"Being pro-choice means you stand up and fight for a woman's right to her own medical decisions, even when it is not popular," said the letter. "You are not pro-choice, you do not share our values and, as such, you will find yourself lacking support from pro-choice women in New York."

Among the scores of signatories were former Manhattan Borough president Ruth Messinger, City Councilwoman Letitia James, Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples, and State Senators Liz Krueger and Andrea Stewart-Cousins.

The letter said Mr. Ford "played politics" when he ran for Senate in 2006, noting his now-famous declaration that he was "pro-life"—a position Mr. Ford has justified as one that used the language more broadly to highlight the hypocrisy of his Republican opponents.

Mr. Ford's spokesman, Davidson Goldin, quickly emailed a statement in reply: "It's so disappointing to see yet another party boss scrambling to protect the unelected senator by maliciously distorting Harold's record. Harold has always supported abortion rights and will always support abortion rights. That's why Planned Parenthood has always supported him." The letter cited a quote from Jeff Teague, the president of Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee, who told the Daily News "it is wrong to characterize him as anti-choice."

In the letter, Ms. Hope and her co-signatories pledged to support Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who volunteered for pro-choice organizations even before garnering 100 percent rating from NARAL and Planned Parenthood during her legislative career.

"Please know that we will work tirelessly to promote Senator Gillibrand's strong record on choice and to expose your revisionist one," they wrote. "Senator Gillibrand is our champion and we will work hard to ensure that she continues as Senator from the great State of New York."

Here's the letter in full:

To: Mr. Harold Ford Jr.

Over the years we have had the opportunity to serve in many capacities - as public officials, community leaders, and advocates for the causes we believe in. All of us have worked extremely hard to promote women's equality and to ensure reproductive rights for women. We are proud that New York is one of the most pro-choice states in the country and we support politicians committed to this standard. Based on your own words and deeds, you simply do not measure up.

Your views as a Member of Congress, a candidate, and a political commentator do not match your current claim that you are pro-choice. Being pro-choice means you stand up and fight for a woman's right to her own medical decisions, even when it is not popular. You played politics with a woman's right to choose in your Tennessee Senate race - proudly calling yourself pro-life and spending campaign money on ads to showcase your anti-choice record. Recently, in the New York Post, you decry the "pro-life" label, but when it suited your political ambitions in 2006, you stated clearly that you are "pro-life" and that you "don't run from that." You certainly seem to be running from it today.

Senator Gillibrand, on the other hand, LONG before she sought political office, proudly volunteered with pro-choice groups. As a member of Congress she had 100% voting records with NARAL and Planned Parenthood. We never had any need to question where she stood on protecting a woman's right to choose, even when she ran for election in a relatively conservative district. Now as Senator, she has continued the fight for choice, having stood boldly against the dangerous Stupak amendment in the health care debate. She is, and has always been, our unwavering advocate.

This, Mr. Ford, is why women across the state, and indeed around the country, and pro-choice groups such as NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and WCLA - Choice Matters, have spoken out so strongly against your possible candidacy. It is not about bullying. It IS about making our voices heard. You are not pro-choice, you do not share our values and, as such, you will find yourself lacking support from pro-choice women in New York.

Please know that we will work tirelessly to promote Senator Gillibrand's strong record on choice and to expose your revisionist one. We will make sure that the pro-choice people of New York State know that, with your words and with your votes, time and time again, you have not stood with us on the critical value of a woman's right to choose.

As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: "Everyone is entitled to his (or her) own opinion, but not to his (or her) own facts." The facts are clear: you have not been straight with us and you are not an advocate of a woman's right to choose. Senator Gillibrand is our champion and we will work hard to ensure that she continues as Senator from the great State of New York.

Hillary Clinton: “Extraordinary”
Bill Clinton: “Smartest man in any room he‘s in.”
Barack Obama: “Very talented and has a lot of promise.”
Ted Kennedy: “National icon.”
Eliot Spitzer: “Going to be one of most distinguished governors when he’s done.”
Rudy Giuliani: “Soon to be retired permanently to the private sector.”
Michael Bloomberg: “I don’t know him well, but he’s done a great job as mayor.”
Mark Weprin (who was sitting next to Morelle for part of the interview): “He’s a scoundrel.”

Also responding rapidly on behalf of Clinton here in New York is former state Democratic Party Chair Judith Hope, and Queens County Democratic Chairman, Representative Joe Crowley.

That's how outgoing state Democratic Party chairman Herman "Denny" Farrell just described the state party's condition at the end of his five-year tenure.

(For the record, that's slightly different from how newly-elected party co-chair David Pollak, sees it.)

In a speech to party leaders at the Sheraton, Farrell noted that since he took over as state chair from Judith Hope on Dec. 3, 2001, the party has picked up five congressional seats and had a "dramatic increase in Democratic enrollment. "Together," he said, "we did it."

-- Azi Paybarah

Now Mr. Obama is the only author with two books among the top 50 sellers on Amazon.com. Two weeks after the release of The Audacity of Hope, it is in its sixth printing, with 725,000 books in print.

America can’t tell the difference between the book and the candidate. That may be because the book itself is the perfect campaign speech, and is one of the reasons why everyone keeps talking about Mr. Obama and ’08.

“Primaries are 131¼2 and 14 months away, and there are full teams in New Hampshire and Iowa already,” said pollster John Zogby. “And Hillary, who is a household word, and Kerry and Edwards and Gore, who have run before—this is the time to get the word out, and this is the trial balloon.”

The Obamamania trial balloon has gotten oohs and ahs from wonks and dreamers alike. But, with so many donors locked down by Hillary Clinton, and with a few hopelessly devoted to various non-celebrity candidates, is there affection—and wallet—enough for Mr. Obama to raise real money for a campaign? Why, yes! Yes, there is. Sort of.

“I think the execution of phase one of this rollout is obviously a huge success,” said Tom Ochs, of McMahon, Squier and Associates. (Mr. Ochs did Howard Dean’s D.N.C. chair campaign in 2005.) “He has people talking about it, and in a way that diminishes all the other candidates—except Hillary.”

That’s sort of the catch to the whole Obama thing. To think that a couple of weeks of even the most bonkers-rabid positive attention can spell the end of Mrs. Clinton, or her machine, is crazy talk. She has been at the center of all ’08 conversations, except maybe in certain parts of Nashville or in the offices of Al Gore’s Current TV.

And so just as everyone was getting a little bit sick of talking about Hillary ’08, here comes the arrival of another star lawyer—way greener, sure, but with the same capacity for workload.

By contrast with that well-oiled army of robots, Mr. Obama is downright D.I.Y. He filed chunks and chapters of his book to Crown sometimes as late as midnight and 3 a.m. People who worked with him on the project characterized his style, more or less, as delightfully unpredictable. “I’m calling from Djibouti!” Lucinda Bartley, an assistant editor at Crown, remembers him saying. “Where can I find a fax machine?”

So far, the book, and the accompanying publicity campaign, has worked very well. “I would say it has fulfilled our most optimistic best-case scenario,” said Steve Ross, senior V.P. and publisher of Crown.

“People are psyched,” Ms. Bartley said.

The escalating talk of a Presidential run “was more like icing on the cake,” Mr. Ross said.

“I know, standing next to him at that Barnes & Noble, person after person came up to him and said, ‘Please run for President, Senator Obama—the country needs you,’ and that was a small taste of the kind of public response that he’s gotten,” Mr. Ross said. “We have a publicist with him and the stories she tells, with the mobs of people chanting ‘Obama for President,’ and the pleas in their hearts and eyes, and you can hear it in their voices. He’s become the projection of their hopes and dreams—and at a time of disillusionment.”

“I could lie to you and minimize the thing,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s media consultant. “The reaction he has engendered has been extraordinary.”

As for his ’08 campaign? “I wouldn’t place a timetable on him,” Mr. Axelrod said. “All of us are mindful of the calendar, but he has some advantages that are apparent. I don’t think he has to step out on the 8th of November, and he certainly has time in the weeks and the months afterward.”

If he is running for President, what’s going on right now could be his window of opportunity. “This gives him an advantage,” said Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report. “But that advantage is about to run out. It’s not a meaningful one, and Clinton won’t have those shackles on for much longer.”

