While most Democratic voters remember Bill Clinton’s presidency with fondness, as the era of peace and prosperity and two straight wins in presidential elections, more than a few elected officials and Democratic leaders remember him as the selfish careerist who, time and again, threw them all under the bus.

Sure, he won reelection in 1996—the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt—but at a steep price for the party.

When he came to power, Democrats enjoyed overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate, marking only the second time since the end of L.B.J.’s presidency that the party controlled both the executive and legislative branches. But when he left, the G.O.P. owned both houses of Congress, the presidency and a majority of governorships—and within two years, Republicans gained a majority of seats in state legislatures for the first time in five decades.

While he was still in office, his would-be Democratic critics mostly stewed in silence. Bill was too popular with the masses to oppose, so they were stuck with him—even at the height of impeachment, when his approval rating was still almost twice what George W. Bush’s now is.

But now, their chance to get the last laugh seems to have arrived.

Whatever chance remains of a Clinton restoration in 2008 depends on Democratic superdelegates siding with Hillary Clinton, erasing what now looks almost certain to be an advantage for Obama in pledged delegates. There will be nearly 800 superdelegates at this summer’s convention (about 20 percent of all delegates) and right now Clinton leads Obama among them, 257-185. A late, mass shift of 350 or so could well swing the election her way.

In other words, her fate is in the hands of many of the same Democratic insiders who remember the first Clinton presidency largely for its missed opportunities. They’ve stayed neutral in this race because of their natural tendency to play it safe, and until very recently, Hillary seemed like the safe choice. If she survived the primaries, they’d swallow hard and side with her, just like they did with her husband a decade ago.

Obama’s dominant February, though, has turned that calculation on its head: Suddenly, he is supplanting Hillary as the safe choice, the one insiders flock to for fear of alienating a possible soon-to-be president.

Their grievances with Bill (and Hillary) go beyond the hit that the party’s down-ballot candidates took at the polls in the ’90s. If that had happened because Bill was out fighting the good Democratic fight, it would have been forgivable. But all too often, he seemed perfectly willing to serve up his own partisan allies, presenting himself to the public as the centrist hero between the extremes of the left and right—“triangulation,” this was called.

It reared its head in 1995, when he was on the comeback trail to re-election. Appearing before a group of wealthy business leaders, Bill Clinton brought up his 1993 budget, a tax hike and (modest) spending cuts package that had cost his party dearly at the polls. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate had voted for it, and Democrats across the country went down to defeat in 1994 because they had dared to defy public opinion and to stand with their president.

But when Bill spoke about the budget in ‘95, he didn’t praise his fellow Democrats for their courage: He buried them.

“There are people in this room still mad at me at that budget because you think I raised your taxes too much,” he said. “It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too.”

It was hardly an isolated incident.

He championed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, which was—and still is—vigorously opposed by organized labor and the Democratic base. But Bill muscled it through Congress on the strength of Republican support. To many Democrats, it was betrayal. But to him, it was a political boon—another “Sister Souljah” moment that allowed him to show independent voters he was different from the old Democratic guard they’d come to so dislike.

So was welfare reform, which reached his desk at the height of his 1996 reelection campaign. In truth, welfare rolls were already shrinking, thanks to an improving economy and reform efforts undertaken at the state level. But polls showed voters still believed the system was counterproductive and rife with abuse, and Bill Clinton signed it—over the cries of some in his party that it senselessly punished children.

“It is a social risk that no sane person would take, and I mean that,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan said at the time.

There was also the ordeal of impeachment. Democratic voters may remember it as a heroic struggle against an out-of-control Republican inquisition, but many party leaders remember the missed opportunities: A full year of Bill’s presidency wasted defending himself from an inquiry that—no matter how outrageous—was ultimately the result of his immaturity and lack of self-control.

To Bill Clinton, members of the party establishment realized, they weren’t allies as much as they were foils.

In one moment of candor 13 years ago, Congressman David Obey vented his frustration: “I think most of us learned some time ago that if you don’t like the president’s position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks.”

Obey will be a superdelegate at this year’s convention. He is backing Obama.

It took this reporter one year, three months and two weeks from that first sun-splashed day on the upstate farm of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where Mrs. Clinton launched her legendary “Listening Tour,” to come to that conclusion, but it crystallized on Saturday, Oct. 21, during her unremarkable press availability after her unremarkable speech at the Metropolitan After Nine Club in Glen Cove, L.I.

Her essential brilliance was not in the message of the day, in which she used a fabulously topical baseball metaphor to call “strike two” on Representative Rick Lazio for violating their campaigns’ agreement to ban soft money, which he had not done. (Governor George Pataki has been appearing in a series of radio ads that tout the upstate economy but do not tout Mr. Lazio or trash Mrs. Clinton—which latter detail makes it hard to see how the commercials constitute a violation of anything other than the sensibilities of those disturbed by the sound of taxpayer dollars being flushed down the drain in an effort to convince economically distressed people that they are not economically distressed.)

Her essential brilliance was not in how she attacked Mr. Lazio, which she often does while attacking him for attacking her.

“I think that the voters have a right to know that he has essentially stopped fulfilling his responsibilities as a member of Congress,” said the issues-not-insults candidate, who has revived the practice (used in 1998 by then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato against then-Representative Charles Schumer) of whacking one’s opponent for not showing up to cast Congressional votes in the last two months; an attack clearly meant to complement, not cancel out, her attacks on Mr. Lazio for not showing up upstate.

“Do you think that they have a right to know that his overall attendance record is above 95 percent?” asked Bob Hardt of the New York Post.

“They can certainly weigh that however they choose,” said Mrs. Clinton, without the blink of a wide blue eye.

Her essential brilliance was not in her indisputably favorite moment of the press conference, which came in the sort of awestruck question that is often handed to her like the huge bouquets she still receives at the lion’s share of her appearances (in this case, a man from Japanese television asked the First Lady to say a few words of encouragement to the politically marginalized women of his homeland).

No, as befits a woman who has a reputation as the most wizardly of policy wonks, her essential brilliance was in her response to a question about a specific point of the debate about Social Security. But, as befits a candidate who should have a reputation as the most artful of dodgers, the brilliance sprang not from anything she actually said about the actual issue. Indeed, except for one or two specific word choices, she could have been fielding a question about health care, welfare reform, child poverty or the Middle East.

