2012: Corzine, Orin Kramer raising for Obama. [Page Six]

1964: Bill Clinton visited Times Square, saw "a hooker approach a man in a gray flannel suit." [Politico]

The Lede:  "You can't find a hooker in Times Square anymore, former President Bill Clinton lamented Wednesday." [Adam Lisberg]

John Cook: He can't wait to read serious snark about Trump's birther-fueled campaign. [Gawker]

Birthers: Romney says "The citizenship test has been passed." [Aliyah Shahid]

Cuomo Intervention: Proposed bill would give electric companies permanent property tax abatements, "removing the basis" for an expected 12 rate hike in energy bills.[Fred Dicker]

Cuomo Travels: Touting Recharge New York program, in Buffalo, this morning. [Tom Precious]

Cuomo's Deal: Retroactive raises for Council 82 members; wage freeze till 2014. PEF won't accept similar deal. "The state made it clear that accepting these concessions would not ensure PEF members would not be laid off. [Casey Seiler]

Cuomo's Deal: Editors like it. [Daily News]

Cuomo and DiNapoli: Accused extortionist sheds light on their tension. [Rick Karlin]

Cuomo's Popularity: A "honeymoon." [Jacob Gershman]

Rent Rules: Letting rent laws expire would be a "tsunami" says Perkins. Golden disagrees. [Glenn Blain]

Cars: "Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, spent $26,000 on a 2011 Ford Taurus in February." [Joe Spector]

Changing Chancellors: Walcott easily clears a hurdle. [Sharon Otterman]

School Safety: Wildcat strike tomorrow? [Philip Messing]

Clothes: "New Jersey is wasting $3.1 million on clothing allowances for workers who aren't required to wear special clothes." [Lisa Fleisher]

Changing Chancellors: "The effort to turn this one instance into some sort of general referendum on non-traditional leadership shows how divorced our strident national education conversation is from the challenges of actually improving our schools." [Andrew Rotherham]

Happy Birthday: Assemblyman Marcos Crespo isn't afraid to send a polite note to embattled lobbyist Richard Lipsky. [Facebook]

Taxes: Nick Kristof's "raise my taxes" column makes the person with whom he files jointly, flinch. [Twitter]

The complaint says Boston Provident held an Arizona investment that paid about $66,000 dollars, which Mr. Levy routed to himself, unbeknownst to the company. He also made about $600,000 by having the fund purchase stock at an inflated price from an account he controlled.

Mr. Kramer--one of Barack Obama's most successful bundlers last year--appears not to have known about the fraud. The complaint says Mr. Levy was fired from Boston Provident as soon as the scam was exposed, and that the company then notified the authorities. Mr. Kramer has said he will cover the fund's losses.

It's the latest scalp for nascent fund-buster Preet Bharara, who's done a lot of indicting in just three months.

But this time around, it's not entirely clear who the well-connected bundlers need to be lobbying for jobs.

Whereas Terry McAuliffe famously served that role for the Clintons, some New York donors say there is not one gatekeeper they can readily identify.

"Everyone has different rabbis," said one Democratic donor.

Read the rest here.

But this time around, it's not entirely clear who the well-connected bundlers need to be lobbying for jobs.

Whereas Terry McAuliffe famously served that role for the Clintons, some New York donors say there is not one gatekeeper they can readily identify.

"Everyone has different rabbis," said one Democratic donor.

Some of the donors said they are not entirely sure if the administration's chief liaison for the New York donors is the campaign's national finance chair Penny Pritzker or his finance director Julianna Smoot or someone else. One source said that staffer Jenny Yeager, who raised money for him full-time in New York, and Pritzker's deputy finance chairman, David Jacobson, were acting as "filters" who were bringing the more deserving donors to the transition team's attention.

One formal position that donors are keeping an eye is who Obama appoints to head the office of presidential personnel, through which all formal appointments are made.

The bundlers are not idly waiting around.

"Everyone goes from allies in the quest to seek the presidency to competitors in the quest to seek appointments," said one Clinton fund-raiser. "It's an ugly process, a very demeaning process, where it's hand-to-hand combat with people vying for positions. It brings out some of the worst aspects of human nature. You are now having to advocate for yourself."

The speculative consensus, understandably, is that early Obama bundlers have the best chances of getting their wishes granted.

Chief among them is Orin Kramer, who is also seen as a very good person for administration hopefuls to cozy up to.

