Duane, the state senator from Chelsea, didn't attend the event, but has officially come out in support of Thompson, a fellow Democrat.

Duane was among the notable absences from another endorsement event recently on the Upper West Side, which featured Representative Jerry Nadler, State Senator Eric Schneiderman, Assembly member Linda Rosenthall and City Councilwoman Gale Brewer.

Through a spokesman, Duane, said, "From LGBT issues to his oversight of New York's Mitchell-Lama housing program, Bill Thompson has been a consistently effective and progressive advocate for the people of this city. He represents strong Democratic values and I wholeheartedly endorse him for Mayor."

Now, the only Democrats on the West Side who have not endorsed Thompson are City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Borough President Scott Stringer.

Both employ a consultant, Josh Isay, who also advises Bloomberg.

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."

Now, after a bit of a courtship, Trippi's firm confirms it is actually getting paid to put a campaign together. Paul Blank, the director of Trippi & Associates, told me in an email, "I can confirm we are now being paid by Maloney, and Joe Trippi will be her chief strategist and media consultant. The campaign is putting together the team now and will be announcing the team when she makes her official announcement in two weeks."

Last month, high-powered consultant Josh Isay said the report that Representative Carolyn Maloney had hired him to work on her primary campaign was not true. He did say he was supportive of her candidacy, but he was not being paid.

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.’”

"For my part, I am very focused on being the best senator I can be," Gillibrand told The Observer. "And I really do leave the politics to themselves. I think they will take care of themselves."

But she’s preparing, just in case they don’t.

At the moment, it’s Representative Carolyn Maloney who is continuing to present herself as a threat to Gillibrand, comparing her lengthy House tenure with her former colleague's by saying, among other things, "She's, to my knowledge, never passed anything."

Gillibrand's supporters, who are still hoping that Maloney's theatrics will end up having been an exercise in noise-making, point out that the congresswoman hasn't been in a competitive race in 18 years. They say, by contrast, that Gillibrand is just coming into her own as a politician. 

"When she came to meet with us in '05 and said, 'I want to run for Congress,' we said candidly and respectfully, 'We don't think you can win—it doesn't seem like a good idea to us,'" said Howard Wolfson, whose Glover Park Group worked on Gillibrand's ultimately successful race in 2006 and who informally advised Gillibrand during the Senate selection process to fill Hillary Clinton's seat earlier this year. "'Well, I want you to work for us. I'm running because I think I can win.' She has tremendous determination."

Another adviser to Gillibrand said the senator's camp would have a game plan in place were Maloney to run. But the adviser was reluctant to discuss it in detail, except to say that Maloney was a “known quantity” who, by questioning Gillibrand's "character" in a meeting with the Daily News editorial board this week, had already revealed her intention to run a negative campaign.

Gillibrand, the adviser said, still had the element of surprise, a top-tier (and proportionately expensive) campaign team waiting in the wings, and an incumbent’s deep well of political support behind her.    

It’s not hard to imagine what the Gillibrand campaign’s response would look like in practice.

Her campaign would continue to roll out endorsements from Democratic officials, including initial skeptics who have been won over by a combination of Gillibrand’s intense personal lobbying, her substantive shifts to the left and approaches from her well-connected consultants.

As the surrogates heaped on the praise, making Maloney appear increasingly isolated and out of touch with the party, Gillibrand herself would be able to follow what one consultant referred to as "the Schumer model" of campaigning, staying on message—hardest-working mom in the Senate—traveling the state and working relentlessly in Washington to compile a strong legislative record.

And that's where her powerful supporters within the Senate, first among them Chuck Schumer himself, come into play.

Schumer, who is by mutual agreement a primary political mentor to Gillibrand, and who headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for two extremely successful cycles, is in a position to see to it that Gillibrand gets to make high-profile, popular announcements and that her name winds up attached to important legislation.

It should also be noted that Schumer is decidedly not a fan of Carolyn Maloney. Multiple former aides to Schumer recalled that the senator always had a particularly low opinion of her abilities, and that he questioned her seriousness as an official and her motives.