Actually, as in all such cases, the response originated long before it was made, way back on May 19, coincidentally the day that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani exited the Senate race. It was minutes before that news broke that Mrs. Clinton was first asked whether she agreed with Vice President Al Gore, a central theme of whose own campaign had become attacking the very notion—then on offer from the campaign of Governor George W. Bush—of allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their payroll tax in the stock market. Or did she side more with Senator Moynihan, a central theme of whose tenure had become supporting such a proposal, and in fact fairly ridiculing the notion that such a measure would, in and of itself, send the nation to hell in a hand basket? (To be clear, the Senator had also taken the Republicans to task for their failure to spell out how they would fund the investment provision. But the fact remained that Mr. Moynihan’s approach differed from that of Mr. Gore at least as significantly as from that of Mr. Bush.)

At that time, and on many occasions since, Mrs. Clinton had referred reporters to a speech she would soon be making based on numbers she would soon be studying. Just as time heals all wounds, it neutralizes almost all questions, particularly those having to do with substance. For months the speech did not materialize, much in the same way that the anti-poverty program announced in December failed to materialize; but such facts have been easy to miss in the Cuisinart of the campaign. Then, beginning before (but certainly escalating after) the point when Al tapped Joe and tongue-kissed Tipper and thus left George W. Bush eating dust in New York, Mrs. Clinton had sounded the standard Gore theme and then really revved on it. By the time of her recent visit to a group of elderly voters in upper Manhattan, she was pretty much doing William Jennings Bryan, substituting “seniors” for “mankind” and “privatization” for “cross of gold!”

It is, of course, crazy to think that such a question on Social Security would make or break—or even affect—a Senate race. But just for old times’ sake, it seemed worth asking her in Glen Cove: Did she consider Mr. Moynihan’s support of some private investment to be materially different from the Republicans’, or was he, too, being reckless on this issue?

Here comes the brilliance:

“Oh, I think he has a very different position that he is certainly the most eloquent advocate of,” said Mrs. Clinton. “He really wants people to be able to save and have retirement security, and that’s why I support the kind of retirement accounts that the President and the Vice President have proposed in slightly different forms, because I think that we should create means for people to be able to save and add to their Social Security benefits, and I support that.”

No, no, no, the question was sharpened: the Senator is in favor of allowing two points of the payroll tax to be invested; the Vice President—and, lately, you—have been giving out the idea that this is, in and of itself, an evil; what gives?

“Well, I think if you look at some of his more recent statements, he has been very careful to say that he doesn’t want to do anything that would undo the good work that he did when he was the chair of the finance committee,” Mrs. Clinton said. “So I think that some of his concerns are ones that I share.”

Needless to say, it’s not the content here that’s brilliant. Indeed, the content here is sufficiently bland, muddled and altogether “lite” to be spooned into plastic snack containers as found in the grocer’s freezer, labeled “George W. Bush’s Own Pudding” and sold at a premium to the undecided voters who seem to crave such stuff. The brilliance lies in the diamond-quality facets of the deflection; in the full sound of its emptiness, the diplomacy of its duplicity. Think of what that answer achieves. It publicly kisses the derrière of the potentially disgruntled dignitary. (Which, by the way, is quite a contrast from what has been going on in private. Though Mr. Moynihan has reportedly cut one commercial for the First Lady and will be doing some campaigning for her, the Senator and his staff have been virtually absent from the Clinton effort pretty much from the moment the cameras left the farm. As a matter of fact, word has it that Moynihan chief of staff Tony Bullock has just taken a leave of absence, as government staffers frequently do before an election, to go work on a campaign: the Vice President’s. In Pennsylvania.) The answer states support for a value that no one opposes (old people having savings, hey!). It conjures a nonexistent harmony between two diametrically opposed ideas (the Vice President’s concept of Social Security and Mr. Moynihan’s). It sidesteps even the faintest breath of controversy (the sentence “I love Pat Moynihan, but I disagree with him on this one point” might not seem to be a statement of excessive boldness or candor, but Mrs. Clinton would never go there). It implies that Mr. Moynihan has, in recent comments, somehow changed his position on this issue when in fact he has not. And, most importantly, it does all of the above in such cool, complete, un-Lazio-like English that it sounds like a real answer.

Last week, this reporter attributed Mrs. Clinton’s success to the act of simply showing up everywhere, all the time. But really her success is more of a two-parter. It’s showing up and saying nothing—while seeming to say a ton. If this is an art, then the First Lady is Picasso, Rembrandt and Monet rolled into one. It is true, what Mrs. Clinton claims: From Brooklyn to Buffalo, in porches and backyards and at dinner tables all over the state, she has addressed major public issue after major public issue. But with the exception of those issues (or aspects of issues) that come safely packed in Styrofoam peanuts of polling and shipped, as if by U.P.S., from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in huge, damage-proof boxes marked “100 Percent Political No-Brainer,” she has given one contorted yet content-free answer after another. Far more remarkably, she has done it without touching a hair on the head of her image as the ultimate woman of substance.

Yet, to a truly dumbfounding degree, none of this has mattered one whit—even in the quarters where it usually matters the most.

“Hey,” you can practically hear them saying in her war room on Seventh Avenue, “she got the Times endorsement.”

So she did, on Sunday, Oct. 22. Granted, given that Mr. Lazio seems to be running on a platform of radiant mediocrity, it is hard to fault the paper of record on its choice. Moreover, the tenor of the endorsement seemed to be one of hope rather than experience: The Times called Mrs. Clinton “an unusually promising talent” and said that she is “capable of”—not in the process of, or already meriting praise for—“following the pattern, established by the likes of [Robert F.] Kennedy, Mr. Moynihan and Jacob Javits, that finds New York senators playing a role on the national and world stages even as they defend local interests.”

So that’s fair enough. If and when she makes it to the Senate, Mrs. Clinton may very well prove to be a Kennedy, a Javits, a Moynihan. But at the same time, it must be said: On her way to the Senate, she has definitely been much more of a Lipinski.

For those of you who did not see her spinning, leaping and preening her way to Olympic gold in Nagano, Tara Lipinski is a skater. But for those of you who have not seen the First Lady spinning, leaping and preening her way to a very possible victory in New York, no one is a better skater than Mrs. Clinton.