“You have four entitlement candidates,” Mr. Zogby said. “Hillary: ‘It’s my turn and a woman’s turn.’ And Al Gore, who says, ‘I won, remember me? And I’m pure on the war.’ John Kerry, who says, ‘Al Gore got 50 million votes, I got 57 million votes.’ John Edwards: ‘I ran for V.P.!’ All of a sudden, you’ve got somebody who represents 25 percent of the party because he’s African-American and represents an enthusiasm and excitement that none of those four do.”

“This race enters a whole new phase at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 8,” Ms. Duffy said.

One Week Out

On Saturday night, in the grand whale-filled room of the Museum of Natural History, steak was served. The evening was a Clinton Foundation benefit, and there was a silent auction; items included a signed Keith Richards guitar. Bill and Hillary Clinton sat at separate tables.

The press was, once again, up in some balcony. “This is definitely Barack’s big buzz moment,” said New York Times reporter Marc Santora, “and he’s got a book to sell—so I’m not even sure if he’s going to run. Colin Powell did the same thing when his book was about to come out. He sort of flirted with the idea of running but then he never ran.”

“If it came down to a face-off between Barack and Hillary, I think the Clinton people have a lot more favors they could call in,” said another reporter. “I mean, look at this event tonight. Barack couldn’t pull something like this together.”

Mr. Obama’s people don’t disagree.

“Listen, one of the great assets she’s got is 15 years of relationships, and there are a lot tracks laid if she decides to run,” Mr. Axelrod said.

“Oh yeah,” he said of Mrs. Clinton’s potential Presidential campaign. “It’s ‘just add water,’ you know?”

According to the index of Mr. Obama’s book, Mrs. Clinton is mentioned twice—once as a spouse, and another time in a group of Democrats.

In fact, she is also mentioned a third, non-indexed time. In a discussion of how Democrats are painted as weak and without guiding principles, Mr. Obama wrote, “A vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that runs against type is immediately labeled calculating.”

At the Council on Foreign Relations, at 1 p.m. on Halloween, she spoke quite well to 250 or so finance and policy wonks on the subject, largely, of Middle East policy.

Three times in his introduction, the council’s chairman, Peter Peterson, referred to her former First Lady status. Then, in her speech, Mrs. Clinton apologized to the political scientists in the room before she attacked the Bush administration’s “false choice between realism and idealism.” She said she would like to send more troops to Afghanistan.

“Hope,” Mrs. Clinton said, “is not a policy.”

She was talking about Iran and the Bush White House. Was she also dismissing an audacious young Senator and his book?

Mr. Obama is mentioned zero times in the 567 pages of Ms. Clinton’s Living History. Of course, that book is now all of three years old, well predating Mr. Obama’s national career.

Of course, that book is also peppered with the words “First Lady,” a phrase that rarely, if ever, crosses her lips now.

But The Audacity of Hope is just so much more recent. Everyone likes what’s shiny and new.

Donors Get Ready

But do they put their money there?

Between Oct. 5 and Election Day, Mr. Obama will have flown in to give support to, at minimum, 41 candidates, and at most, 50 candidates. On Halloween he was with Jim Doyle in Wisconsin. On Nov. 2, he would see Jim Webb in Virginia and Bob Menendez in New Jersey. On Nov. 3, Deval Patrick in Massachusetts; on Nov. 4, Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

And then, on Nov. 5, he will campaign with Harold Ford Jr. in the close Tennessee Senate race seen as, among other things, a bellwether of African-American electability.

“I think he’s a very exciting young person and there’s just a great, great future ahead of him, and I’m very happy about that, but I’m already strongly committed to Senator Clinton,” said Judith Hope, the former New York State Democratic Party chair.

“I have a very open mind during this process and I’ve been down this road enough times to know it’s exceedingly unpredictable,” Ms. Hope said. “It’s basically too early to rule out any candidate now.”

“In the donor community, especially in New York,” said one professional Democratic fund-raiser, “you’re going to see people hedge their bets—you’re going to see people give money to Hillary, but they’re going to spread it out too.”

“They’re all here and all very quietly meeting people and building relationships. And literally, when Nov. 7 happens, they’ll go into high gear,” said the fund-raiser.

“There are people who gave money to Mark Warner and are pissed off right now, and say, ‘Why’d we give you all that money?’ With Hillary, they’re not gonna say, ‘Uh! What a waste of money!’ because she’s so good, she’ll have that seat as long as she wants it.”

“I’m undecided,” said one New York Democratic donor. “I’m concerned about Hillary’s ability to carry it out and I’m concerned if Barack is ready.”

“There’s an inevitability and invincibility about Hillary, so this makes it kind of interesting,” she said. And: “It doesn’t look like as though people are running to be Hillary’s running mate.”

Another donor said he was decidedly in the camp of Mrs. Clinton, but did see a lot of undecideds around town. “Obama certainly has a hot hand right now, so he’s not just any other Senator, and he’s not some governor throwing his hat in the ring,” he said.

Others near the Clintons had stronger things to say about Mr. Obama.

“If the Democrats wanna lose 49 states, they can nominate Barack Obama,” said Democratic donor and Friend of Hillary John A. Catsimatidis. “He’s not ready to be President.

“I think if Hillary wants the nomination,” he said, “there’s no one in the Democratic Party that has the power to stop her.”

“I think the world of Barack Obama,” said another Democratic donor, who is committed to a non-Clinton candidate. “But I think he’s a little late to get going, and very young and unseasoned. I think he’s quite good and impressive, but I’m not going to do anything now.

“I think Hillary is very viable,” she said, “but I don’t know if she can capture the hearts and minds of the American people, I have serious doubts about that.

“I think Obama’s terrific,” she said, “and maybe if I weren’t attached to somebody, I would.”

Not everyone was ready to talk, even as the checkbooks were about to be torn apart page by page. “It’s not even November yet, and already you people are all over her,” said the secretary of one Democratic donor on Oct. 30.

Oh, but now it is.

—with additional reporting by Spencer Morgan

This morning, Mark Green pulled out the triple endorsement of David Dinkins, Judith Hope and Marty Markowitz. [In an earlier version, I tied these endorsements to the McCall/Cuomo race in 2002. Many of you were kind enough to let me know that I was wrong to do so. Firstly, Dinkins endorsed Mark for mayor over Freddy and Mark had worked for the Dinkins administration, so they go way back. Secondly, Hope wasn't the state chairman during that primary, as I first wrote. It was, and still is, Herman Denny Farrell. Lastly, it was 4 years ago and some people have moved on.]

Not to be outdone, Andrew not only unveiled his website, but announced veteran media men David Axelrod and Jef Pollock are joining his team (something this site anticipated earlier).

--Azi Paybarah

Crowds were big; polls were nudging up; money was pouring in (so much, the campaign was having a tough time getting rid of it before public financing kicked in); reporters were being nice; and Dubya, bless him, was continuing to be Dubya.

The latest: telling Cuban-American supporters in Tampa that the fiend Castro was turning their imprisoned island homeland into the destination of choice for sex tourists.

The proof: Fidel boasting to Oliver Stone that Havana hookers were the cleanest, best educated anyplace.

Mr. Kerry offered no reaction to the bearded Commie dictator's slander against American whores. Having just finished using Mr. Bush as a hockey puck before 4,000 roaring members of the NAACP, he was focused on heading to Nantucket for a few days of sea, sun and scribbling his convention acceptance speech.

"I cut and paste, the old scissors and paste, write it out, have somebody type it up, read it, sleep on it, see how shitty it is in the morning," he told the boys on the bus-except it's no longer a bus, but a custom-fitted 757, on which plenty of girls ride, too.

According to ABC's The Note , Mr. Kerry quickly amended: "Sorry, wrong word. 'Bad,' it is."

Apology aside, it was a good sign. Anytime John Kerry allows himself to use "fuck it up" (as in describing what George Bush's doing to Iraq in Rolling Stone ), "shitty" or " Spaccare la faccia, porco! " (a pungency picked up at a Swiss boarding school, The Boston Herald reports), he's feeling great.

"Fabulous," Mr. Kerry described his mood.

Oh-oh, boy-o. Didn't Teddy tell you about the Irish curse? Soon as you say "fabulous," hold on to your hat for "awful."

Sure enough, the word was hardly out than Judith Hope blew her top.