"Orin can get whatever he wants," said one New York bundler. "He's not on the list. He's his own list."

But the appointment of Fred Hochberg, a former deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration under Bill Clinton, who acted as a major Clinton bundler before moving on to raise money for Obama, has once again shown that the Obama campaign is by no means not limiting its selections to die-hard loyalists.

"The thing that’s the most encouraging is that Hillary Clinton herself is in the cabinet and that she has the position of secretary of state," said the former Clinton fund-raiser. "I think it's terrific that Obama has done this and that's the biggest message that has been sent."

"Hillary Clinton is going to have a role in choosing the ambassadorships," said another former Clinton donor.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a heavy New York administration like the last time,” said one prominent New York donor, referring to the prospect of an Obama presidency. “It’s a new world.”

To an extent, the fortunes of New York’s would-be appointees to prestigious federal positions rose and, eventually, sunk with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, with attention and influence shifting to power players in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

But New York won’t be shut out entirely. Because of the city’s status (even if somewhat diminished) as the country’s financial capital, its hedge funds and banks will provide a number of names for top economic jobs in an Obama administration.

According to several Democratic insiders based in New York, Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, comes up frequently in discussions of possible appointees.  

Mr. Obama also receives the advice of former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. To the extent that they want to go back into government, the door is presumably open to them.

(Mr. Summers has relayed advice to Mr. Obama directly or through the campaign’s economic adviser, Jason Furman, another New Yorker likely to get some sort of job offer from an Obama administration.)

The stock of Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, who has successfully avoided the shoals of the financial crisis, has risen as well.

Another choice that some donors have discussed as a potential Treasury secretary is Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who was the CEO of Goldman Sachs before Hank Paulson, the current Treasury secretary, staged a coup and replaced him. Since Mrs. Clinton dropped out of the race, Mr. Corzine has been especially enthusiastic and influential in bringing around New Jersey support.

Some less immediately recognizable New Yorkers are also in a position to be players in an Obama administration.

Chief among them is Michael Froman, a top executive at Citigroup, who served as Mr. Rubin’s chief of staff at Treasury, and who is playing a key role in the transition process. A Harvard classmate of Mr. Obama, he is extremely close to the candidate, and the feeling is that if he wants to play a significant role in government, he’ll have the opportunity to do so.

Other New Yorkers who are helping with transition and might play a role in the new administration are Jamie Rubin, the son of the former Treasury secretary, and an accomplished investor in his own right; Jeh Johnson, an attorney at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and a former general counsel of the Department of the Air Force; Josh Steiner, the founder and managing principal of New York City-based private investment firm Quadrangle Group and a onetime chief of staff at Treasury; Josh Gotbaum, the former chief executive of the September 11 Fund who has worked for the Carter and Clinton administrations and Lazard Frères; Seth Harris, a faculty member of the New York Law School and a former counselor to the secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration; and Kevin Thurm, an executive at Citigroup, former Rhodes scholar and a former deputy secretary and chief operation officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Among the New York-area fund-raisers who bucked the Clinton trend and provided early support for Mr. Obama, several are likely to have a line into an Obama White House.

First among them is Orin Kramer, a financier at Boston Provident, a former aide in Jimmy Carter’s administration and a prodigious fund-raiser, who was perhaps the most influential bundler in Mr. Obama’s corner. Robert Wolf, an investment banker and CEO of UBS Americas, has expressed interest in a position, some insiders say. Also mentioned is Mark Gallogly, a private-equity expert who founded the firm Centerbridge after leaving Blackstone. Jim Torrey, a fund manager, has been especially enthusiastic and successful in raising money for Mr. Obama. Other founding members of the Obama fund-raising machine in New York include Provident Group managing director Brian Mathis and Frank Brosens, who runs Taconic Capital Advisors and is seen as very close to Bob Rubin.

Law is another major industry in New York, and insiders suggest that it will provide some candidates for jobs at the Department of Justice. Aside from the aforementioned Mr. Johnson, insiders have mentioned Preeta Bansal, a partner at Skadden, Arps and a former solicitor general of the State of New York who has worked on foreign policy, immigration and legal issues for the campaign. Before that, she worked on Supreme Court nominations in the Clinton White House, and like Obama, she is a graduate of Harvard Law. David Carden, an attorney at the law firm Jones Day, has roots in Illinois and has raised a lot of money for Mr. Obama. Andy Schapiro, a partner at Mayer Brown who attended Harvard with Mr. Obama and clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Justice Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court, is also named as a potential candidate for a position.