Brilliant.

“If I was running for Governor, I would have run a whole different race,” the newly re-elected Senator told The Observer in a telephone interview. “The primary vote is 80 percent downstate. I would have been downstate all the time. I was upstate.”

Mr. Schumer spoke a day after dousing a rumor that had him and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer playing a game of chicken, with the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2006 as the prize. On Nov. 15, Mr. Schumer announced that he had accepted a sweet deal from new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: a leadership post and a prized seat on the Finance Committee. And suddenly, as he had it, there was only one player in that game all along.

“I would never say ‘never’ and would not be pushed into that, either by my opponent or the press,” Mr. Schumer said of his long refusal to rule out a run for Governor. “People got one and one and equaled 11.”

But if Mr. Schumer doesn’t want to be Governor, what does he want to be? The answer, it seems, is that New York’s senior Senator would like to be Daniel Patrick Moynihan. At age 53 and about to begin his second six-year term, Mr. Schumer’s decision to stay in the Senate marked a clear choice for the future. Mr. Schumer wants to be judged by the standards of New York’s handful of large Senate figures: Robert F. Wagner, Jacob Javits and, of course, Moynihan, with whom he served for two years before the late Senator retired in January 2001.

“He’s on track to be a lion of the Senate,” said William Cunningham, a former Moynihan aide who is now Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s communications director. “With this decision to stay in the Senate, he is what Pat Moynihan hoped he would be when he first ran. When Senator Moynihan campaigned with Chuck, Pat made the point that it’s good to have somebody that age, because you have the time that you need to build up seniority.”

The parallel between the son of a Hell’s Kitchen saloonkeeper and the son of a Brooklyn exterminator isn’t an obvious one. The four-term Senator Moynihan was unorthodox, distant and occasionally cryptic, better known for his academic research than for his devotion to constituent service. The Brooklyn legislator is blunt and ubiquitous. Moynihan was a party maverick; Mr. Schumer just took a party leadership role. Moynihan sequestered himself on his farm to write books; Mr. Schumer, recalled State Senator David Paterson, is the kind of politician who wakes up early on New Year’s Day to attend the inauguration of the North Hempstead supervisor.

“Unlike with Moynihan, you’ll never be able to say ‘I don’t know where my Senator is’ with Schumer,” said U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, the dean of New York’s Congressional delegation.

But Mr. Schumer told The Observer that he regards Moynihan, who died last year, as a model.

“Moynihan is somebody I’ve always looked up to, aspired to be,” said Mr. Schumer, who recalled auditing Moynihan’s comparative-government course as a freshman at Harvard.

“I’ll tell you a very interesting story,” Mr. Schumer continued. “The week after I won [in 1998], I’m sort of flush with victory and Moynihan calls me up and he says, ‘Come to my office.

“‘In a few days, I’m going to announce I’m not running for another term,’” Mr. Schumer recalled Moynihan saying. “‘The fact that you are there allows me to do this.’ He felt I could continue his legacy.” Moynihan did, in fact, announce his retirement on Nov. 8, 1998. Hillary Clinton succeeded him.

Moynihan’s legacy--from laying the intellectual groundwork for welfare reform to fighting for federal money for New York--stemmed in part from his own seniority and his seat on the Finance Committee, one of the two most sought-after Senate perches, which he chaired from 1993 to 1995. The Senate Finance Committee writes tax legislation.

Mr. Schumer’s move to that committee won him praise from even his old nemesis, former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, whom Mr. Schumer defeated in ’98.

“He’s made the right decision, and not so much for his party but--much more importantly--for the good of New York,” said Mr. D’Amato. “The fact that he will now be on the Finance Committee is very important.”

The Finance Committee will be the setting for two of President Bush’s second-term initiatives: his plans to change the tax code, and his announced intention to allow Americans to invest a portion of their Social Security savings in private accounts. Mr. Schumer, who has close ties to Wall Street, told The Observer that he is skeptical of Mr. Bush’s Social Security plan, but open to changing Social Security “to modify the system and give people some more control.”

“It’s an amazing committee,” an ebullient Mr. Schumer said of Finance, “because you can take [on] ideas, big ideas. I have a little card I keep in my pocket. I have new ideas all the time.”

Sometimes overshadowed by his superstar junior Senator, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Schumer now finds himself one of the most powerful, and highest-profile, Democrats in the country. Along with his new post leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for two years, and the coming Finance Committee wars, he is also a key player in the Democrats’ stand against some of President Bush’s judicial nominees. As New York State Democrats celebrate averting a civil war between Mr. Schumer and Mr. Spitzer, Mr. Rangel speculated on Mr. Schumer’s new prominence.

“They’re giving Chuck Schumer the ability to become a Presidential candidate in four years,” he said.

Even if it’s, well, the other Senator from New York who runs for President in four years, however, Mr. Schumer is a fixture on the political scene. He’ll likely hold that Senate seat--to which he was re-elected with 71 percent of the vote this year--for “as long as he wants,” said Mr. D’Amato.

Job Security

Senate seats don’t carry the life tenure of the federal bench, but in a Democratic state like New York, it’s pretty close. No New York Democrat has lost re-election to the Senate since the 17th Amendment established the direct election of Senators in 1913. (Trivia buffs: The last New York Democrat to lose his Senate seat was Edward Murphy Jr., in 1898.) With just a decade or two of patience, Mr. Schumer--who turns 54 on Nov. 23--could hold a prime chairmanship on a key committee (assuming the Democrats manage to win control of the Senate at some point), and vital seniority on others.

“He is, by Senate standards, a very young man,” said Mr. Cunningham.

On the Banking Committee, Mr. Schumer is younger than any of the four Democratic Senators who rank ahead of him in seniority. Of six more senior Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, only Wisconsin’s Russell Feingold is younger than Mr. Schumer. And on the all-important Finance Committee, which Mr. Schumer will join as one of the junior members next session, only Blanche Lincoln (of unsafe--for Democrats--Arkansas) is younger.

Now Mr. Schumer will wait on two things: time, and control of the Senate, which will make the difference between tacking programs onto Republican legislation and steering a national agenda.

