley, left an editorial job at the hip-hop magazine The Source to come to the board.

In the past, the patronage system gave the board a certain odd charm. Now, however, the stakes are higher. "It's not the board of many years ago," said Ms. Perkins.

The pressure comes from Washington, where in 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, establishing stricter standards for identifying voters and providing states nearly $4 billion to upgrade their technology. The first half promises a bureaucratic nightmare for administrators, and the second demands a technologically savvy workforce.

A Tough Challenge

HAVA, as the legislation is known, also presents a political challenge for Mr. Ravitz. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 92 to 2, with Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton in the opposition. The New York Senators worried that in a city where many people-particularly the poor-lack a driver's license, the law's ID requirement could keep voters away from the polls.

The identification requirements are deeply politicized. Republicans typically say they want to crack down on fraud; Democrats then accuse them of trying to disenfranchise blacks, college students or other likely Democratic voters.

"We've already seen more partisan kowtowing to the Republican Party leaders than we would like [from Mr. Ravitz]," said the Democratic commissioner from Manhattan, Douglas Kellner, citing a dispute over how to operate the manual voting machines.

Mr. Ravitz angrily disputes that notion.

"I'm not some plant who's been put in to spy for the Republican Party and to suppress voting. I'm here to get the job done," he said.

And the top elections official at the New York Public Interest Research Group, a frequent critic of the board, said that he's been impressed by Mr. Ravitz. "We have high hopes," said the official, Neal Rosenstein.

From Mr. Rosenstein's point of view, Mr. Ravitz is an improvement on his acting predecessor, a devoted Brooklyn Republican with a rough sense of humor named Joseph Gentili. "He once threatened to shoot me because I looked like Osama bin Laden," Mr. Rosenstein said.

Implementing the federal law will be the real test of Mr. Ravitz's staff, his ability and, to doubters, his motives. The board expects to send out 60,000 letters this spring asking newly registered voters to verify their identities before they can complete their registration. The focus on identification is a sharp change from past practice, which stressed making it as easy as possible to register. And administering the changes will fall largely on part-time, poorly paid Election Day poll inspectors.

"We've been hitting our inspectors in the head; we've even been penalizing them when they ask people for ID," said Ms. Perkins. "This is a 360-degree turnaround."

The other half of HAVA will, if anything, be more traumatic for the Board of Elections-and, for that matter, for city voters. It requires the state to replace those rattletrap metal booths in which New Yorkers first elected John V. Lindsay in 1965 with some sort of newfangled electronic contraption. Democrats, sore from what some see as Republican chicanery, are suspicious of the machines, but federal law makes them the wave of the future, like it or not. And even Mr. Ravitz, a modernizer when it comes to staff, admits to some ambivalence about the coming change.

"I've gotten very partial toward the machines," he said. "They're good machines."

America is headed for disaster, and it has nothing to do with terrorists or George W. Bush's "axis of evil." A new study of the environmental health of 142 countries found that the United States ranks 51st, behind Cuba, Botswana and 48 other countries that have more respect for their natural surroundings than the U.S. does. The top five were Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada and Switzerland. It's clear that this country still has its head in the sand, unaware of how we are laying the groundwork for a profoundly low environmental quality of life and the economic crisis that will accompany it.

There is no excuse for the poor standing. Yes, mistakes were made in the past, when we did not have the knowledge or experience to fully comprehend our impact on the environment. But now we know better. In 2002, protecting the environment should be the No. 1 priority of every country. The study, which was conducted by teams from Yale and Columbia universities, looked at how each country handles water and air pollution, how it protects its land, and how seriously it takes global warming, among other factors. The researchers concluded, "No country is on a truly sustainable path." They also found that the more corrupt a government was, the more likely that country was to rank poorly on the environmental scale.