The most prominent New York-based figure who could potentially figure in a significant role in the Obama foreign policy operation is Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He is, as several Obama insiders pointed out, too important not to be considered. At the same time, though, he has a couple of political problems. One is that he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Clinton. The other, potentially more serious, is that he has had a rocky personal history with Anthony Lake, one of Mr. Obama’s most senior foreign policy advisers.

There’s at least one famous New Yorker who is less likely to get a call from the Obama administration than was once supposed.

Despite the advice he has offered to the next president in Newsweek columns, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is no longer in consideration as a candidate for a top job. To the degree that he was discussed at all, Mr. Bloomberg’s name all but vanished from serious conversation when he pushed a bill to overturn a two-term limit on city elected officials through the New York City Council, according to a number of insiders interviewed for this article.   

Though there’s much to be decided about which New Yorkers will eventually make the final cut, the decision-making portion of the transition process is certainly farther along than the resolutely tight-lipped Obama campaign has let on.

According to a senior Obama campaign official, a dozen groups completely separate from the campaign’s policy working groups have been operating under John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, to come up with personnel in areas like the economy, health, climate change, foreign policy and national security. And according to another source with knowledge of the transition process, the campaign has already whittled those names down to “shortlists.”

jhorowitz@observer.com 

But Mr. Kramer, an undisputed leader among this ancient, wealthy, largely Manhattan-based species of political fund-raiser, is still very much alive.

The Obama campaign has notified its most productive New York bundlers that to mount a decisive financial advantage over John McCain, it will for the duration of the campaign need to place a renewed emphasis on raising money the old-fashioned way.

“The Obama campaign has signaled, for example, through [national finance chair] Penny Pritzker, that it’s going to rely more on traditional fund-raising techniques from here on out than it did through the primaries,” said Roger Altman, a former deputy treasury secretary who started raising money for Mr. Obama after Mrs. Clinton dropped out of the race. “So their fund-raising will be more of a balance between the small donor, Internet-based fund-raising, and the traditional donor efforts, and therefore the New York fund-raising community is very important to the Obama campaign. And that campaign has been playing close attention to that community.”

Most everyone in that narrow but incredibly influential world identifies Mr. Kramer, a 63-year-old curmudgeon who was first among the giants to throw his lot behind Mr. Obama, as the group’s spiritual leader.

“I tease him with his kids, ‘You know your dad is like Obi-Wan Kenobi,’” said Brian Mathis, a partner at the hedge fund Provident Group. “In my view, there is no more important person to our success in New York.”

“A lot of people looked at his support for Barack early in this race as a sign, not only of how seriously Barack would compete financially in New York, but just how substantive of a candidate Barack was and is – because Orin doesn’t throw his support lightly,” said former representative Harold Ford, Jr. Mr. Ford would know: he recalled having to work hard during his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2006 before he got “the entire Orin Kramer machine” behind him.

Mr. Kramer, a lanky native of North Jersey who bears a passing resemblance to Alan Alda, helps manage the hedge fund Boston Provident, LP. He is well known in government and donor circles for his gruff, sardonic manner, and can frequently be found holding forth about politics or structured financial markets with his feet kicked up on a nearby table. He chomps unlit cigars.

“I maintain that it is a more disgusting form of chewing tobacco,” said Ralph Schlosstein, another Obama supporter, financier and friend who worked closely with Mr. Kramer as a young staff member in Jimmy Carter’s administration.

Mr. Kramer, who works in an 18th Floor office on Madison Avenue, does not go out of his way to invite attention for his work as a bundler. He turned down multiple requests to cooperate for this story, and only consented to confirm some facts and offer a couple of quotes when it was clear that the piece was going ahead without him.

He stuck with the dinosaur theme. “If we were determinative of the outcome then the outcome would have been different,” said Mr. Kramer, noting that most major fund-raisers backed Hillary Clinton in the primary. The result, he said, “prove that as a class we weren’t as important as people thought we were.”

Mr. Kramer, who according to several former Clinton supporters is doing more than anyone in the country to erase Mrs. Clinton’s debt, said that the initial choice last year to go in the opposite direction of almost all his friends was not an easy one. He received calls daily from Clinton backers soliciting his support.