As one former staffer put it, “He thought she was starved for attention."

(Schumer spokesman Josh Vlasto called the assertions “totally untrue.”)

Gillibrand would also be in a position, unlike Maloney, to spend liberally on ads—produced by primary-campaign warriors David Dixon and Rich Davis--reintroducing her to New Yorkers without making mention of David Paterson. She has at her disposal a war chest filled by the likes of Dennis Mehiel, Sally Minard, Bernard Schwartz, Sarah Covner, Gerry Laybourne, Jill Iscol, Toni Sosnoff, Rosina Ruben, Rob Dyson and Hassan Nemazee.

The script: When I first got this job, I know a lot of you didn't know me, but it's been a pleasure listening to and learning about your concerns, and as a result, here are just some of the legislative accomplishments we have been able to do working together.

And so on.

And though having lots of heavyweight, proven consultants and advisers never guaranteed anyone a victory, Gillibrand will have … lots of heavyweight, proven consultants and advisers: Jefrey Pollock, the president of Global Strategy Group, which has polled for Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer; Howard Wolfson, the former communications director for Hillary Clinton and current communications director for Michael Bloomberg; Karen Persichilli Keogh, Clinton's former state director and one of New York's most tested operatives; Charlie King, who works with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who recently endorsed Gillibrand; and Roberto Ramirez, a key player in the city's Latino politics. They are all either on the payroll or willing to help, by means overt and covert.

"If you have Wolfson," one veteran Democratic strategist said, "you are going to have some dark arts."

Maybe early, even.

"But what they really want to do is stop her from running," said the strategist. "So it wouldn't shock me to start seeing negative stories about Maloney in the papers. A little bit like what I assume Bloomberg did to Weiner, basically letting him know, ‘This is what you can look forward to.'"

Joe Trippi, who is handling Maloney's campaign calls now, maintained a defiant tone on his potential client's behalf.

"Gillibrand certainly has a bunch of endorsements and the elite consulting class working for her, but she doesn't have what counts, which is standing up and fighting on the issues that matter to New Yorkers," he said.

Last week, when I called Maloney's office with a question about her possibly-maybe Senate campaign, I was referred to Isay, the influential consultant to Michael Bloomberg who, according to a report in City Hall News, Maloney had signed up to work on her prospective bid.

At that point, a source with knowledge of the arrangement between Maloney and Isay said that he was supportive, but that he wasn't actually helping her in any official, paid capacity.

Today, when I called Maloney's office with a campaign-related inquiry, I was told to direct my call to Joe Trippi, who told me this week that he would work for Maloney if she does decide to challenge Gillibrand.

I subsequently asked Isay if he was associated in any way with the Maloney campaign—a situation that would put him, extraordinarily, at odds with his former boss Chuck Schumer.

In an email, Isay said, "I am an unpaid advisor, a huge admirer and a friend of the Congresswoman. I look forward to helping her in any way I can on whatever she chooses to do now or in the future."

“I’m in Florida for the weekend,” said Mr. Sheinkopf, one of a number of prominent Democratic consultants now working for the mayor, in a recent phone interview. He was there for a speaking engagement.

“I’m not taking a vacation,” he said. “Until the summer. When my kids go to camp.”

It must be sorely tempting for Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign staff to think that summer camp has already started.

With Representative Anthony Weiner apparently scared out of the 2009 mayor’s race by Mr. Bloomberg’s strong poll numbers and bottomless campaign budget, and City Comptroller Bill Thompson unable to grab the attention of a city that seems deeply unimpressed with his stealth candidacy, the best citywide campaign money can buy has taken on the strange aspect of a mercenary army without anyone to fight.

Still, with the billionaire mayor’s put-the-kids-through-college paychecks still rolling in, these underutilized, adrenalin-free campaign staffers and consultants must be kept busy. It is, at the moment, a war on complacency.

That charge is being led by Bradley Tusk, the 35-year-old campaign manager for Mr. Bloomberg’s reelection effort.

He says that no one is taking anything for granted.