If you've been reading the New York Post , listening to Rush or have Republican neighbors close enough so you can hear them hooting while watching Fox News, you're aware of the reason. If not, a three-step recap:

The Kerry campaign failed to include on its roster of convention speakers the junior Senator from New York (you may recall she used to be First Lady of the United States).

Ms. Hope, the former chairwoman of the New York Democratic Party and a very good friend of the slighted Senator, was not happy.

Ms. Hope registered annoyance in a fashion calculated to attract Mr. Kerry's attention.

"Total outrage" were the exact words she sputtered to the Associated Press. "A slap in the face, not personally for Hillary Clinton, but for every woman in the Democratic Party and every woman in America."

Then, after faint-praising a female scheduled to speak-Christie Vilsack, spouse of Iowa governor Tom ("I'm sure [she] is a wonderful woman," she allowed of Christie, whose endorsement was the first rock in the Kerry landslide)-Ms. Hope did her Tony Soprano impersonation.

She sure hoped Mr. Kerry would "correct this omission," she said, because there was this e-mail message she'd composed to more than 1,000 New York women-just coincidentally, "many major donors to the Kerry campaign." And, well, all it would take to send it was one tap of the "Enter" key.

Ms. Hope was probably mistaken about every person in America with XX chromosomes feeling dissed (Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney, one imagines, absorbed the news with equanimity), and in a bomb-damage-assessment chat with your correspondent, Ms. Hope-a good egg, once you get to know her-expressed sincere-sounding chagrin at the rhetoric employed. "I was mad," she confessed.

The detonation, in any case, produced the desired effect: Not 24 hours later, Mr. Kerry was on the horn with Hillary, asking if she'd please be so kind as to introduce her boy Bill at the convention. And Hill, being a better sport than her husband (who was still going on about The Washington Post functioning as patsy for Ken Starr while hustling his book in Europe last week), said sure-then had her office tell Judy to shut up.

End of story? Au contraire , dear reader. Shakedown Season has only just begun.

It rolls around every four years about this time, when an interest group with an ax to grind presents whoever happens to be the Democratic Presidential nominee with a choice: Cough up, or face maximum political embarrassment.

The demands vary, never the outcome: Everybody pays; everybody swears they didn't; and everybody-payer and paid alike-pretends they're good chums afterward, just like Judy and John are doing today. That's the game.

To see how it was played on this occasion-and how it will be multiple times the next few months-requires some CSI -style stage-setting, starting with a fill-in on Judy Hope.

An Arkansas transplant with Bill Clinton's smile, Dick Daley's elbows and more passion than the two of them put together, Ms. Hope made her initial splash as supervisor of East Hampton Town, where a Democrat getting elected anything is even rarer than a cheap summer rental. She performed ably and indefatigably, and in 1995 became the first of her gender to lead the state party, which was $750,000 in the hole and had just seen George Pataki whack Mario Cuomo. After an unpaid year at a borrowed desk in a borrowed office dealing with process servers, Ms. Hope dramatically rectified the situation on all fronts-in the bargain leading the charge to cleanse the 219-year-old New York State Constitution of a total of 170 gender-discriminatory references.

There were bumps en route, however.

She proved, for starters, to have a mouth on her, saying of Al D'Amato, "He would have a carnival at a Holocaust memorial if he thought it would get him another vote." (Overstatement, but not by much.) Unlike her mostly invisible male predecessors, who tended to keep favorites to themselves, she also took noisy sides about who ought to run for what. When Senator Pothole seemed vulnerable in 1998, for instance, she proclaimed Bobby Kennedy Jr. "the best guy" to take him on, and moaned that one of the "frustrations" of her job was having to sort through lesser others. (As events bore out, second-stringer Chuck Schumer substituted just fine.)

Two years later, Ms. Hope backed registration-switching former Republican incumbent Mike Forbes over tireless Democratic vineyard worker Regina Seltzer to run for Congress in her home district against fireworks-family son Felix Grucci. The upshot was bipartisan distaste for Mr. Forbes, who disappeared in a light show that would have awed George Plimpton. Undeterred, Ms. Hope then called upon Carl McCall and Andrew Cuomo-who were vying to be sacrificial lamb for Mr. Pataki-to be big boys, sit down and figure out which of them ought to withdraw, so as to avoid a repeat of the Mark Green–Freddie Ferrer mud-sling. Neither appreciated the advice; Ms. Hope turned in her resignation two days later, saying she was worn out and planned to, anyway; and it was left to Bill Clinton to force the hemlock cup upon his Housing and Urban Development Secretary, saving Andy a lot of money he'd later need for divorce proceedings.

Ms. Hope is best known, though, as the seed-planter who suggested Hillary Clinton's Senate run, as attested to in Living History by the author herself. Ms. Hope succeeded, of course, but not before drawing the ire of Common Cause for messing around with federal campaign-finance laws by using state party money to create television commercials urging the First Lady to run. Once Hillary suited up, Ms. Hope publicly urged her to "give up her day job." Maybe, she added, Hillary should "put a cot in that house in Chappaqua and move in there"-prompting the Republican National Committee to thoughtfully dispatch a cot to the White House west gate.

Hillary didn't take the advice (you wouldn't leave a husband like Bill alone, either), and won anyway when Rudy Giuliani's prostate cancer made cluck Rick Lazio her opponent. She hadn't been in her new job long before Ms. Hope was pushing a run for President, a cause endorsed by Mr. Clinton. When, after protracted teasing, Hillary finally declined, Ms. Hope switched to Howard Dean: "Harry Truman with a medical degree," she hailed him. Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire and numerous elsewheres disagreed, but Ms. Hope was a bitter-ender, urging Mr. Dean to drop plans to make Wisconsin his last stand and crash his Zero into the New York primary-forget about John Kerry getting cut up.

Ms. Hope, in short, was no great fan of the person who'll be accepting the Democratic nomination next week. Nor, until extremely recently, was Bill Clinton-and the jury's still out on his sincerity. The timing of his memoirs gives pause, as does his less than ringing endorsement (Mr. Kerry has a shot at being "a good President," says five-star 42); his kind words for Dubya on everything from Iraq to the recession; and-best evidence yet that the conspiracy theorists may be right and he wants Mr. Kerry to lose so the missus can run in '08-the advice he's been dispensing. Dutch-uncled Bill to John, according to The Boston Globe : "Campaign as though Iraq was stable, the economy was going great guns, and bin Laden was dead." And, while you're at it, "avoid cultural issues."

In other words, run on your dazzling personality.

Add it all up, and you can understand why the Kerry campaign decided that having one Clinton addressing the Democratic National Convention was quite enough, thank you.

Mr. Kerry's people didn't come right out and say so, of course-stupid, they're not. Instead, they fibbed that the reason for not having Hillary on the prime-time podium was that she "hadn't asked." When it was pointed out that bashfulness hadn't prevented Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama from getting an invitation to deliver the keynote address, a new explanation issued, namely that the Democratic women Senators decided they'd appear en bloc, with their senior member, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, doing the orating. This had the benefit of being true. Mostly, at any rate. Unmentioned, but even truer, is that Hillary's popularity doesn't exactly extend the length and breadth of the land. She's also not Queen of the Senate-that title goes to Dianne Feinstein of California.

In the end, though, Judy Hope's willingness to burn the house down trumped, and John Kerry caved.

Net-net: Hillary Clinton will likely be greeted by applause stormier than that which meets John Kerry, and Karl Rove has new material for flip-flop commercials.

There've been other backtrackings at gunpoint of late, shakedown being a pastime any Democrat who's aggrieved and organized can play. A few weeks ago, Donna Brazile-who did such a swell job managing Al Gore's Presidential campaign-took her turn by announcing, "Don't expect me to go out and say John Kerry is a great man and a visionary if you're not running ads on African-American or Hispanic cable networks." Mr. Kerry, who'd already been taking heat for not having the requisite number of black and Hispanics on his staff ("He is generally surrounded by white folks, and that concerns me," South Carolina Democratic Congressman James Clyburn groused to The Times ), got the message: Last week he unveiled a $2 million advertising campaign targeted at blacks.

Did this hush the grumbling? It did not. Because Mr. Kerry neglected to pay the necessary obeisance of first running the ads past the members of the Congressional Black Caucus. They made their displeasure loud and clear. "Lackluster to say the least," caucus chairman Elijah Cummings of Maryland adjudged the effort to the L.A. Times . "Very disappointing," agreed Representative Barbara Lee of Oakland; "Horrible," chimed Representative Gregory Meeks of New York.