“It was a very difficult emotional decision where there were a lot of countervailing factors. If I had a problem with the Clintons that would have made it easier, but I didn’t,” he said. In the end, he was convinced that Mr. Obama was a “transformational political figure” who could bring legions of people traditionally unenthusiastic about politics into the process and actually beat Mrs. Clinton. “I remember my wife saying, ‘Given how you feel about this you’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t do it.’”

Mr. Kramer is considered something of an oddball in the polished world of penthouse fund-raisers. During a dinner party with John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry in the palatial apartment of uber-bundlers Steven Rattner and Maureen White in 2004, he received a reprimand from Ms. White for leaving the table to take a mid-meal walk, without explanation. At an exclusive party at the Gore-Lieberman Democratic Convention in 2000, Mr. Kramer drew the attention of Secret Service agents by suddenly laying down on the ground and using his backpack as a pillow. When Mr. Ford was first told to keep an eye out for the major fund-raiser at one of his events during his 2006 Senate race, he spotted Mr. Kramer laying on the floor against the wall.

For all his quirks, though, Mr. Kramer is widely recognized as a serious financial and political thinker. A graduate of Yale University, where he roomed with former New York Governor George Pataki, and then Columbia Law, he is an accomplished investor and policy wonk. He entered President Jimmy Carter’s administration at the age of 31 as an associate director on the domestic policy staff, and became the White House’s point man for dealing with New York’s fiscal crisis.

Mr. Kramer is still active in public policy. He monitors New Jersey’s $82 billion public pension fund, wrote the strict 2004 regulations preventing outside managers of New Jersey money from making campaign contributions and is the subject of articles in Pensions and Investments. (“Kramer Eerily Clairvoyant,” read one headline.) He’s close to Governor Jon Corzine, and remains a player in New Jersey power politics.

But it is Mr. Kramer’s reputation as a prodigious fund-raiser that matters most to the Obama campaign.

Once a major donor to the presidential campaign of Al Gore, and then a national finance chairman for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, Mr. Kramer was a natural fit for Hillary Clinton’s camp. But he had something of a relationship with Mr. Obama. They were first introduced in 2003 by Mr. Corzine, then the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, during Mr. Obama’s Senate campaign. Mr. Kramer and his wife, Columbia art history professor Hilary Ballon, met Mr. Obama for lunch at the Four Seasons in New York, and Mr. Obama stayed in touch, even calling to comment positively about an article Mr. Kramer wrote about tax policy in The American Prospect.

(Mr. Kramer said the calls spoke more to Mr. Obama’s political instincts than the originality of his own thinking on taxes.)

In the weeks before the presidential campaign got underway, Mr. Kramer, like other highly sought-after Democratic bundlers, received briefings from Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s senior strategist, and David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager. Mr. Kramer told both men, and others, that he was convinced the country was hungry for change and that Mr. Obama amounted to an extraordinary political talent. He received daily calls from the Clinton campaign and his friends supporting her, but in January 2007, when he was already leaning for Mr. Obama, he ate a steak dinner with the candidate at a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse near Dupont Circle with the core of Mr. Obama’s New York support, including fund manager Jim Torrey, Mr. Mathis, Citibank executive Michael Froman and private-equity manager Jamie Rubin. In the airport on the way back to New York, he called Jonathan Mantz, Mrs. Clinton’s finance director, to break the bad news.

“When he called me to tell me he was going to do this, he said, ‘Does the word suicidal come into mind?’” said Hassan Nemazee, a friend of Mr. Kramer who was one of Mrs. Clinton’s national finance chairs. “It showed tremendous political acumen.”

Mr. Kramer’s decision shocked the donor establishment in New York.

“Jonathan [Mantz] was really upset. I was really upset,” said Maureen White, one of Mrs. Clinton’s major donors, who is now actively raising money for Mr. Obama. “I don’t think I had gone through a presidential campaign in recent memory that I hadn’t talked to Orin every day. I jokingly said that the only thing I held against Obama was that he took Orin away.”

Ms. White said Mr. Obama greatly benefited from Mr. Kramer’s decision because “even if you look at their national finance committee, very few of them have been involved in a major way in a presidential campaign before this one.”

“The Clinton people worked very hard to make sure there was no leakage in their own base,” said Mr. Schlosstein. “If you put together a list of the top five fund-raisers, Orin would be on it. It was a high-risk decision. As a consequence relatively few people did that.”