“I understood the dynamics of this campaign when I was staffing up a few months ago—it wasn’t like none of this was foreseeable,” he said in an interview in a conference room at campaign headquarters on May 15. “So in picking the team, you wanted to pick people who were really motivated and disciplined, professional and accomplished. I’m constantly driving them and they are driving themselves with very specific goals.”

A bit later, I talked to Howard Wolfson, the campaign’s communications director and a 42-year-old veteran, most recently, of a grueling and emotionally taxing presidential cycle as Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman. I asked him if the Bloomberg reelection gig wasn’t the greatest summer job ever dreamed up.

“What do you think, people are going to start going to Nantucket?” he said, when he was done laughing. “It’s not the summer yet.”

“I have never been in a campaign that I didn’t think I was going to lose,” he continued. “I don’t believe in inevitability, O.K.? Been there, done that. There’s a lot of work to do and we’re doing it.”

Mr. Sheinkopf had been in the office earlier that week.

THE BUILDING on West 40th Street that houses Bloomberg campaign headquarters grows narrower as it rises, so the fifth-floor offices are more spacious than the 19th-floor offices the campaign occupied four years ago.

Behind a reception area, the campaign’s senior officials work in a bullpen of beige cubicles, or snack on cold cuts in a lounge decorated with photos of smiling campaign staffers frozen in orbit around a photo of Mr. Bloomberg. A separate kitchen is stocked with fruit and cans of Fresca.

Further back is the field operations department, which on Friday afternoon was sparsely populated and spotted with six empty desks on a blue-gray carpet. Along the wall, a section of empty desks and dark computer screens had been arranged for yet-to-arrive summer interns. Conference rooms, in an expression of corporate playfulness, were labeled “Rangers” or “Mets” or other New York sports teams.

Around the corner, in the volunteer wing, a man stretched behind a sign that said “Shift Captain.” Nine relaxed Bloomberg volunteers did things: a few dialed phones at a table, the rest painted signs that said things like “Mayor Mike Rules” and “Bloomberg Si Se Puede!”

The hallway leading back to the reception area was lined with offices bolted closed and used as supply closets. Outside the doors, reporters from the New York Post and New York 1 combed through the campaign filing made available that day, which reported that Mr. Bloomberg had already spent more than $18 million—more than $155,000 a day since Jan. 12—despite the lack of competition.

Most of that money has gone to the exquisitely produced ads all over the TV and heavy-gauge literature that has cluttered city mailboxes. A sizable chunk has also gone to coffee and sandwiches and Staples products and, more significantly, the salaries of the all-star campaign team that’s now working hard to work hard.

With a roster that includes Mr. Tusk, Mr. Wolfson, former Schumer aide Josh Isay, pollster Doug Schoen and strategist Bill Knapp, there is certainly some overlap.

“There has been pretty broad agreement on the direction of the campaign,” said Mr. Wolfson, describing a recent strategy meeting.

When asked what each of the strategists does in such a meeting, Mr. Wolfson said, “Talk about strategy.”

MR. TUSK, by consensus within the campaign, is the person most engaged in making other people feel as if they’re involved in a contest.

“Bradley,” said Jill Hazelbaker, the 27-year-old spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg who served as communications director for John McCain’s presidential campaign, “is like David Plouffe on steroids.”

Mr. Tusk, a 35-year-old graduate of Chuck Schumer’s communications office and Mr. Bloomberg’s City Hall, before going on, somewhat unluckily, to become a deputy governor of Illinois under Rod Blagojevich and then a senior vice president at Lehman Brothers, said that the campaign was busy. They were chasing endorsements and then turning those endorsements into ads and newspaper stories and television hits that echoed Mr. Bloomberg’s core message, which is that he is the sort of competent and nonpolitical mayor who was needed to bring the city through tough times.

Mr. Tusk was wearing a checkered button-down and not a suit only because it was Friday.

The campaign had a plenary meeting every two weeks, he said, and had started going for outings to pizza places or organizing potluck lunches at headquarters. The mayor, he said, gave them health, life and dental insurance, and late-night cab fare. So it was a nice place to work.