“This is clearly a long-term decision on his part, a sense that six, eight years down the road, the Democrats will retake the Senate,” said Robert David Johnson, a professor of American history at Brooklyn College. “If he’s right, he will be one of the three or four most influential players in the body. But it’s a big gamble. If they don’t get the majority back, he’ll be consigned to permanent minority status.”

Or maybe not. The Governor’s race comes up, after all, every four years. And Mr. Schumer is ruling nothing out.

“I would say this, as I said before the election: The only thing on my radar screen is being a good Senator and delivering for New York,” he said. “Maybe now, people will believe me.”

"If I was running for Governor, I would have run a whole different race," the newly re-elected Senator told The Observer in a telephone interview. "The primary vote is 80 percent downstate. I would have been downstate all the time. I was upstate."

Mr. Schumer spoke a day after dousing a rumor that had him and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer playing a game of chicken, with the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2006 as the prize. On Nov. 15, Mr. Schumer announced that he had accepted a sweet deal from new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: a leadership post and a prized seat on the Finance Committee. And suddenly, as he had it, there was only one player in that game all along.

"I would never say 'never' and would not be pushed into that, either by my opponent or the press," Mr. Schumer said of his long refusal to rule out a run for Governor. "People got one and one and equaled 11."

But if Mr. Schumer doesn't want to be Governor, what does he want to be? The answer, it seems, is that New York's senior Senator would like to be Daniel Patrick Moynihan. At age 53 and about to begin his second six-year term, Mr. Schumer's decision to stay in the Senate marked a clear choice for the future. Mr. Schumer wants to be judged by the standards of New York's handful of large Senate figures: Robert F. Wagner, Jacob Javits and, of course, Moynihan, with whom he served for two years before the late Senator retired in January 2001.

"He's on track to be a lion of the Senate," said William Cunningham, a former Moynihan aide who is now Mayor Michael Bloomberg's communications director. "With this decision to stay in the Senate, he is what Pat Moynihan hoped he would be when he first ran. When Senator Moynihan campaigned with Chuck, Pat made the point that it's good to have somebody that age, because you have the time that you need to build

up seniority."

The parallel between the son of a Hell's Kitchen saloon-keeper and the son of a Brooklyn exterminator isn't an obvious one. The four-term Senator Moynihan was unorthodox, distant and occasionally cryptic, better known for his academic research than for his devotion to constituent service. The Brooklyn legislator is blunt and ubiquitous. Moynihan was a party maverick; Mr. Schumer just took a party leadership role. Moynihan sequestered himself on his farm to write books; Mr. Schumer, recalled State Senator David Paterson, is the kind of politician who wakes up early on New Year's Day to attend the inauguration of the North Hempstead supervisor.

"Unlike with Moynihan, you'll never be able to say 'I don't know where my Senator is' with Schumer," said U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, the dean of New York's Congressional delegation.

But Mr. Schumer told The Observer that he regards Moynihan, who died last year, as a model.

"Moynihan is somebody I've always looked up to, aspired to be," said Mr. Schumer, who recalled auditing Moynihan's comparative-government course as a freshman at Harvard.

"I'll tell you a very interesting story," Mr. Schumer continued. "The week after I won [in 1998], I'm sort of flush with victory and Moynihan calls me up and he says, 'Come to my office.

"'In a few days, I'm going to announce I'm not running for another term,'" Mr. Schumer recalled Moynihan saying. "'The fact that you are there allows me to do this.' He felt I could continue his legacy." Moynihan did, in fact, announce his retirement on Nov. 8, 1998. Hillary Clinton succeeded him.

Moynihan's legacy-from laying the intellectual groundwork for welfare reform to fighting for federal money for New York-stemmed in part from his own seniority and his seat on the Finance Committee, one of the two most sought-after Senate perches, which he chaired from 1993 to 1995. The Senate Finance Committee writes tax legislation.

Mr. Schumer's move to that committee won him praise from even his old nemesis, former Senator Alfonse D'Amato, whom Mr. Schumer defeated in '98.

"He's made the right decision, and not so much for his party but-much more importantly-for the good of New York," said Mr. D'Amato. "The fact that he will now be on the Finance Committee is very important."

The Finance Committee will be the setting for two of President Bush's second-term initiatives: his plans to change the tax code, and his announced intention to allow Americans to invest a portion of their Social Security savings in private accounts. Mr. Schumer, who has close ties to Wall Street, told The Observer that he is skeptical of Mr. Bush's Social Security plan, but open to changing Social Security "to modify the system and give people some more control."

"It's an amazing committee," an ebullient Mr. Schumer said of Finance, "because you can take [on] ideas, big ideas. I have a little card I keep in my pocket. I have new ideas all the time."

Sometimes overshadowed by his superstar junior Senator, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Schumer now finds himself one of the most powerful, and highest-profile, Democrats in the country. Along with his new post leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for two years, and the coming Finance Committee wars, he is also a key player in the Democrats' stand against some of President Bush's judicial nominees. As New York State Democrats celebrate averting a civil war between Mr. Schumer and Mr. Spitzer, Mr. Rangel speculated on Mr. Schumer's new prominence.

"They're giving Chuck Schumer the ability to become a Presidential candidate in four years," he said.

Even if it's, well, the other Senator from New York who runs for President in four years, however, Mr. Schumer is a fixture on the political scene. He'll likely hold that Senate seat-to which he was re-elected with 71 percent of the vote this year-for "as long as he wants," said Mr. D'Amato.

Job Security

Senate seats don't carry the life tenure of the federal bench, but in a Democratic state like New York, it's pretty close. No New York Democrat has lost re-election to the Senate since the 17th Amendment established the direct election of Senators in 1913. (Trivia buffs: The last New York Democrat to lose his Senate seat was Edward Murphy Jr. in 1898.) With just a decade or two of patience, Mr. Schumer-who turns 54 on Nov. 23-could hold a prime chairmanship on a key committee (assuming the Democrats manage to win control of the Senate at some point), and vital seniority on others.

"He is, by Senate standards, a very young man," said Mr. Cunningham.

On the Banking Committee, Mr. Schumer is younger than any of the four Democratic Senators who rank ahead of him in seniority. Of six more senior Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, only Wisconsin's Russell Feingold is younger than Mr. Schumer. And on the all-important Finance Committee, which Mr. Schumer will join as one of the junior members next session, only Blanche Lincoln (of unsafe-for Democrats-Arkansas) is younger.