Mr. Kramer maintained friendly relations with his friends in Hillaryland, even placing friendly wagers on the Pennsylvania primary.

“It was a $100 bet that we would win by ten points,” said Mr. Nemazee. “I called him up that night and said, ‘We’ve won by 10 points.’ It was announced on CNN and Fox and everybody that we won by ten. The next day there was an envelope with 100 dollars cash in my office. And a day later I get a call from Orin: ‘I can’t believe you Clinton people. This is why we hate you so much. You win by 9.4 percent and instead of rounding it down to nine percent, you round it up to ten and take our hard-earned money.’”

Mr. Nemazee returned the hundred dollars.

But he almost forgot to do it.

After finishing his speech to a room full of New York donors at the Grand Hyatt without any mention of helping Clinton with her debt, reporters ran over to Obama's spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who was already spinning hard that Obama's failure to make a pitch was no big deal. ("He said a lot of things," she said.) Then the music stopped and Obama, very awkwardly, started speaking again.

"Hold on a second, guys -- I was getting a little carried away," he began. "This is not the speech part of it, but it is important.

”Senator Clinton still has some debt and I would have had some debt if I hadn't won. So I know the drill. There are many supporters of mine here who have not yet given something to help her retire her debt. I would be very grateful if you look under your chair, I think there should be an envelope, or a pledge sheet or something, if people would take the time to not only pick it up, but put something in it and mail it back, we've got volunteers outside who are collecting. That is part of the process toward unifying and moving forward. So I would ask all of you to take that time."

The crowd replied with a smattering of applause.

"Turn on the music again, let's keep on partying, but New York, take this responsibility seriously. It's something that's important to us. And obviously Senator Clinton will be grateful as well."

Up to that moment, the staging had been more or less perfect.

As early as 6 p.m., contributors to Clinton and Obama had started filing in through the main entrance of the Hyatt, taking the elevators past inflatable baseballs floating in the hotel’s fountains and signs advertising the week’s Major League Baseball All-Star game. The Obama advance team steered smaller donors toward a metal detector that fed into the ballroom, and directed bundlers to another beeping gate that led into a smaller room where Obama would meet with them personally.

“It’s to introduce people from the Clinton camp to the Senator,” said Alan Patricof, who seemed in good spirits as the entered the hotel. The financier and Clinton loyalist had already begun raising money for Obama, but said, “Some of the people who are here have been waiting for the opportunity to meet him.”

As the donors took their places in a large ballroom with seats surrounding a stage, the Obama press team worked heavy-handedly to clear the room and halls or members of the media.

Saying that no press were allowed in the halls or anywhere else outside of a predetermined area, a junior press officer name Pauline wrangled representatives from New York’s largest tabloids away from the doors where they could have any access to guests.

“This is very standard for us,” she said, as she led the reporters down an escalator away from the donors. “I know it’s a much better story if you guys can get some flavor, but.” Then she looked back up the escalator and mouthed to a colleague, “If you see any press, move them out.”

Obama arrived at the Grand Hyatt a few minutes before 7 p.m. with Caroline Kennedy, and then met with about 75 donors, including major Clinton bundlers such as Steven Rattner, Hassan Nemazee, Robert Zimmerman, Patricof and Fred Hochberg, and their Obama counterparts such as Orin Kramer and Jeh Johnson. Obama made no remarks to the group as a whole, but spoke to donors individually on a photo line.

Some of the former Clinton campaign donors in the room, such as Nemazee and Hochberg, had already raised six figures for the candidate. In less than 10 days, Nemazee had, at the behest of Obama finance chair Penny Pritzker, bundled commitments for $200,000 for the evening’s event, and another $250,000 for an event in Orange County on Sunday.

Asked if the Obama campaign appreciated his efforts, Nemazee said "In the world I operate in, you produce and people show their appreciation," he said. "I have no doubt the people in the Obama world appreciate what people in the Clinton world are doing."

When asked how much the Obama donors would raise for Clinton, Nemazee said he was "sure the number would be a respectable number."

"I've read these articles in the paper and I think everybody should just take a deep breath," said Mr. Nemazee, saying that the Clinton donors would raise substantial amounts for Obama and expressing confidence that the Obama people would come through for Clinton. "Let's give them a chance to do what they can do on debt relief."

Hochberg had cut short a trip to Jordan and arrived that afternoon to attend the event. He said he had raised his share of the money while he was away, all of it through e-mails to friends and associates back home.