Result: The ads are being recut.

The good news for demographically minded Democrats is that having been burnt, John Kerry's fireproofing himself in every conceivable way. He now has a woman as campaign manager and as press secretary (added plus: The gals are sharper than the guys were). "All-stars" of color have been added to the middle reaches, The Washington Post 's Colbert I. King reports; ditto the "community outreach senior leadership." A Latino is now one of the national co-chairs (presumably, he prescreened the just-launched, largest-ever Hispanic ad buy in Presidential campaign history). And separate apparatchiks have been designated to attend to Asian-Pacific Islanders, blacks, Hispanics and Jews-not to mention the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community.

Closer to home, Mozambican-native Teresa is responding to insensitivity charges by no longer referring to herself as "African-American"; convert to Judaism Cam Kerry is off in Israel, assuring co-religionists that his goy brother won't get pushed around by Arabs (they don't have a separate "outreach" person); and Mr. Kerry himself has professed being "fascinated" by rap and hip-hop. "There's a lot of poetry in it," he told MTV viewers. "A lot of social energy …. It's important."

It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to placate P. Diddy, whose latest empire expansion is into political king-making, via a candidate question show he's creating for MTV, featuring "real people off the streets."

"I want to be disruptive, because it seems Kerry and Bush are already counting their votes," the Puffster boasted to the New York Post . "I'm going to pull the rug out from under them-they need to work."

Shakedown has been going on a long time in Andy Jackson's party, be it in the guise of anteing up staff positions, paying off pastors for "get-out-the-vote" drives or forking over "expenses" for "community leaders" while they traverse the hustings-such as the $36,000 Jesse Jackson and two bodyguards collected for nine days' work on behalf of George McGovern in 1972, when 36 grand was real money. California Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally used to be a master of the art, but at 78 he's lost a step or two. Not that he's misplaced his roar. Last week, still-Assemblyman Dymally demanded the firing of Arnold Schwarzenegger's commissioner of education, ex-L.A. mayor Richard Riordan, for making a typically ham-handed joke at the expense of a 6-year-old girl he was reading to during a photo op. "Would he have done that to a white girl?" Mr. Dymally thundered about Mr. Riordan, whose foundation has donated millions to reading programs in minority areas. With that, he announced he was getting the NAACP on the case, and would be staging a press conference the next day at the state capitol for further denunciations.

The press conference never took place. Turned out, the girl was white. (Blond hair was the first clue.)

The NAACP-which has adopted bad manners as a marketing strategy-ain't pure, either. Left out of most stories about why Mr. Bush declined its speaking invitation, for example, is that senior NAACP officials have accused the "illegal president" of treating blacks like "prostitutes"; likened his social policies to the Taliban's; and termed his black supporters "ventriloquist dummies." For good measure, the nation's oldest civil-rights organization has also run an ad suggesting that then–Texas Governor Bush sympathized with the two white assailants in the infamous dragging death of a black man in 1998 because he opposed hate-crimes legislation.

Lucky Dubya didn't show up; the welcome would've made for a terrific Karl Rove commercial.

As for Mr. Kerry, he's in the final stages of readying himself for next week's Boston convention, where enforcing ruliness among congenitally-disposed-to-the-opposite Democrats will be up to D.N.C. chairman Bill Richardson. He's a charmer, and Hispanic to boot. If you're keeping a box score, the A.P. says that the 4,300-plus delegates Governor Richardson will be calling to order are 20.3 percent black, 11.3 percent Hispanic, 3.9 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 1.7 percent Native American. Altogether, that makes for 40 percent minority, a record number-and way more than in the U.S. population. So there.

By the way, John, Judy Hope's going to be in attendance, too.

So watch your step.

every unhappy political party is unhappy in its own way. The Democratic Party

of New York is very unhappy, indeed.

The Democrats have just one year to drag Anna Karenina from under

the train and bring her back to life. That's when the party will hold a

gubernatorial primary between Andrew Cuomo, who is white, and H. Carl McCall,

who is black.

"Racial politics are as raw as they could be," said one Democrat

with ties to both camps. But no one seems to have a clue how to avoid another

wreck.

Just a few weeks ago, Republican Party leaders were keeping their

distance from Michael Bloomberg and preparing for the historical inevitability

of losing New York's City Hall to the Democrats. Within hours of Mr.

Bloomberg's surprise win, however, they could barely contain their glee.

"Governor Pataki is going to win next year. Absolutely," former

U.S. Senator Alfonse D'Amato told The

Observer . He'd just finished saying that the coup de grâce for Michael Bloomberg wasn't the commercial featuring

Rudy Giuliani's endorsement, but the one where Democrats and their

partisans-including Congressman Charles Rangel, health-care workers' union head

Dennis Rivera and teachers' union president Randi Weingarten-were criticizing

their own nominee, Mark Green.

Democrats know how much this hurt them. And this has left them

deeply unhappy-more unhappy even than in 1994, when they lost both the

Governor's mansion and the state attorney general's office.

That they could blame on national trends: Newt Gingrich and his

Contract with America. Today's unhappy state, however, has everything to do

with the internal workings of their own party and the rifts that are far from

being healed.

"To lose New York, and the way we lost it!" lamented a high-level

Democratic operative not affiliated with either the Green or Ferrer campaigns.

"There's a lot of finger-pointing, and all of it's earned. All of it."

"It's such a mess," added another operative. "The Mark [Green]

people are all pissed, Roberto [Ramirez, the Bronx Democratic chair] is

half-cocked, and I don't think Freddy [Ferrer] comes out a winner. Nobody's a

winner."

As for the Green partisans: "It is unspeakable for us to have

blown this campaign, us as Democrats. It's a disaster!"

Republicans can't believe their luck. "It was pretty

astonishing," said Kieran Mahoney, Governor Pataki's political strategist, of

Mr. Green. "He ran the worst possible campaign in the primary, the runoff and

the general election. The guy had as close to a lay-down hand as you can have,

and he lost."

It is what he lost-besides the Mayoralty-that has Republicans

gloating. As early as election night at B.B. King's Blues Club, Republican

Party executive director Patrick McCarthy was cheerfully counting his chips:

half the Hispanic vote, a quarter of the black vote-both unprecedented for any

Republican in New York City. And many New York City Democrats have now pulled

the lever three times for a Republican, he noted, and each time "it gets

easier."

What's wrong with a fourth time, in November 2002, for George

Pataki?

Bye Bye, Hope

Of course, much can happen in the next 11 months. But the past

two months have laid down tracks-largely along racial lines-that could portend

an even worse train wreck for the Democrats and two of their biggest stars next

year.

The first casualty of the Mayoral campaign was Judith Hope, the

Democratic Party chair, who issued a statement at 7 p.m. on Friday evening,

Nov. 9-a time guaranteed to minimize coverage in the week's least-read

newspaper editions-saying that she would resign on Dec. 3.

Ms. Hope took over the party

shortly after the 1994 debacle at the behest of Clinton adviser Harold Ickes.

Then the party was $500,000 in debt and without an office, a staff or control

of the state's highest office. Now the party is in the black and has a paid

staff and a professional press operation. Under Ms. Hope's leadership,

Democrats gained a U.S. Senate seat, held onto another, won back the state

attorney general's office and scored impressive victories in the Republican

stronghold of Nassau County. Even those who criticize her said Ms. Hope was a

formidable fund-raiser and cheerleader for the party.

But unlike Republican leaders, Ms. Hope was never able to crack

heads and force unity. This became most evident in the days following the

Democratic primary, when Mr. Ferrer and his supporters indignantly objected to

some of the tactics used by supporters of Mr. Green.

In the waning days of the runoff, Ms. Hope issued a statement

calling on both candidates to cool their jets, but spokeswoman Serena Torrey

insisted at the time that the admonishment "wasn't directed at any one

candidate in particular." At the same time, according to a Ferrer adviser who

said he was present at the time of the conversation, Ms. Hope was calling Mr.

Ferrer and saying, "What did you think would happen when you took [the Reverend

Al] Sharpton's endorsement?"

But the end for Ms. Hope came

the day after the Mayoral election, when she said that either Mr. McCall or Mr.