Now Mr. Schumer will wait on two things: time, and control of the Senate, which will make the difference between tacking programs onto Republican legislation and steering a national agenda.

"This is clearly a long-term decision on his part, a sense that six, eight years down the road, the Democrats will retake the Senate," said Robert David Johnson, a professor of American history at Brooklyn College. "If he's right, he will be one of the three or four most influential players in the body. But it's a big gamble. If they don't get the majority back, he'll be consigned to permanent minority status."

Or maybe not. The Governor's race comes up, after all, every four years. And Mr. Schumer is ruling nothing out.

"I would say this, as I said before the election: The only thing on my radar screen is being a good Senator and delivering for New York," he said. "Maybe now, people will believe me."

Candidate Daniel Patrick Moynihan, onetime ambassador to India and most recently the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, might have been expected to echo his opponents' emphasis on foreign affairs and statecraft and the great issues of war and peace. But then again, he was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and he did not echo the thoughts of others as a matter of policy, nor was he all that interested in nods of approval from his party's cognoscenti. More to the point, he understood that New York in 1976 was in crisis, and the crisis involved cash money. There was a place called the United States Senate where some people gave fine speeches about war and peace, and other people worked in cloakrooms or studied the rules or played with language to get cash money for their states.

When New York had the country's largest delegation to Congress, and when its Governors and Senators were considered Presidential candidates in waiting, it could afford to look with scant regard on legislators with dreary assignments like, say, the Transportation Committee. Such posts were for pork-barrel hustlers; New York was above such gritty concerns. New York's Senators, were expected to concern themselves with more elevated issues: the operational strength of tank divisions in East Germany; the domestic problems hampering Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer; the number of governments in postwar Italy.

But by the time Moynihan ran for Senate, New York had changed, and he was one of the very few people who appreciated that the old politics and old rules no longer applied. A new Governor named Hugh Carey began his administration in 1975 by announcing, famously, that "the days of wine and roses are over." New York was on the verge of going broke.

And so in 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan-all tweed and bow ties and scholarship and diplomacy-announced that, if elected, he would request an assignment to the Senate Finance Committee. He would do this for the same reason that Willie Sutton decided to rob banks-except in Moynihan's case, he would seek to withdraw funds that rightfully belonged elsewhere, that is, in New York.

In the tributes that followed Moynihan's death on March 26 at age 76, some but not enough attention was paid to the ways in which he changed the position of United States Senator from New York. Because his demeanor and breadth of knowledge invited such windy descriptions as "scholar-statesman" and "philosopher-Senator," some of Moynihan's final press notices failed to convey his success in the scut work of delivering dollars to his home state. In recent years alone, Pat Moynihan somehow persuaded Washington to give New York $5 billion for building the New York Thruway decades ago Moynihan rewrote a federal highway bill so that New York (and other urban areas) could get more money for building mass transportation instead of pouring more concrete. Moynihan enlisted Congress and the White House to help convert the Farley Post Office Building into a new Penn Station, so that the city's passenger-rail gateway would once again convey power and dignity. And Moynihan tinkered with Medicaid formulas to help New York cope with its health-care costs.

Most New Yorkers associate this prosaic and occasionally mind-numbing constituent work with the aldermanic habits of Moynihan's onetime colleague, Alfonse D'Amato. And while it's certainly true that Mr. D'Amato emphasized service delivery over sweeping legislation, he simply borrowed a portion of the Moynihan portfolio. Today, the Moynihan vision of what a New York Senator must be is borne out in the work of Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, who are more likely to hold a news conference to announce federal grants than they are to issue grand policy pronouncements. It's not that the broader picture is no longer of concern to New Yorkers. But in a capital and an era in which power has moved south and west, a Senator from New York is obliged to deliver as well as to think.

Moynihan could do both. "He was the perfect blend of a professor and a politician, and was successful in both areas," said Mitchell Moss, director of the Urban Research Center at New York University. As long ago as the mid-1980's, some people noticed that Moynihan contained multitudes, and they were none too happy about it: I recall a well-known neoconservative journalist complaining in print that the senior Senator from New York was spending too much time on "infrastructure"-you could picture his upper lip curling, like a Frenchman sizing up a Big Mac-and not enough on muscular Cold War issues. But by then, Moynihan already had decided that the story of the decade would be the decline and fall of the Soviet empire. And so he did, in fact, turn his attention to mere infrastructure, along with a dozen or so other domestic issues that affected the voters back home.

To cite just one example: He began preaching to all who would listen-and some who would not-of the revitalizing power of magnetic levitation. I had this conversation with him on at least three occasions, and I suspect others in more frequent touch with him long ago lost count. I knew the argument by heart: The technology for mag-lev trains was invented in New York, under the Triborough Bridge, but who is implementing it? Not us. The Japanese. Run a mag-lev train along the Thruway right-of-way and watch the city and region prosper like the old days.

The prospect of mag-lev trains shuttling up and down the Hudson Valley remains distant. But Pat Moynihan's many other contributions to New York's well-being surround us.

It took this reporter one year, three months and two weeks from that first sun-splashed day on the upstate farm of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where Mrs. Clinton launched her legendary "Listening Tour," to come to that conclusion, but it crystallized on Saturday, Oct. 21, during her unremarkable press availability after her unremarkable speech at the Metropolitan After Nine Club in Glen Cove, L.I.

Her essential brilliance was not in the message of the day, in which she used a fabulously topical baseball metaphor to call "strike two" on Representative Rick Lazio for violating their campaigns' agreement to ban soft money, which he had not done. (Governor George Pataki has been appearing in a series of radio ads that tout the upstate economy but do not tout Mr. Lazio or trash Mrs. Clinton-which latter detail makes it hard to see how the commercials constitute a violation of anything other than the sensibilities of those disturbed by the sound of taxpayer dollars being flushed down the drain in an effort to convince economically distressed people that they are not economically distressed.)

Her essential brilliance was not in how she attacked Mr. Lazio, which she often does while attacking him for attacking her.

"I think that the voters have a right to know that he has essentially stopped fulfilling his responsibilities as a member of Congress," said the issues-not-insults candidate, who has revived the practice (used in 1998 by then-Senator Alfonse D'Amato against then-Representative Charles Schumer) of whacking one's opponent for not showing up to cast Congressional votes in the last two months; an attack clearly meant to complement, not cancel out, her attacks on Mr. Lazio for not showing up upstate.