Which brings us to the U.S., where George Bush is presiding over a corruption of truth when it comes to the environment. It's abundantly obvious that this President does not care a whit about the environment, as he pries open the Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling and wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on a ridiculous military buildup. Once the patriotic fervor dims, the country will awaken to find our landscape ruined not by madmen from the Middle East, but by our own unforgivable ignorance.

Public Schools Outsmart Private In Top Science Contest

Scanning the list of 40 finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search, the nation's most prestigious academic contest among high-school students, one is struck by two things. Once again, New York State left the rest of the country in the dust, with 15 of the finalists –almost 40 percent–attending high schools in New York City, Westchester and Long Island. The next closest state is Illinois, with five finalists. The second striking fact is that, with one exception, all of the finalists from New York City attend public schools. One looks in vain for Dalton, Collegiate, Chapin, Riverdale, Trinity, Brearley and the other elite private schools which so transfix the imaginations (and deflate the wallets) of New York parents. As has been the case for the past several years, the city's private schools appear to be washouts when it comes to providing a top-notch education in the sciences. One must conclude that private schools are content to make a name for themselves with a relatively low-cost investment in a humanities curriculum, but balk when it comes to funding science labs and faculty that would elevate their students to a competitive level.

The only private school that made the grade this year was Horace Mann, with one finalist. Picking up the slack are the city's selective public schools, Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, each with two finalists. The other finalists from New York are from public schools in Long Island and Westchester. Angela Kim of Great Neck South High School studied the relationship between breast cancer and H.I.V. Raminder Parihar of the Bronx High School of Science found evidence that blocking a certain neurotransmitter may help slow Parkinson's disease. Allegra Giovine of Manhasset High School studied how women compete differently with other women than they do with men. Yang Li of Ward Melville High School did research on a safer vaccine for Lyme disease. Michael Wagner of John F. Kennedy High School delved into the effects of plant hormones on plant growth; in his spare time, he invented a machine that adds chocolate syrup and sprinkles to ice cream. Behind each finalist is a dedicated teacher, a tribute to the quality of teaching in many New York schools.

The winner of the Talent Search will be announced in March and awarded a $100,000 scholarship. Past winners have gone on to receive five Nobel Prizes–not to mention 10 MacArthur Foundation grants and three National Medals of Science. May the best New Yorker win!

John Ravitz for State Senate

The resignation of longtime State Senator Roy Goodman after 33 years in Albany means that East Side voters will be tramping to the polls on Feb. 12 to choose Mr. Goodman's replacement. Mr. Goodman's protégé, East Side Assemblyman John Ravitz, is running on the Republican line, while social activist Liz Krueger, who nearly beat Mr. Goodman last fall, is the Democratic candidate.

Both are serious, policy-minded people who would bring energy and ideas to the Senate. Mr. Ravitz has been an exemplary member of the Assembly, while Ms. Krueger has devoted her life to advocacy for the less fortunate.

Our choice in this highly contested race is Mr. Ravitz. We're confident he will follow in Mr. Goodman's footsteps as an articulate advocate for moderate New York Republicanism, an important force in city politics. His qualifications for the job are beyond dispute. Before running for the Assembly in 1990, he was a social worker, evidence of his concern for the poor. He understands how Albany works, and he is smart enough to make Albany work for the city. He has also been a voice for education reform, supporting school choice, charter schools and the move to abolish the Board of Education. He supports rent stabilization, and has founded a number of youth-oriented sports and educational programs on the Upper East Side.

Indeed, given how Albany works, the case for Mr. Ravitz's election is even more compelling. The fact is, no Democrat can make much of an impact in the Republican-controlled State Senate. It's not fair, but it's a fact. As a member of the majority party in the Senate, Mr. Ravitz would be able to use his clout for the city at a time when we are trying to recover from Sept. 11. Ms. Krueger, on the other hand, would be virtually powerless. She could give press conferences, but not much more than that.

We encourage East Side voters to go to the polls and make John Ravitz their new state senator.