Cuomo should drop out of the gubernatorial race. The statement took both

candidates by surprise, according to aides, and won condemnation not only from

the campaigns, but from Senator Charles Schumer, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer

and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Republicans marveled. "You don't say 'We can't win unless X

happens' unless you know X is going to happen," said one high-level strategist.

"That's Politics 101."

"Judith lit a fuse when she went out there and said 'No primary,'

and now the bomb has gone off," said one Democrat with ties to the party

apparatus.

Ms. Hope had long been hinting that she had spent enough time in

the unpaid post. But the timing of her departure was certainly not her own

choice. On Friday, Nov. 9, operatives loyal to Ms. Hope were convinced that

Roberto Ramirez was going to "make a move." They were certain he and Mr.

Sharpton were planning a press conference the week of Nov. 12 to wreak some

kind of havoc. (Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Sharpton did not return calls, but one

member of the Ferrer cabal insisted this wasn't true.)

Ms. Hope's partisans were playing for time, trying to put

together support for Assemblyman Herman (Denny) Farrell to take over the party

reins. They urged party stalwarts to insist that Ms. Hope was staying.

As late as Friday afternoon, when many Democrats had already been

told that Ms. Hope was out and would be replaced by Mr. Farrell, Michael

Schell, the No. 2 official in the party, was telling the Associated Press that

Ms. Hope wasn't leaving, that she had the support of the county chairs and "was

looking forward to the Governor's race." The party spokeswoman, Ms. Torrey, was

telling reporters, "She is not resigning, and any suggestion to the contrary is

a complete fabrication."

At 6:45 p.m.-after Mr. Farrell had lined up the necessary

support-Ms. Torrey paged reporters to say that Ms. Hope was issuing a statement

at 7 p.m. announcing that she was resigning effective Dec. 3.

Mr. Farrell is the Manhattan Democratic chair, and as chair of

the powerful Assembly Ways and Means Committee, is one of the highest-ranking

African-Americans in the State Legislature. He also, as one Democrat put it, " is Shelley Silver." That consolidates

Mr. Silver's power inside the party-a thicket into which neither Mr. Schumer

nor Senator Hillary Clinton seemed inclined to wade. It is also, according to

some Latino officials, a cynical attempt to pit African-Americans against

Latinos.

Nevertheless, Democrats are trying to put on a happy face. "The

Democratic Party had been on an unprecedented run," said pollster Jeffrey

Plaut, whose firm worked for Mr. Ferrer. "And the loss in the Mayor's race was

a bad one. But overall,the state is trending Democratic."

As early as the morning after the election, supporters of Andrew

Cuomo were spinning that their candidate was the least hurt by the fallout from

the runoff because, unlike Mr. McCall, Mr. Cuomo wasn't relying on an obviously

divided Democratic Party establishment.

Added chief Cuomo adviser Dan Klores, "In the long term, we'll

end up being healthier. You gotta give people some time to sit down

face-to-face and talk things through and just, you know, be mensches . You have to ask what's best

for the constituents, not just what's best for our own little fiefdoms. Right

now it's too open. People are too wounded, too angry, too ambitious."

Then there's the argument that Mr. McCall was one of the earliest

supporters of Mr. Ferrer, and had counted heavily on a Ferrer win to put

together the black-Latino coalition Mr. McCall would rely on for his own

campaign. That he got behind Mr. Green after the runoff left him further than

ever from that coalition and its statewide potential.

But McCall advisers see a different calculus. "It's lose-lose"

for Mr. Cuomo, they say. "To win, he has to keep Carl from winning the

primary," said one. "And if he keeps Carl from winning the primary …

psychologically, it will be tough for blacks and Hispanics to pull the lever

for him. And he can't get the vote anywhere else with Michael Bloomberg out for

George Pataki."

One Democrat who has managed several city and state campaigns

said the racial volatility in the party essentially defangs Andrew Cuomo, who

is used to playing hard and tough. "We've had a lot of years with the Cuomos.

They're nasty people. They're like the Clintons; they'll do anything to win,"

the Democrat said. Mr. Cuomo will now have to pull his punches against Mr.

McCall-perhaps in areas that should be fair game.

In response, a spokesman for

Mr. Cuomo, Peter Ragone, said it was "a disgraceful comment and an example of

exactly how the race card is being played in the Democratic Party. Anyone who

has spoken to or read any comments from Andrew Cuomo over the past several days

would know that he has been calling for clean primaries that are not divisive."

Popular Pataki

Either way, both Democrats are in trouble. And though things can

change-voters are becoming increasingly impatient with officeholders, and the

economy is in a downward spiral-important factors like money are established

now. Having a Republican in City Hall dries up the money spring for Democrats,

and Governor Pataki already has many times in the bank what either Mr. McCall

or Mr. Cuomo has.

Meanwhile,

Mr.Pataki's popularity rating, post–Sept. 11, is at 80 percent, his highest ever.

Even before the World Trade Center attack, he was what pollster Jeffrey Plaut

described as "a Republican with Democratic policies in issues like health care

and the environment." Consultant Norman Adler, who has worked for both

Democrats and Republicans, calls the Governor "unbeatable-Democrats have very

benign feelings towards him."

As for the Democrats, they're still nursing their wounds.

"To this day, no one from the Green campaign asked me for help,"

said Bill Lynch, a former deputy mayor under David Dinkins who is a vice chair

of the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Lynch said he received calls "every

day" from Bloomberg advisers Alan Gartner and Das Velez.

The Thursday after the runoff-after the so-called solidarity

meeting to address some of the Ferrer camp's concerns-Mr. Green met with Ferrer

advisers, including Mr. Lynch, Mr. Rivera and Mr. Ramirez. According to Mr.

Lynch and others who were present, Mr. Green told them, "I don't need you to

win; I need you to govern."

Right after that, Mr. Lynch said, "I went to Virginia to work on

Mark Warner's campaign."

buy City Hall.

On Oct. 20, the same day that Democratic State Senator Olga

Mendez crossed party lines and endorsed Mr. Bloomberg as "truly qualified to

run our city," the Bloomberg campaign quietly paid $40,000 to a small political

organization known as the Caribe Democratic Club, campaign records show. This

little-known East Harlem organization might have eluded the attention of Mr.

Bloomberg's advisers, if it weren't for one thing: The club was founded by Ms.

Mendez's father-in-law, and Ms. Mendez has served as the club's district

leader-a state party position that makes her the club's de facto leader-for

more than a decade.

This unlikely cash gift is an example of how Mr. Bloomberg's

campaign-which has spent more than enough money to buy three Thanksgiving

turkeys for each of the one-million-plus voters expected to turn out on Nov.

6-is using his wealth to promote his candidacy in a host of unorthodox ways. In

addition to saturating the airwaves with TV attack ads aimed at Democratic

rival Mark Green, Mr. Bloomberg has spread his cash around with less

conspicuous techniques. He has taken out ads in tiny niche publications around

the city, bought huge amounts of air time on Spanish-language and black radio,

sent out 250,000 "Mike for Mayor" videotapes and rewarded organizations that

back him with loans of prime midtown office space and generous political

contributions.

As the battle for City Hall enters its final week, the

billionaire Republican's unprecedented spending blitz-$41 million and

counting-has begun to worry some top New York Democrats, who blame the huge

spending gap in part on the Democratic National Committee. Senior national

Democrats, they say, have been slow to invest resources and money in the race

to offset Mr. Bloomberg's huge financial advantage-frustrating New York

Democrats and top supporters of Mr. Green, who arestrugglingtoovercomeMr.

Bloomberg's massive financial advantage.

"We put in a proposal for $800,000," said Judith Hope, the

chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, referring to a request for

a donation from the national party that state officials wanted to use for

get-out-the-vote operations. "I've woken up to the fact that it is not going to

happen."

"The support from the national party has so far been meager at

best," added Ken Sunshine, a longtime close friend and top supporter of Mr.

Green. "I hope after this campaign the D.N.C. will lose the phone numbers of

all of the loyal New York donors who traditionally give, give, give, give to

the D.N.C."

Mr. Green is, however, about to get some national help: The Observer has learned that Senator

Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut is expected to campaign for Mr. Green within

days.

Meanwhile, Mr. Green's advisers maintain that they have more than

enough money to close out the campaign, and also that Mr. Bloomberg's ad blitz

has been so all-pervasive that it has begun to work against him. And senior

D.N.C. officials say that Mr. Green's lead in the pre-election polls means

resources may be better invested elsewhere.