"Do you think that they have a right to know that his overall attendance record is above 95 percent?" asked Bob Hardt of the New York Post .

"They can certainly weigh that however they choose," said Mrs. Clinton, without the blink of a wide blue eye.

Her essential brilliance was not in her indisputably favorite moment of the press conference, which came in the sort of awestruck question that is often handed to her like the huge bouquets she still receives at the lion's share of her appearances (in this case, a man from Japanese television asked the First Lady to say a few words of encouragement to the politically marginalized women of his homeland).

No, as befits a woman who has a reputation as the most wizardly of policy wonks, her essential brilliance was in her response to a question about a specific point of the debate about Social Security. But, as befits a candidate who should have a reputation as the most artful of dodgers, the brilliance sprang not from anything she actually said about the actual issue. Indeed, except for one or two specific word choices, she could have been fielding a question about health care, welfare reform, child poverty or the Middle East.

Actually, as in all such cases, the response originated long before it was made, way back on May 19, coincidentally the day that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani exited the Senate race. It was minutes before that news broke that Mrs. Clinton was first asked whether she agreed with Vice President Al Gore, a central theme of whose own campaign had become attacking the very notion-then on offer from the campaign of Governor George W. Bush-of allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their payroll tax in the stock market. Or did she side more with Senator Moynihan, a central theme of whose tenure had become supporting such a proposal, and in fact fairly ridiculing the notion that such a measure would, in and of itself, send the nation to hell in a hand basket? (To be clear, the Senator had also taken the Republicans to task for their failure to spell out how they would fund the investment provision. But the fact remained that Mr. Moynihan's approach differed from that of Mr. Gore at least as significantly as from that of Mr. Bush.)

At that time, and on many occasions since, Mrs. Clinton had referred reporters to a speech she would soon be making based on numbers she would soon be studying. Just as time heals all wounds, it neutralizes almost all questions, particularly those having to do with substance. For months the speech did not materialize, much in the same way that the anti-poverty program announced in December failed to materialize; but such facts have been easy to miss in the Cuisinart of the campaign. Then, beginning before (but certainly escalating after) the point when Al tapped Joe and tongue-kissed Tipper and thus left George W. Bush eating dust in New York, Mrs. Clinton had sounded the standard Gore theme and then really revved on it. By the time of her recent visit to a group of elderly voters in upper Manhattan, she was pretty much doing William Jennings Bryan, substituting "seniors" for "mankind" and "privatization" for "cross of gold!"

It is, of course, crazy to think that such a question on Social Security would make or break-or even affect-a Senate race. But just for old times' sake, it seemed worth asking her in Glen Cove: Did she consider Mr. Moynihan's support of some private investment to be materially different from the Republicans', or was he, too, being reckless on this issue?

Here comes the brilliance:

"Oh, I think he has a very different position that he is certainly the most eloquent advocate of," said Mrs. Clinton. "He really wants people to be able to save and have retirement security, and that's why I support the kind of retirement accounts that the President and the Vice President have proposed in slightly different forms, because I think that we should create means for people to be able to save and add to their Social Security benefits, and I support that."

No, no, no, the question was sharpened: the Senator is in favor of allowing two points of the payroll tax to be invested; the Vice President-and, lately, you-have been giving out the idea that this is, in and of itself, an evil; what gives?

"Well, I think if you look at some of his more recent statements, he has been very careful to say that he doesn't want to do anything that would undo the good work that he did when he was the chair of the finance committee," Mrs. Clinton said. "So I think that some of his concerns are ones that I share."

Needless to say, it's not the content here that's brilliant. Indeed, the content here is sufficiently bland, muddled and altogether "lite" to be spooned into plastic snack containers as found in the grocer's freezer, labeled "George W. Bush's Own Pudding" and sold at a premium to the undecided voters who seem to crave such stuff. The brilliance lies in the diamond-quality facets of the deflection; in the full sound of its emptiness, the diplomacy of its duplicity. Think of what that answer achieves. It publicly kisses the derrière of the potentially disgruntled dignitary. (Which, by the way, is quite a contrast from what has been going on in private. Though Mr. Moynihan has reportedly cut one commercial for the First Lady and will be doing some campaigning for her, the Senator and his staff have been virtually absent from the Clinton effort pretty much from the moment the cameras left the farm. As a matter of fact, word has it that Moynihan chief of staff Tony Bullock has just taken a leave of absence, as government staffers frequently do before an election, to go work on a campaign: the Vice President's. In Pennsylvania.) The answer states support for a value that no one opposes (old people having savings, hey!). It conjures a non-existent harmony between two diametrically opposed ideas (the Vice President's concept of Social Security and Mr. Moynihan's). It sidesteps even the faintest breath of controversy (the sentence "I love Pat Moynihan, but I disagree with him on this one point" might not seem to be a statement of excessive boldness or candor, but Mrs. Clinton would never go there). It implies that Mr. Moynihan has, in recent comments, somehow changed his position on this issue when in fact he has not. And, most importantly, it does all of the above in such cool, complete, un-Lazio-like English that it sounds like a real answer.

Last week, this reporter attributed Mrs. Clinton's success to the act of simply showing up everywhere, all the time. But really her success is more of a two-parter. It's showing up and saying nothing-while seeming to say a ton. If this is an art, then the First Lady is Picasso, Rembrandt and Monet rolled into one. It is true, what Mrs. Clinton claims: From Brooklyn to Buffalo, in porches and backyards and at dinner tables all over the state, she has addressed major public issue after major public issue. But with the exception of those issues (or aspects of issues) that come safely packed in Styrofoam peanuts of polling and shipped, as if by U.P.S., from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in huge, damage-proof boxes marked "100 Percent Political No-Brainer," she has given one contorted yet content-free answer after another. Far more remarkably, she has done it without touching a hair on the head of her image as the ultimate woman of substance.

Yet, to a truly dumbfounding degree, none of this has mattered one whit-even in the quarters where it usually matters the most.

"Hey," you can practically hear them saying in her war room on Seventh Avenue, "she got the Times endorsement."