Obama spoke with the bundlers on an individual basis for about an hour, but saved his formal speech for the ballroom, where he addressed a crowd of about 1,000 donors who had paid between $1,000 and $50,000 for "The Obama Victory Fund," a pot of money to benefit Obama and the Democratic National Committee. He called Clinton "tough and smart" and said she "wore me out" during the primary, and that he was "a better candidate because of her."

He said Clinton would be on the "forefront" of passing a universal health care bill when he would be president, and that because of her talents, "many of you in the room understandably supported her in the primary."

Obama then talked to the wealthy donors about the hardships of working- and middle-class people he had encountered across the country before returning to the commonalities between him and Senator Clinton.

"Listen, number one, Senator Hillary Clinton and I agree on 98.9 percent of the issues," he said, adding that they both opposed John McCain, who he then methodically attacked.

But it was Obama's lapse that caught the attention of reporters, some of whom had been told only minutes earlier by Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee that Obama was expected to make a pitch to help erase Clinton’s debt in the grand ballroom. (He was supposed to do that in a private meeting earlier in the day, but the event was canceled due a delay caused by votes in Washington.)

After the meeting, Clinton donor Hochberg admitted that the delivery of the pitch was "odd," but said, "Maybe I'm a more forgiving guy."

Hochberg said that Obama was the nominee and that he would do everything he could to help him win.

As for Obama’s nearly forgotten pitch for Clinton, he said that what counted was the result. "The only answer is if the money comes in," he said.

UPDATE: After the event at the Hyatt, some of the major bundlers went uptown to see Obama and Clinton appear together at another fund-raiser at the Regency.

Here’s the pool report from that event, courtesy of Nick Timiraos of The Wall Street Journal:

"People do not perceive him as sending mixed signals," said the guest. "People have a very deep loyalty to him, but they have gotten involved in other campaigns."

That didn't keep the 45 or so veterans of many a presidential campaign from discussing the declared Democratic candidates.

"You can't put together a bunch of jockeys in a room and not talk about horseracing," the guest said.

Attendees at the buffet-style dinner at the Washington house of Gore confidant Peter Knight included Gore's current chief-of-staff Roy Neal, and nationally recognized fund-raisers Mary Pat Bonner, Charles Bone, Carol Pensky, Robert Zimmerman, Orin Kramer and Allan Kessler.

The guests--a virtual roll call of top Democratic fund-raisers from the 2000 Presidential election, including supermarket magnate John Catsimatides, Democratic National Committee finance chairwoman Maureen White, investment manager Orin Kramer, patron of the arts Barbaralee Diamonstein Spielvogel, public-relations man Robert Zimmerman and Loews Corp. chief executive Jonathan Tisch, who was hosting the event in his Fifth Avenue duplex apartment--were thrilled with Mr. Gore’s unexpected candor and feistiness. They quickly pledged $200,000 to Mr. Gore’s treasury. When it was all over, one donor leaned to another and asked what they were all wondering: “Why didn’t he talk like that during the last election?”

After more than a year in self-imposed exile from politics--a time of media ridicule, intra-party recriminations and public abandonment by major supporters because of his flawed, failed Presidential campaign in 2000--Candidate Gore is back from the dead. With his New York–centric fund-raising network springing into action, his well-placed political allies on notice and a newfound determination to insert himself back into the national political dialogue, Mr. Gore is acting like someone who wants another shot at the Presidency. For better or worse, he might just get it.

“If he runs, I think this will be his primary to lose,” said Simon Rosenberg, head of the influential New Democrat Network. “He starts out so far ahead, with a national fund-raising network and name identification, he’s going to be very hard to beat.”

Representative Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from Brooklyn who was a famously reluctant supporter of Mr. Gore in 2000, was even more matter-of-fact. “He’s going to be our nominee,” said Mr. Weiner.

Of course, Mr. Gore’s apparent resurrection is not being universally welcomed in the circles of elected officials and party loyalists who carried the banner for him in 2000. They’re not hoping that Mr. Gore will learn from his past mistakes. They’re hoping he’ll disappear entirely.

“Al who?” said Representative Charlie Rangel, the dean of New York’s Congressional Democrats. “Why don’t you give me time to spread the word--I’m going to Washington tomorrow, and I’ll tell the delegation that Gore’s back. I hadn’t noticed. Maybe he was already back and no one recognized him because of the beard.”