He said that another motivation of the staff was a desire to impress Mr. Bloomberg in the hopes of finding work with him in either the private or public sector, or getting his name on a résumé.

But the big thing, he said, was that they all believed in him as a mayor.

“That’s driving me more than people coming up to me and saying, ‘I had the best time ever,’” he said.

Mr. Tusk talks with the urgency of someone who has something to prove. He said he sends and receives 600 to 800 emails a day and makes more than a hundred phone calls. He prides himself on getting back to people quickly, and said that if people on the Bloomberg team didn’t follow his example, they’d hear about it from him.

“I don’t tolerate staff that doesn’t come to work,” he said, noting that he planned to skip a good friend’s wedding in October for the sake of the campaign.

(He allowed that he did take a week off when he had a baby, as did Mr. Wolfson last month. “This is life,” he said. “Almost every single person I hired said to me something like ‘Hey, in June my brother’s getting married.’ Of course. We’re reasonable people.”)

In his own way, Mr. Tusk is also looking to have a good time.

He said that the campaign was trying, “for fun,” to build an Obama-style list of supporters by inviting Facebook users to check out the mayor’s reelection Web site.

Plus other things.

“Can I get like 10 newspaper endorsements before Labor Day?” Mr. Tusk said, smiling. “That’s not supposed to happen, but maybe I can.”

MR. TUSK is making a salary of $27,500 a month to run the campaign.

Mr. Isay’s glossy, colorful, booklet-sized direct mail has cost Mr. Bloomberg $1,485,000. (That is the amount paid, for the direct mail, to Squier Knapp Dunn Communications, Mr. Isay’s parent company. The company has received a total of $8.5 million from the campaign so far, partly for TV ads produced by Mr. Knapp. The campaign declined to reveal Mr. Isay’s or Mr. Knapp’s cut.)

The firm of Mr. Sheinkopf, who is handling a portion of the mailings, including the majority of the Spanish-language mail, is getting more than $20,000 a month.

Mr. Schoen’s polling firm has received about $2,700,000, some of which goes to the cost of voter lists and the price of calls. 

Strategic Telemetry, the Washington-based micro-targeting firm of former Obama operative Ken Strasma, has earned about $800,000.

For his handling of big-picture media stories and major news outlets, Mr. Wolfson is bringing in more than $40,000 a month for Blizzard Communications, the political arm of his firm the Glover Park Group, which will pay him separately. (Mr. Wolfson declined to reveal his salary.)

Ms. Hazelbaker is earning about $12,000 a month, partly for talking to national Republican columnists to spread a more Bloomberg-friendly message throughout the conservative radio universe.

Silvia Alvarez, an alumnus of the City Hall press office and Major League Baseball who deals with Spanish-language press, rounds out the communications team and earns $9,500 a month.

The field operations are led by Maura Keaney, a veteran of Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office who is earning $17,000 a month. Chris Coffey, a former deputy commissioner for community assistance at City Hall, is making $9,000 a month.

The political team also includes Patrick Brennan, who is receiving a salary of $16,000 a month and heads up the pursuit of labor endorsements; Larry Scott Blackmon, who specializes in African-American outreach; former Weiner operative Basil Smikle, who also specializes in African-American outreach; and Rose Rodriguez, who is in charge of Latino outreach.

Karen Persichilli Keogh, who was Hillary Clinton’s New York political director, is heading up Bloomberg for Women. Mark Botnick is doing Jewish outreach and Oliver Tan is heading up Asian outreach.

The campaign’s web operation, located in a room with Mac computers in the back of the headquarters, is headed up by Jonah Seiger, whose Connections Media firm has been paid about $1.7 million. And the campaign’s advance man, Jay Weinkam, a former political adviser to Rudy Giuliani, is making $10,000 a month.

The campaign’s policy specialist Andrea Batista Schlesinger—formerly of the Drum Major Institute, which was an intellectual home to Mr. Bloomberg’s last opponent, Freddy Ferrer—is earning $10,000 a month, as is fellow wonk Brian Mahanna.

They’re all there sometimes, Mr. Tusk says.