So she did, on Sunday, Oct. 22. Granted, given that Mr. Lazio seems to be running on a platform of radiant mediocrity, it is hard to fault the paper of record on its choice. Moreover, the tenor of the endorsement seemed to be one of hope rather than experience: The Times called Mrs. Clinton "an unusually promising talent" and said that she is "capable of"-not in the process of, or already meriting praise for-"following the pattern, established by the likes of [Robert F.] Kennedy, Mr. Moynihan and Jacob Javits, that finds New York senators playing a role on the national and world stages even as they defend local interests."

So that's fair enough. If and when she makes it to the Senate, Mrs. Clinton may very well prove to be a Kennedy, a Javits, a Moynihan. But at the same time, it must be said: On her way to the Senate, she has definitely been much more of

a Lipinski.

For those of you who did not see her spinning, leaping and preening her way to Olympic gold in Nagano, Tara Lipinski is a skater. But for those of you who have not seen the First Lady spinning, leaping and preening her way to a very possible victory in New York, no one is a better skater than Mrs. Clinton.

Brilliant.

On its own, this little exchange seems a perfectly logical, if high-level, exercise in posterior-puckering. Mrs. Clinton seeks not only the seat Mr. Moynihan holds, but also the stature he emanates-and at least some of the popularity with which he emanates it. And the Senator, despite his reputation as an ivory tower antipol, is known to have been born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic, and therefore can be counted upon for chivalry toward the woman who would succeed him.

But in light of the First Lady's policy-riddled Washington past and her politically ambitious New York present, her courting of our senior Senator ought to be seen as a good deal more than that. Both artful and energetic, it is a window into her general wooing of New York political players, to whom she offers her newcomer's humility on the silver tray of her national importance. (Too bad the Rev. Al Sharpton couldn't make it to that White House dinner for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.) Fraught with ironies of style and of substance, it suggests several of the most legitimate questions that her candidacy should raise, as well as some of the ways that her campaign will attempt to answer, if not pre-empt, them. And insofar as the Senator's cooperation signals his desire that Mrs. Clinton guard his legacy, it hints at the lines of mutual self-interest being drawn between the not-yet candidate and her would-be Congressional colleagues; traces of which can, of course, be detected in the current contretemps over the President's Medicare proposal.

If one had recently descended from Mars, one could be forgiven for thinking that Mrs. Clinton had spent a lifetime longing to emulate Mr. Moynihan. Over the past few months, she has met several times with him and, much more relevant to the how-tos of running for the Senate in New York, with his wife, Elizabeth, who has long served as the practical-politics side of the Senator's brain. The First Lady has sat for tutorials from several people suggested by the Senator, one of whom predicted that "she's going to have a postgraduate degree" in Empire State advocacy. Even bedtime would seem to be no barrier to her tuition in all matters Moynihan. "In a meeting the other day," said an associate of the Senator, "Hillary Clinton said, 'I sleep with the Moynihan fisc report'-which describes how other states steal New York's lunch-'under my pillow.'" And, of course, Mrs. Clinton chose to kick off the first leg of her "listening tour" of New York State at Derrymore, the Moynihans' farm in Delaware County. The farm, incidentally, has a one-room, no-telephone schoolhouse in which the Senator has spent many mornings tapping out his thoughts on an electric typewriter, but does not have a hint of anything that would scream "crazy urban liberal" to anyone scanning the scene on television. Mandy Grunwald, the Clinton aide who served as a media consultant on three of Mr. Moynihan's campaigns is thought to have brokered the highly unusual use of the farm as photo op.

'Academic Floozy'

If, on the other hand, one has spent any of the past seven years reading American newspapers, one can remember an instance or two when the Clinton-Moynihan relationship seemed scarcely less hostile than that of Montague-Capulet. Indeed, the first such instance might well be the one involving the single policy issue of greatest importance to the First Lady (health care reform) and the second, the one involving the single policy issue of greatest importance to the Senator (welfare reform). As many remember, Mr. Moynihan, who assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee in 1993, argued strongly that the health care initiative ought to come after the welfare one; and that the health care measure, representing a rather seismic shift in national policy, could not be secured without tremendous bipartisan support. But, perhaps sniffing the powerful glue of victory and of Democratic dominance in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Administration made few bones about its intentions to roll over the Republicans in Congress-and indeed, quite literally by some accounts , over the Democratic Senator from New York.

"When Harold Ickes went to Washington, his role was to manage the health care campaign," said Mr. Moynihan's former chief of staff Bill Cunningham. "There is no record of him seeking out the Senator who was (a) from New York and (b) chairman of the Finance Committee." (Mr. Ickes did not return a call for comment.) Instead, as many also remember, it was the Administration that got flattened. "They viewed Pat Moynihan as some kind of academic floozy," said a friend of the Senator. "Now they've come on their knees."

This scenario, it must be said, is far from strictly true. "On a number of other fronts-the budget, foreign policy-the Senator has been a very strong supporter of and adviser to the President," Moynihan chief of staff Tony Bullock pointed out. "When things were flaring up on the Indian subcontinent, Moynihan was the first guy they called." Moreover, throughout the Clinton era, there have been significant relationships of mutual respect, such as that with former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. Nonetheless, when it comes to the current specter of Mrs. Clinton seeking Mr. Moynihan's mantle, her people do tend toward tones of deference; his, toward the voice of vindication.

Bill Clinton's 'Disorder'

And even now that love has bloomed, the Senator and his aspiring successor do seem a rather odd couple. Clearly, they are well matched in their shared qualities of intelligence, diligence and an ideological provenance somewhere in the social-justice quadrant of the Democratic Party. But unless the First Lady's political emancipation from her husband includes a dramatic severance of styles, they would seem to be virtual opposites in their approach to political life. Mr. Moynihan, for instance, prides himself on speaking, as opposed to spinning. (One of the thoughts he spoke in January 1998 was that if the Monica Lewinsky story were true, the President should resign because it suggested a "disorder.") Mrs. Clinton is in every sense married to an Administration whose spinning puts that of Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski to shame. Mr. Moynihan served in the Nixon White House and has often taken pleasure in praising such Republicans as the Bobs, Dole and Packwood-to say nothing of Senator Bob Kerrey, whom he endorsed in the 1992 Democratic Presidential primary over Mr. Clinton. She may well have saved her husband's Presidency when she drove the phrase "right wing conspiracy" stake-like through the heart of the Republican Congress. Mr. Moynihan, whatever one thinks of his views, has views, and New Yorkers know what they are. After the demise of her 1994 health care bill, Mrs. Clinton largely vanished from the path of policy.