"I think one of the things the D.N.C. looks at is what the

polling numbers look like, and Mark has had double-digit leads for weeks now,"

said Bill Lynch, vice chairman of the D.N.C. and a key adviser to Bronx Borough

President Fernando Ferrer, whom Mr. Green defeated in a bitter runoff several

weeks ago.

Such talk is less than reassuring to some top Green backers.

True, Mr. Green maintains a comfortable lead in most polls, but insiders

believe the race may be tightening. And nobody can predict the ultimate effects

of Mr. Bloomberg's massive negative attack.

Mr. Green's backers complain that the national party considers

the race a foregone conclusion. As a result, the New York Democrats said, they

have fallen short in efforts to tap into the national donor base for individual

contributions, and have contributed little in the way of soft money to the

state party for get-out-the-vote operations. While the D.N.C. gave the state

party approximately $1 million to help former Mayor David Dinkins in 1993, it

has only donated $50,000 in such funds for Mr. Green, according to state party

officials.

Several days ago, Mr. Green's fund-raisers made a round of calls

to some top donors in an effort to set up a private breakfast with D.N.C.

chairman Terry McAuliffe and Ms. Hope, according to a top Democratic donor with

ties to the Green campaign. The idea, the donor said, was to raise some soft

money to help Mr. Green in the race's final days.

The goal was to approach donors who had already given the Green

campaign the maximum contribution allowed under the city's public

campaign-finance rules and persuade them to give money to the state or national

party. Such unregulated gifts - designed for "party-building" activities -

could then be used for attacks on Mr. Bloomberg and for get-out-the-vote

activities, the donor said. The breakfast has not yet taken place, and in fact

has been postponed twice because of scheduling conflicts.

Although Mr. Green opted into the city's voluntary

campaign-finance system, which limits fund-raising and spending in return for

giving candidates public money, he doesn't have to adhere to the spending

ceiling for the general election because his rival, Mr. Bloomberg, is not

participating in the system. That's why Mr. Green can benefit from a late rush

of contributions and an infusion of soft money.

Priorities Elsewhere?

The national party-which often finds itself besieged by requests

for resources by operatives around the country-has sometimes been reluctant to

play a role in New York City contests. But this year, the battle for City Hall

has far-reaching implications for the national party. If Mr. Bloomberg were to

win, it would be the first time that a Republican candidate succeeded a

Republican Mayor, and it would signal a severe lack of confidence in the

Democratic leadership during a time of crisis.

"The New York City Mayoralty is a first real step to winning back

the [New York] Governorship and the White House," said Robert Zimmerman, a

member of the D.N.C. and a major Green supporter. "This race should be a

national priority."

The sluggish response by national Democrats has prompted some

behind-the-scenes friction between Mr. McAuliffe and Ms. Hope. Early last

spring, the D.N.C. announced that its priorities were gubernatorial races in

New Jersey and Virginia and the mayor's race in Los Angeles. Ms. Hope, alarmed

by what she saw as a downgrading of New York as a targeted political battleground,

traveled immediately to D.N.C. headquarters in Washington to get more resources

for New York.

Ms. Hope recently won several breakthroughs: $75,000 for races in

Nassau County and Syracuse, and a personal appearance by Mr. McAuliffe in the

city in the wake of the contentious runoff between Mr. Green and Mr. Ferrer.

In terms of attracting concrete help towards the Mayor's race,

however, Ms. Hope's mission has fallen somewhat short of expectations.

There are several reasons that an outpouring of aid from the

national party has yet to materialize. The D.N.C. is strapped for cash as it

tries to help finance candidates throughout the country without the help of a

Democrat in the White House. Making matters worse, political fund-raising has

been flat since Sept. 11. At the same time, political insiders are watching

other races more closely, particularly the 

gubernatorial battles in the national battleground states of New Jersey

and Virginia, where Democrats are looking to pick up two governor's seats.

"If we win in Virginia or New Jersey, Terry gets a big notch on

his belt," said one D.N.C. insider. "He probably doesn't feel that he would get

any credit for winning in an overwhelmingly Democratic town like New York."

Meanwhile, the net effects of Mr. Bloomberg's enormous spending

are unclear. He has offered what appear to be unprecedented cash rewards to

political groups who support him. Although candidates often give token

contributions-say, a couple thousand bucks-to political clubs that back them,

the $40,000 gift to Caribe is surprising, to say the least. It is particularly

surprising coming on the same day that Mr. Bloomberg accepted the endorsement

of the club's district leader, thanking Ms. Mendez for her "brave and

independent support."

The effect of Mr. Bloomberg's saturation of the airwaves and

print media is also unclear. In particular, the constant presence of Bloomberg

ads in tiny publications around the city seem to be having an unintended

consequence: They are persuading some voters that Mr. Bloomberg is trying to

reach them while Mr. Green, who doesn't have the resources to advertise in such

places, is willfully ignoring them.

"Bloomberg is spending a fortune," one Green supporter said. "He

can hit every single niche market. When you have the kind of money Green has,

you can't."

Mr. Harding has been talking quite a bit with Mr. Ickes about the Senate campaign, according to the friend. And Mr. Ickes has good reason to stay in touch with the Liberal boss, because Mr. Harding's party can deliver tens of thousands of votes in a statewide election. The Liberal Party's endorsement could decide what is expected to be an extremely close race.

"Harold touches base with [Mr. Harding] frequently," the friend said. "He asks him where things are."

And in a previous conversation with the Democratic Party's state chairman, Judith Hope, Mr. Harding apparently sought to quash yet another round of rumors, according to an associate of Ms. Hope. At the time, political insiders were confidently predicting that Mr. Harding would secretly help Mr. Giuliani by running a spoiler candidate on his party's line, intending to siphon crucial votes from Mrs. Clinton.

But Mr. Harding wanted Ms. Hope to carry a clear message to Mrs. Clinton, according to the associate: He hadn't made up his mind at all. So when, he asked, would Mrs. Clinton be calling him?

Through a friend, Mr. Harding denied the conversation with Ms. Hope. But the person close to Ms. Hope insisted that he had indeed sought to convey the message to Mrs. Clinton.

These developments suggest that cracks and strains may soon develop in what has long been New York's most blissful political marriage of convenience: the relationship between Mr. Harding and Mr. Giuliani. In providing Mr. Giuliani with the Liberal line in the mayoral races of 1989, 1993 and 1997, Mr. Harding became one of the Mayor's most important political allies. Thanks to public perception of his intimacy with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Harding's lobbying business exploded and two of his sons ascended to lofty positions in city government. Mr. Harding and Mr. Giuliani remain close and have often talked politics over late-night dinners and cognac.

But those evening bull sessions may soon become a thing of the past, as the Giuliani-Harding relationship comes under the strains of Mr. Giuliani's shifting political imperatives. In a simpler world, Mr. Harding would simply hand his endorsement to Mr. Giuliani. According to one top supporter of the Mayor, however, Mr. Giuliani has all but decided to pursue the ballot line of the Conservative Party, which is considered vital for any Republican seeking statewide office. But the Conservative Party refuses to endorse candidates who also run on the Liberal line.

That has left Mr. Harding pondering three other options, none of which is particularly appetizing. He can leave his party's line blank–but then he'll have played no role in the most-hyped statewide race in a generation. He could endorse Mrs. Clinton–the Liberals generally support Democrats in statewide races–but then his prized relationship with Mr. Giuliani presumably would come to an end.

"If he goes for Hillary, it will have to be with a wink from the Mayor," observed one close associate of Mr. Harding. "And I can't imagine the Mayor winking." Indeed, one mayoral supporter hinted ominously that an endorsement of Mrs. Clinton would mean an end to Mr. Harding's place in the Mayor's inner circle. "If he endorses Hillary, he's obviously not going to have any role with the Giuliani campaign," the Giuliani supporter said.

So the Mayor's allies are hoping that Mr. Harding will embrace a third way–running a left-of-center spoiler candidate against Mrs. Clinton. One top supporter of the Mayor told The Observer that the spoiler option would be "extraordinarily helpful."

So what to do? "I'm not worried," said Herman Badillo, who is Mr. Harding's longtime law partner and Mr. Giuliani's special adviser on education. "[Mr. Harding] likes being in what seems to be a difficult dilemma because he likes to show he can get out of it."