“It’s funny, because sometimes I’ll walk in the office and say, ‘Where’s my staff?” he said. “But especially the political team—their job is to be out there getting endorsements. So if you look around, you think, ‘That’s what they are supposed to be doing.’”

Supporters received an email—from scott [at]stringerexplore.com—about the meetings, one at 12:30 p.m. and another one at 7 p.m. The meetings are billed as an opportunity “for me, and my campaign team, to hear from you.”

The email was forwarded to me by a reader, who also said there were another set of meetings that took place yesterday.

Gale is a Washington-based fund-raiser who directed my inquiries to Stringer’s office. Isay did not immediately return an email about both sets of meetings.

Here’s the full text of the email:

From: scott[at]stringerexplore.com

Sent: 5/11/2009 7:05:03 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

Subj: Please join us...

Dear Friends,

I would like to invite you to join me on Tuesday, May 19th at 12:30 pm or later that evening at 7:00 pm for a confidential briefing and discussion about my exploratory efforts regarding the upcoming campaign for the United States Senate seat that has been held by Hillary Clinton.

This will be an informal opportunity for you to hear from the leadership of our exploratory efforts, and it will also be an opportunity for me, and my campaign team, to hear from you.

Our political advisor, Josh Isay, will be giving us an update on the politics of the Senate race. His current clients include dozens of New York elected Democratic officials and also Mayor Bloomberg. Our finance consultant, Scott Gale, will also make a presentation. Over the past 20 years he has worked with almost 100 Democratic candidates for United States Senator or Governor, and he has worked over the years with 20 candidates in New York.

Again, I hope that you can join me at one of the following:

• Tuesday, May 19th at 12:30 pm at the Law Offices of Greenberg Traurig, located at the MetLife Building, 200 Park Avenue (at East 44th Street), 15th Floor, or

• Tuesday, May 19th at 7:00 pm at the home of Sharon and Ed Silberfarb, located at [address].

Please RSVP by emailing me at scott[at]stringerexplore.com or by calling (917) ###-####.

Warmest Personal Regards,

Scott Stringer

Manhattan Borough President

Wow—random, you may say. But the important thing to keep in mind is that he has little to lose by this exercise and, potentially, something to gain.

For Stringer, currently the Manhattan borough president, the 2010 election cycle is an off-year, and he’s up for what’s expected to be a relatively easy reelection. So, unlike the House members from New York who have made noise about possibly challenging David Paterson's Senate appointee in a primary, Stringer wouldn’t have to give up his current job to do so. This also means Stringer can dangle the prospect of challenging her for quite some time without any real fallout.

Stringer’s political team has no allegiance to the governor that appointed Gillibrand. Among Stringer’s consultants are Josh Isay and the folks at Knickerbocker SKD, who spearheaded the unsuccessful bid by Caroline Kennedy.

And in terms of Stringer's actual prospects, it's kind of tough. Gillibrand's incumbency and establishment backing will count for a lot. But it's not nothing that the part of the world that Stringer currently represents, Manhattan, is a gold mine for super-prime Democratic voters. (There are more Democratic voters registered there than in any other county in the state, except Brooklyn [corrected].)

It should also be remembered, for what it's worth, that Stringer has demonstrated an ability to campaign (hard!) and win against female opposition. In the 2005 Manhattan borough president’s race, Stringer, with some help from the teacher’s union, took shots at another leading candidate, Eva Moskowitz. He suffered no ill effects.

They were produced by Knickerbocker SKD.

Knickerbocker, the Josh Isay-led firm that advised Caroline Kennedy in her unsuccessful attempt to become a U.S. senator. 

Caroline Kennedy, who eventually pulled out for "personal reasons" only to get smeared by people close to David Paterson.

David Paterson, who a blind man in the ad asks, "Why are you doing this to me?"

Is this Isay's accidental revenge?

"Josh is as talented a political operative as there is in New York, it just happens he was not directly involved in the production of this ad," said Brian Conway, a spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association, which co-produced the ad with union SEIU 1199. "We've worked with Knickerbocker SKD for quite some time, and we think they're great."

(Waiting to hear back from Isay.)