Mr. Rangel took particular issue with the notion that Mr. Gore’s organizational advantages would allow him to dominate his primary opponents. “You can raise $200,000 and be popular with one group of people, but that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the fact that we’re going to have a variety of nationally known candidates vying for the nomination,” he said. Mr. Rangel even suggested the name of one candidate who certainly is nationally known, for better or worse: “Maybe Bill Clinton could run. I don’t know if he’s really allowed, but the Supreme Court owes us one.”

It is one thing for Mr. Gore to be disliked among the Washington elite, although that must be a bitter enough pill for someone who spent so much of his life inside the Beltway. (Between Mr. Gore’s time in Congress and the White House and that of his Senator father, Albert Sr., a Gore has held office in Washington for all but six of the last 50 years.)

What’s more remarkable is the level of animosity among politicos in a place like New York, where Mr. Gore defeated Mr. Bush in 2000 by almost a 2-1 margin. “There are a lot of people who are active in Democratic politics at the local level who just don’t want to be put through it again with him,” said State Senator Eric Schneiderman of the West Side. “I think that most Democratic activists feel like he’s a tremendously smart guy who’d make a great President, but who has severe limitations as a candidate. Those Democrats in New York and around the country are gun-shy about going to war again with him at the head of our troops.”

That Darned Dowd!

Supporters say that much of the animosity toward Mr. Gore is stirred up by “elite opinion-makers” who perpetuate the idea that the former Vice President is as exciting as a late-night panel discussion on C-Span. These supporters almost unanimously cite a recent, unflattering column by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times entitled “The Dude and the Dud.” Mr. Gore, needless to say, was the dud. They also say that criticism of Mr. Gore’s mistakes during Campaign 2000 has been blown out of proportion. “The piling on here has been unbelievable,” said Mr. Zimmerman, who is a D.N.C. committeeman and a top Democratic fund-raiser. “It’s coming from political pundits and other people who sit on the sidelines and never really make a difference. It’s irrelevant, and if anything, it’s served to rally the Gore troops. These are many of the same people who said that [Bill] Bradley was going to beat Gore in 2000.”

Mr. Gore’s partisans also argue that the political environment in the Democratic Party is about to undergo a major change. As a Gore candidacy gets to be closer to a reality--the beginning of the front-loaded Democratic primary schedule is less than two years away--it will become increasingly difficult for fence-sitters and detractors alike to brush off the idea of Gore in ’04. Donors will write checks, just to be safe. Uncommitted elected officials will come back into the fold, betting on the best-funded and best-organized candidate. The media will try to decipher Mr. Gore’s detailed policy proposals, rather than talking about his beard, his weight or, most significantly, his performance in 2000.

“Lead opinion in the Democratic Party is starting to change,” said Mr. Kramer, a longtime Gore supporter. “People are just starting to realize that Gore is really serious about this thing, and that hasn’t adequately filtered through Democratic elite opinion yet.”

Mr. Kramer also suggested that the whole process would be accelerated in the coming weeks, as Mr. Gore and his allies continued to make their presence felt. “He’s got a distinctive understanding of public policy and an important voice, and he has close friends who intend to ensure that that voice is heard in 2002,” Mr. Kramer said.

To some observers, Mr. Gore’s re-emergence is already taking on the look of a cunningly orchestrated plan. “If you had to sit down in January of 2001 and you had to put together a plan for becoming President in four years after being where Gore was, you’d probably do it very similarly to the way he did it,” said Mr. Weiner. “Lay low for six or eight months, emerge gradually, do one or two speeches to mark that you’re back to the game of being a little bit critical, then gradually start doing fund-raising, then shave off the beard. I think he knows what he’s doing, and knew that a while after his campaign there would be people who were critical of his candidacy. And he’s basically done it right, and I think he’s going to be the guy.”

If he’s ever going to be “the guy,” it will be despite his political skills, not because of them. Mr. Gore will never be accused, as Mr. Clinton was, of charming his way into office. In the end, Mr. Gore’s supporters hope that none of that matters. “There are really serious issues the country is up against, and charm is not what we need right now,” said Laura Ross, a Manhattan-based fund-raiser who attended Mr. Gore’s event. “Gore offers intelligence, conviction, thoughtfulness and leadership. He probably doesn’t have as much charm as George Bush, but so what? He has the right answers.”