And now, in New York's first electoral battle of 2002, it's … John Ravitz vs. Liz Krueger!

Granted, Republican Assemblyman John Ravitz may be a slightly more mundane figure than a billionaire media magnate turned Mayoral candidate, and Democratic social activist Liz Krueger somehow lacks the magnetism of a First Lady seeking to become a U.S. Senator in an adopted state. The office they covet-state senator-has likewise failed to capture the imagination of voters in elections past.

But there is much at stake. For Republicans, it means the defense of a lone remnant of the silk-stocking Republicanism that produced Jacob Javits, John Lindsay and Roy Goodman, the longtime state senator who resigned his office after 33 years to take a job with Mr. Bloomberg. (Mr. Goodman's resignation prompted the special election between Mr. Ravitz and Ms. Krueger.) For Democrats, the race could be a chance to narrow the Republicans' six-seat majority in the State Senate going into next fall's gubernatorial and legislative campaigns.

If voters aren't interested-only a tiny fraction of registered East Siders are expected to turn out for the special election on Feb. 12-New York's most powerful political figures most certainly are.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg demonstrated just how seriously he takes the race, showing up at 7:40 a.m. on a recent overcast Thursday morning to campaign with Mr. Ravitz on a windswept and empty sidewalk outside the Stuyvesant Town apartments. Mr. Bloomberg stuck out his hand to greet potential voters who happened along, introducing himself and then, in a procedure he was to repeat a hundred times over the next half hour, steering the unsuspectingandsleepystrap-hangerstowardsthe

large, bespectacled man to

his right.

"Meet Assemblyman John Ravitz-he's running for State Senate," said the Mayor. "You gotta vote for this guy."

A similar scene was played out the next day at a Gristede's in Kips Bay, where U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer was taking a break from federal lawmaking to engage in some retail politicking on behalf of Ms. Krueger. All told, there were more reporters, aides and politicians in the store than customers, leaving Mr. Schumer to sweep through the dimly lit aisles in search of shoppers for Ms. Krueger to meet. At one point, Mr. Schumer and the would-be state senator, finding themselves alone in the cosmetics aisle, debated the merits of a hairbrush. ("I can't walk around with this," said Mr. Schumer about a particularly bulky model.)

Near the checkout area, Mr. Schumer addressed himself to one woman shopper, apologetically, for the second time: "Tell everyone you know-Feb. 12 is the election!"

The presence of the Democratic Party's star performers at Ms. Krueger's side-in addition to Mr. Schumer's shopping expedition, Ms. Krueger is also scheduled to receive campaign help from New York's other U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton, on Feb. 1-should come as a surprise to no one. Democrats have been dreaming for decades about controlling the State Senate-coupled with their ironclad control of the State Assembly, the party would have absolute power over, among other things, the redrawing of Congressional districts, a matter of great interest to politicians across the country. It would also give the Democrats a second seat at the policy-making table-the one currently occupied by upstate Republican Senator Joe Bruno, majority leader of the Senate-alongside Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. (Governor Pataki, a Republican, fills the other seat in Albany's three-person policy roundtable.)

Partisan enthusiasm aside, the 44-year-old Ms. Krueger has an enormous task in front of her. She will be heavily outspent by her opponent, despite an infusion of $50,000 to her campaign from her father, an executive for Lehman Brothers. She has never held office-she was narrowly defeated last year in attempting to unseat Mr. Goodman-and therefore lacks any store of political chits to call in for financial or political help. And she can't realistically promise to deliver anything significant as a minority-party member in the Republican-controlled Senate.

While she is running on the premise that the Senate status quo needs to be changed, that very stasis makes her current task extremely difficult. "The Republicans are not only in the majority, but seem to be approaching this race like their lives depend on it," she said somewhat ruefully. In her favor, Ms. Krueger received the endorsement of The New York Times, which has a particularly big impact in neighborhoods like the East Side.