Mr. Harding certainly is a wily fellow. His leadership of the Liberal Party dates back to 1976, when he inherited the mantle of a party that had been formed as an alternative to Tammany Hall machine politics and the communist-leaning American Labor Party. Though the party's original base has all but vanished, Mr. Harding has managed to keep the party–and himself–relevant with a series of cunningly brokered alliances and endorsements.

A Political Throwback

Mr. Harding is almost comically perfect in his role as one of the last of the old-time political bosses. (He has been described as a "one-man smoke-filled room.") A Giuliani insider recalled that Mr. Harding would puff away on Camels during strategy sessions over antipasto in the Gracie Mansion library. He is a large man–viewed from the side, he looks as if he stuffed a cowcatcher under his suit. He speaks in a clipped, nasal tone that sounds something like a cross between a mongoose and Charlie Brown's teacher.

Here is Mr. Harding telling his life story to a reporter a few years ago: "So–thumbnail history of Ray. Born Yugoslavia, 1935. Nazis come in 1941, beat up Dad. Dad reads signals. we go to Italy. Then, 1944–Nazis tell Italians, 'No more Mr. Nice Guy.' Round up Jews, ship us to camp in Calabria. Barbed wire. Machine gun turrets. But no ovens, no work detail–not bad, given what might have happened."

Given Mr. Harding's long and extremely lucrative relationship with Mr. Giuliani, many insiders expect him to do his friend's bidding and go with the spoiler option. But others insist that Mr. Harding may have little choice but to defy the script that political insiders have written for him, an act that would be fraught with all sorts of political peril.

Mr. Harding didn't return several calls requesting an interview. But one Liberal Party member noted that it is no easy task to find a credible third-party candidate. If Mr. Harding finds one who has no effect on the outcome, he will have lost perhaps his main selling point: his ability to persuade politicos that he can make or break their electoral ambitions.

"If the spoiler makes no difference, then the party becomes irrelevant," said Martin Begun, who is on the party's policy committee. "The one thing about Ray Harding is that he doesn't like to be considered irrelevant."

He certainly doesn't. In 1993, when his line pulled enough votes for Mr. Giuliani to squeak past then-Mayor David Dinkins, Mr. Harding went around bragging about his role as "Ray 'margin-of-difference' Harding."

If Mr. Harding does, in fact, run a third-party candidate against Mrs. Clinton, he risks arousing the anger of the city's Democratic establishment, which he may need to keep his business flush and his sons gainfully employed after Mr. Giuliani leaves office. In fact, leading Democrats are so worried about the spoiler option that they are already sounding ominous threats. "If he's smart, he'll keep himself in good Democratic graces to protect his fiefdom after 2001," one top Democrat told The Observer .

Finally, observers say, sooner or later he will have to start worrying about his party's image as an ideologically bereft institution more interested in patronage than in policy. If Mr. Harding fields a candidate designed to help Mr. Giuliani at a time when the Mayor appears to be moving rightward, he risks losing members and credibility. Indeed, any Liberal Party member who believes in the party's platform might not be pleased if the party tacitly aids the Mayor. The party's web site (www.liberalparty.org) offers a range of positions that might elicit sneers from the right-tilting Mr. Giuliani.

The Liberal Party on health care: "We must … complete the design of a universal health-care program for all Americans." On juveniles: "We must … develop a community-based 'aftercare' system … to deal effectively with the thousands of damaged young people among us." On workfare recipients: "We must provide them with … literacy, education and training [and] affordable transportation to get them to work and their children to child care."

For his part, Mr. Giuliani has thrown himself behind Federal tax cuts that slash money for hospital and child care programs, and he has assailed those who oppose a strict workfare system as "apostles of dependency."

If Mr. Harding's history is any guide, he is likely to wiggle out of his strange predicament. Even his enemies marvel at his Houdini-like ability to extricate himself from impossible political quagmires. In 1998, for instance, his party suffered a near-death experience when Wilbur Ross, then the wealthy husband of Mr. Harding's candidate for governor, Betsy McCaughey Ross, suddenly pulled his formidable resources from her campaign. The insiders scripted Mr. Harding's demise, predicting the Liberal Party wouldn't pull the 50,000 votes needed in any gubernatorial election to retain its place on the ballot. He survived.

"He has a lot of skill in maneuvering around land mines, and I'm sure he hasn't lost any of those," Mr. Badillo observed. "I don't know how he'll work it yet. [But in the end], all of us will look with admiration at how he pulled it off."

In this very surreal moment of history, Ms. Hope can be permitted an irrational comment. Somehow it has come to this.

A day after the papers carried news of former White House intern Monica Lewinsky meeting with Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr's deputies in a Manhattan apartment, Ms. Lewinsky and her lawyers struck a deal with Mr. Starr that granted her full immunity. A deal that almost guaranteed that the headlines in the days to come would make the New York Post 's "I Had Sex With Bill" banner, accompanied by a full-lipped photo of Ms. Lewinsky, pristine. The Monica caper was finally peaking.

But who would have guessed that when Mr. Clinton's moment of resolution came, it would become a roadshow in the plutocracy's giddiest and most parodic paradise. And the one location in the United States of America-as it is essentially built around one main road-least equipped to accommodate the mass hysteria and frenzy surrounding it.

Making Mr. Clinton's position appear even more precarious is the increasing prospect that these current events will reach a flash point while the First Family is, as Ms. Hope put it, relaxing in the Hamptons, where every weekend the media elite dons shorts and boat shoes to cohabit and hobnob with the wealthy killers who are paying thousands of dollars to get close to the Clintons.

The First Couple is coming to the Hamptons to raise more than $1 million for the Democratic Party via at least three fund-raisers that will take place over the course of July 31 and Aug. 1.

In light of the events of the last few days, they will now have to devote considerable time to the relaxing prospect of self-preservation. And those who parted with enough dough to get anywhere near the Clintons-from $1,000 to stand on a rope line at Alec Baldwin's and Kim Basinger's Amagansett house to $25,000 per couple to dine at the East Hampton home of investment banker Bruce Wasserstein-may find that, more than another form of status, they may have inadvertently acquired ringside seats to watch Mr. Clinton fight for his political life.

Now, Mr. Clinton has proven again and again that he is an excellent fire walker, able to charm impressive sums of soft money out of his supporters while withstanding lethal amounts of humiliation and pain from the hot coals that his political enemies and the press manage to consistently throw at his feet. As he labors to keep his mojo working over the weekend, Mr. Clinton can also take comfort in one thing. The people who populate this string of ocean-kissed hamlets in the summer months have a lot more in common with him than they do with Mr. Starr. Here, allegations of adultery and wonky real-estate deals generate more excitement than outrage.

"This community is very supportive of [Mr. Clinton]. Much more supportive of him than Washington," said Sally Quinn, who as an author, Washington power-hostess and owner, along with her husband Ben Bradlee, of East Hampton's Grey Gardens, knows both worlds (although it should be noted that she was speaking generally and not to the issues of adultery or real estate).

Year-round Hamptons resident and sometime Transom contributor Steven Gaines, the author of Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons , put it another way. "The people of the Hamptons want desperately for Clinton to be safe. He is the spirit of the bull market," Mr. Gaines explained, which has enabled many men and women to build huge second homes there and drive around in expensive sports cars. Mr. Gaines added that Mr. Clinton "is a baby boomer, and the heart and the soul of the Hamptons are 50-year-old baby boomers who would love to get a blowjob."

Hence, the support that Mr. Clinton will find waiting for him when Air Force One lands in eastern Long Island will not necessarily be of the politically ideologic kind. One person closely involved with the fund-raiser that will be held on Mr. Baldwin's and Ms. Basinger's home described the Hamptons as "ground zero of all the biggest starfuckers you could ever meet in your life." Thus, explained the source, the Baldwin fund-raiser would consist of essentially "800 starfuckers [more recent estimates put the crowd at 1,000 attendees] coming to meet the biggest star there is. "Clinton's a star," explained the source. "He's young. He's vital. He's interesting. How else is he so popular in the face of all this stuff that is going down?"

When The Transom called Mr. Baldwin to talk about his event, he called back to clarify a few things.