Needless to say, the 2000 Senate race could turn out to be one of those political contests in which the most stark of policy distinctions between the candidates matters less than such matters as their respective personalities, baseball allegiances and stances for or against launch parties for Talk magazine. Then again, its circumstances may afford policy a prominence it rarely enjoys-and only in small part because attacks upon the First Lady's legal, marital, and financial propensities must be handled with the care accorded dynamite. What's more to the point is that Mrs. Clinton, as you may have read, is not a biological daughter of New York, and her campaign will seek to mitigate that fact most forcefully with the argument that she is something better: its substantive soul mate. "She is an issue-oriented person," said former Presidential adviser Paul Begala, who is not involved in the First Lady's campaign but whose sentiments are universal among her supporters. "The issues of her life-education, health care, children, families-are New York's issues." They are also precisely the kinds of issues on which Mr. Moynihan has most forcefully opposed the Clinton Administration-and done so significantly, although never solely, on the grounds that the Administration's policies would injure his home state. "Mrs. Clinton [recently] said, 'What's good for New York is good for the country,'" observed Lawrence O'Donnell, who served as chief of staff of the Senate Finance Committee when Mr. Moynihan chaired it and Mrs. Clinton scared it, with a 1,342-page bill that aimed to take over one-seventh of the nationaleconomy without appeasing one scintilla of Republican apprehension. "I spent two years trying to convince her of that."

Such are the words of which anti-Hillary bombs are built-and what better way to defuse them than to christen her campaign with Mr. O'Donnell's old boss at her side?

In1998,Mr. Moynihan opposed the line item veto in the first instance because he felt it was unconstitutional, but ended up fighting it, as well, because the President's first attempt to exercise the power was to excise an amendment to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which would have spared New York from having to send some $2.6 billion in state hospital taxes to Washington. (As Republican commercials may be reminding us, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. Moynihan and Dennis Rivera, leader of the Local 1199 hospital workers' union, held a joint press conference on that one.)

In 1996, Mr. Moynihan opposed the Republican welfare bill signed by the President not only because he regarded the measure as a catastrophic confusion of the words "repeal" and "reform," but also because of its disproportionate damage to New York, with its heavy poor and immigrant populations. (On the second part at least, Mr. Giuliani was with the Senator on that one, too.) In 1994, the Senator failed to hail the health care bill not only on a variety of general principles, but also because it threatened funding streams of dire consequence to New York on at least two significant counts: its teaching hospitals and its care of the poor. (Yes, those would be the same teaching hospitals on whose behalf the First Lady "expressed concern" in the recent White House meeting about the President's Medicare proposal.) "The Clinton health care bill was the single most negative piece of legislation to New York City interests to have come to the Congress by a President, ever," said Mr. O'Donnell.

"That's not a path she intends to go down again," said Mrs. Clinton's spokesman Howard Wolfson, putting the health care plan in the past, where the campaign definitely wants it-except insofar as it can be summoned as proof of her sterling intentions and dazzling expertise. (One envisions a "Ends Good, Means Bad" sign, reminiscent of James Carville's "It's the Economy, Stupid," hanging in Hillary's war room.) It may even be true that the reconstituted Mrs. Clinton ends up deserving to win whatever health care debate this race yields. But can't we at least have a laugh at the punditry that has been poured into the question of whether or not the First Lady can possibly have been a Yankee fan during her Illinois girlhood, when she definitely was the relatively recent architect of legislation that was greeted with abject horror by the very hospital system whose cause she is now hitting meetings to champion?

Hillary on Welfare Bill?

Now, the point here is not that Mrs. Clinton's fitness to serve is somehow proportional to the degree of her communion with Mr. Moynihan. Nor is it that such issues as health care and welfare reform will be anything like trouble-free zones for her eventual Republican opponent, perhaps least of all if that opponent turns out to be Mr. Giuliani. Moreover, given the scalding that Mrs. Clinton took at the times when she openly exercised influence in her husband's Administration, it hardly seems fair to take her to task for the times when she refrained from doing so. But it seems equally ill-advised to pre-endow her with a set of courageous convictions that she has yet to articulate. It is easy, for example, to find people who will applaud Mrs. Clinton for some 30 years of tireless advocacy on behalf of the nation's most vulnerable children. But it is very hard to find anyone who can vividly remember how she felt about the most significant legislation to affect those children ever to cross her husband's desk. "I really have never known where she stood on it," said Peter Edelman, who resigned his post as a domestic policy adviser over the President's signing of the 1996 welfare bill. "I actually bought Stephanopoulos' book to find out. I guess she says now that she supported it." (Indeed, that is exactly what she says, through her representatives.)

But look who is supporting her, in spite of it all. If the Senator has chosen to engage the First Lady now that his party has anointed her, the health and hospital workers' union has been right in there, dabbing the oil on the First Forehead. Of course, as the current Medicare dustup indicates, what that gains for her in long-term support, it may lose her in short-term serenity. "Certainly, [regarding] the Balanced Budget Act's effect on the health care system, we strongly disagree with the Administration," said Local 1199 spokesman Ken Sunshine. This tangle has led to the recent spate of stories about the delicate balance of loyalties that a candidate Clinton must achieve. But perhaps those stories have got the dynamic exactly backward. Rather than the difficulty of remaining First Lady while running for the Senate, perhaps the proper point of emphasis is the luxury of it; the very blue bargaining chips it would seem to afford.

Certainly in the eyes of her newest New York friends, Mrs. Clinton needn't buy her house in Westchester before she can start bringing home the bacon. "At some point, the free ride for Hillary is going to be over and we're going to have to see her do stuff to defend us," said Representative Anthony Weiner of Brooklyn. "Every elected official in New York is making the same analysis in how responsive the White House is going to be over the next 18 months." But Mr. Moynihan is making an analysis as to how responsive the First Lady is likely to be over a much longer haul.

So, bygones being bygones, the First Lady will start the first real day of her first run for office on the farm of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and she will finish it falling asleep with a report of his under her pillow.

Although an old friend of Mr. Moynihan, upon hearing that, did make a good point: "I just hope she read the damn thing."