For Mr. Ravitz, who is 41, the challenge will be entirely different. Quite simply, his biggest problem will be that he's running on the Republican line in a district where Democrats have a two-to-one majority. So despite 11 years as a Republican assemblyman, two of them spent as his party's whip under the leadership of upstate conservative John Faso, Mr. Ravitz seems determined to make it through the campaign without so much as mentioning the R-word.

During a conversation in the Metropolitan Republican Club on 83rd and Lexington, the elegantly appointed birthplace of Rockefeller Republicanism, Mr. Ravitz took great pains to describe his brand of politics without actually making reference at any point to his party affiliation. Asked about his connection to the Republican Party, Mr. Ravitz answered: "I look at it more as being another strong, progressive, moderate urban voice in Albany."

He also said that New York suffered from too much "partisan crap."

As evidence of his independence, Mr. Ravitz pointed to past endorsements of such groups as the Empire State Pride Agenda, a gay-rights advocacy group, the National Abortion Rights Action League and a number of other organizations that tend to back Democrats.

But it was party as much as ideology that has helped Mr. Ravitz win the endorsements of a murderer's row of the heaviest-hitting unions, business groups and advocacy organizations in New York for his Senate bid. The key dynamic in many of those decisions is a stark but simple rule of doing business in Albany: If you want something from the Legislature, you had better support the majority party in both houses. The impotence of minority-party members-the Republicans in the Assembly and the Democrats in the State Senate-is notorious.

Unlikely Allies

That's why weird things happen in the state capital. For example, the fiscally conservative Senate approved the generous and highly expensive health-care package that was pushed by Dennis Rivera, head of Local 1199 of the health-care workers' union. Mr. Rivera, a longtime Democrat, donates large amounts of money to Republican Senate candidates, and he recently endorsed Mr. Ravitz. The United Federation of Teachers, which has no shortage of business in Albany, also endorsed Mr. Ravitz despite his support for measures they oppose, such as private school voucher programs.

Then there's the Empire State Pride Agenda, which is supporting Mr. Ravitz and is highly interested in the passage of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, a measure that the Senate Republicans blocked in the past.

"If you have business to do, it's definitely foolhardy to vote your heart rather than your pocketbook," said lobbyist Richard Lipsky, who is organizing a fund-raiser for the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. "To help a Democratic senator, unless it would produce a change in the whole leadership, would be bad for business."

Now loaded with cash, Mr. Ravitz is already on TV and radio with Bloomberg-like frequency, and has hired big-gun consultants like Rick Wilson and Norman Adler from outside the New York Republican establishment to help him craft his message. He will also have a superior Election Day organization, thanks to an army of volunteers supplied by his union backers to hand out leaflets and knock on voters' doors.

What Mr. Ravitz's fate may mean for the survival of East Side Republicanism is a matter of debate. The assemblyman, however uncomfortable he may be with the idea of party labels, would very much like to inherit the "outsider" mantle of the popular and durable Mr. Goodman. " I would do what I can to get voices from outside the party heard within the party," he said "That's certainly a role I can play."

Senate Democrats who served with Mr. Goodman, and who often found themselves allied with him on contentious issues, think differently about his would-be successor. "Ravitz is not an independent actor like Roy Goodman was," said State Senator Eric Schneiderman, who is still looking for his first win as head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. "He will owe whatever success he has to Joe Bruno. It's a mistake to think he'll have anything to do with any particular brand of progressive Republicanism."

Of course, for all the tumult, the outcome of the race will have no practical impact on the way business is done in Albany. The majorities in both houses allow the leaders of each body to rule with near absolute power, and the legislative means by which those majorities are protected make it a virtual certainty that the people currently running things in Albany will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

"At the end of the day, even if Liz Krueger wins, everyone will still have to deal with Joe Bruno," said political consultant Harry Gianoulis, who has worked on Democratic Senate campaigns. "Nothing is going to happen in this election to change that fact."