"I am not hosting this event," Mr. Baldwin said. "The [Democratic National Committee] came to me and said, can we borrow your house. I said, You got a deal." Mr. Baldwin explained that since he made that agreement, "as things unfold" it has become clear that some inconveniences will be visited upon his neighbors and other Hamptons residents. For them, Mr. Baldwin said he was sorry for any problems that might be caused. Mr. Baldwin's sympathies do not extend, however, to all who may be inconvenienced this weekend.

"I'm talking about the people who are year-round residents," he said. "For those people I have endless good will." For the day-trippers and the "people who go out here there as some part of cultural migration for six or eight weeks because they think that every grain of sand on the beach is some teeny-tiny touchstone of hipness," Mr. Baldwin said, "God bless them, but I'm not interested." Referring to the latter group, Mr. Baldwin said: So [they're] going to be inconvenienced for a day. Boohoo. Oh, boohoo. So they can't go to the Farmers Market. Boohoo. I'm shattered."

Mr. Clinton can also rest assured that Mr. Baldwin won't be bringing up Monicagate when he visits. When The Transom asked the actor if he would be asking the President about Mr. Starr, Mr. Baldwin mistakenly thought we were talking about his antinuclear organization Standing for Truth Against Radiation, which has been lobbying for an independent investigation of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. When we explained to Mr. Baldwin that we were talking about Kenneth Starr's investigation of Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Baldwin replied, "My attitude about that is, I really don't care.

"There are rock-ribbed Republicans who are part of the Republican fabric who only have one dream-" Mr. Baldwin said he did not mean rank-and-file, but professional Republicans, the kind he might be battling himself someday, if he enters politics-"that is, in Clinton, they would hope they have found their Nixon. When Clinton beat Bush, they never got over it. They hate him. They will do anything they can to smear him."

Mr. Baldwin's passion about his politics may be spread pretty thin at the event at his home. One source close to the event contended that if those attending the Baldwin fund-raiser were given a pop quiz on their way into the event and asked to name two of President Clinton's cabinet members, "they wouldn't be able to answer." Why, The Transom asked. Because, said the source close to the Baldwin fund-raiser, "They don't know anything about politics. They're not there as political supporters. They're starfuckers."

When we recounted the "starfuckers" quote to Ms. Quinn, she laughed. "That's a lot of money to pay just to go see somebody. You've got to be really desperate if that's your motive," she said. "If you're not just doing it because you care desperately about the Democratic Party."

Whether fund-raiser ticket sales were politically motivated or not, Mr. Gaines said that the D.N.C.'s $1 million goal seemed low. In happier days, there's no telling how much money Mr. Clinton could have raised. Mr. Gaines called the Hamptons "the honeypot of the nation. Everyone suffers from affluenza here. They're just desperate to spend money to buy status. The [D.N.C.] could have taken truckloads of money out of here. I don't think they understand how rich the Hamptons are."

Some of the Hamptons' wealthiest and/or most influential residents won't be around when the Clintons set foot on East End soil. Billionaire Ronald Perelman has packed his bags and headed to that international capital of hedonism, Ibiza. Mr. Perelman's spokesman Howard Rubenstein would not confirm Mr. Perelman's destination, but he said that the Revlon cosmetics company owner had planned this vacation for a long time. Word is that Mr. Perelman did not want to get caught in the gridlock that is reportedly set to grip the area. Then again, Mr. Perelman may just be being politically astute given that Ms. Lewinsky had been slated for a job at Revlon Group Inc.-which was withdrawn when the Monica trouble began in January.

While Maine is usually popular for Hamptonites seeking to avoid the flood of renters and day-trippers who arrive with August, Spain seems to be popular for those power eliters escaping the First Visit. Ms. Quinn told The Transom that she and Mr. Bradlee were heading to Madrid. If they have already not done so, Ms. Quinn's neighbors on West End Road may want to do the same. If Mr. Clinton does stay at Steven Spielberg's secure home, Quelle Barn (Mr. Wasserstein's home has also been mentioned as a possibility), which is also located on West End Road, travel on the street will no doubt be severely hampered by Secret Service checkpoints, as will any water sports on Georgica Cove.

Since news of the Clintons' visit broke, the chatter at Hamptons cocktail parties has been dominated by nightmarish predictions about the traffic snarls that will result when (and if) sections of the Montauk Highway, the main artery leading from Southampton to Montauk is closed off for security reasons. Asked what might be the best way to deal with the President's visit, East Hampton Village Police Chief Glen Stonemetz said, "I would pick Honolulu."

Despite these intimations of roadway paralysis and worse, Frank Newbold, a vice president at Sotheby's International Realty in East Hampton, said, "Oddly enough, people are looking forward to it. People really want to be in the thick of it." Mr. Newbold said that he's already hearing tales of "guys in black suits with earpieces lining up to get doughnuts at Dreesen's [Excelsior Market]" or "cars with blacked-out windows in front of Steven Spielberg's" home. "People here are so jaded, so blasé," he added, "but the power of the office transcends all that."

Rona Jaffe, author of The Best of Everything , is among those who have forked out $1,000 to attend the Baldwin fund-raiser. Ms. Jaffe explained that she's going "not just to see Clinton, but to see the people who have come to see Clinton." She also added, "I'm not looking forward to it. It's going to be dreadful, but I'm going to make the best of it."

For those Hamptonites who can't quite jack into that transcendent mood (Nick & Toni's will be closed-closed!-on Saturday evening, Aug. 1), the man to blame is venture capitalist Alan Patricof. Mr. Patricof has been one of the President's staunchest supporters and Ms. Hope and other Clinton camp sources contend that he is largely responsible for suggesting that Mr. Clinton come to the Hamptons and for convincing Mr. Wasserstein to throw the relatively intimate dinner for 60 couples at his home. (The dinner seems modeled after one that Mr. Patricof held at his Upper East Side home in January. The price tag then was $30,000 a couple.)

The Transom hears that Mr. Patricof may also be holding a dinner at his home after the Baldwin event-which would allow Mr. Clinton to eat twice-although it's unclear whether that would also be a fund-raising event. Ms. Hope said she knew nothing about it. Mr. Patricof did not return calls.

A spokesman for Mr. Wasserstein also declined to comment on her boss' event, but among those who have paid $25,000 a couple to dine with President Clinton on July 31 are Goldman, Sachs & Company co-chairman Jon Corzine and his wife, Joanne; fashion designer Vera Wang and her husband, Walter Becker; Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein and his wife, Eve; Billy Joel and his current girlfriend Carolyn Beegan; and shoe designer Kenneth Cole and his wife, Maria Cuomo Cole.

On Aug. 1, at least one of the Clintons will attend a reception for approximately 60 people at the home of Eos Foundation founder Jonathan Sheffer and Dr. Christopher Barley. (A rather terse Mr. Sheffer refused to confirm that ticket prices for his event were $5,000.) Then it's on to Chez Baldwin, where an interesting stratification will take place. Ms. Hope explained that there will be a very brief "meet and greet" with the President for those members of the benefit committee "who met their goals" in selling tickets (said to be at least $5,000). The list of these co-chairs on the invitation reads like a comp list to a Manhattan nightclub or movie premiere (which is perhaps why such Republicans as adman Jerry Della Femina said that they received invitations): There's Sony Music Entertainment Inc. chief "Thomas D. Mottola," better known in music circles as Tommy; art dealer Arne Glimcher and his wife, Milly; television producer Robert Morton; actor Robert De Niro; Democratic activist and the former Mrs. Perelman, Patricia Duff; and VH1 chief executive John Sykes. The list is also peppered with young publicists of the moment-publicists who know plenty of people who will spend $250 to stand on the Baldwins' lawn and watch the President greet the people who bought $1,000 tickets-including Lizzie Grubman, Elizabeth Harrison and Lara Shriftman.

Author and Paris Review editor George Plimpton said that he won't be in the Hamptons for Mr. Clinton's visit, but added he was thinking of purchasing a $250 ticket because "I sort of like the idea of standing outside a building in which [Mr. Clinton] is inside.

"This would be a very good story," said Mr. Plimpton, "talking to the people who are outside and know … that they're not going to see [Mr. Clinton] because they haven't paid [for the V.I.P. ticket]." Mr. Plimpton said he thought that Mr. Clinton would eventually have to "come out, to these, these unwashed."

"I think that's going to be the ticket, the $250 ticket," Mr. Plimpton said finally. "You always have the chance of seeing one of the Baldwin children, or a horse! They can see one of the horses," said Mr. Plimpton. "That's a very important, very important ticket."