Naturally, it was the president's Brooklyn-based, "no fingerprints" political fixer Patrick Gaspard--who was last seen urging Governor David Paterson to go along quietly into New York's political night--reports Jason Horowitz in today's Washington Post.

According to a White House official with knowledge of the courtship, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned the mission to his political director, Patrick Gaspard, who months earlier floated the idea in the State Assembly of Scozzafava running as a Democrat and now asked allies to console her.

And which New York official did the White House call for such a favor?

Well, who else but ascendant Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Cuomo consoled Ms. Scozzafava with his own inspiring personal story of a failed campaign that now seems like a distant memory, and she certainly sounded inspired.

"You're probably the next governor," Scozzafava said she told Cuomo.

The White House also got Senator Chuck Schumer to make a call, and they even got Representative Steve Israel, who's taken orders from the White House before.

"She had to be convinced that her endorsement was make or break, and I believed it was," Senator Schumer told Horowitz.

Mr. Owens went on to win by a narrow three points over Conservative Doug Hoffman, while Ms. Scozzafava pulled five points on the Republican line despite having already dropped out.

PUBLIC SCHEDULE FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL ANDREW M. CUOMO

 

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2009

 

 

Attorney General Cuomo is in Washington, D.C.

 

1:15PM     Attends meeting with President Obama, Cabinet members, and Congressional leaders regarding financial regulatory reform

 

2:00PM     Attends President Obama's remarks on financial regulatory reform

 

Often these public schedules include an admonition of "for planning purposes only." This one doesn't. It's "for immediate release."

A Cuomo aide said the trip was made at the White House's invitation, and that he will be meeting with Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Valerie Jarrett as well as Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank. Cuomo is discussing a consumer protection agency, and how state lawmakers can enforce these tighter regulations; Cuomo has styled himself as "the people's lawyer" and taken many consumer protection actions as attorney general, including actions involving student loan companies and a health care billing company.

"It's about working with the administration to better protect consumers," said Benjamin Lawsky, a special assistant to the attorney general who is accompanying him on the trip.

This trip follows a big conspicuous sloppy kiss Cuomo got from Obama when the president came to an event in Troy. Obama aides have reportedly expressed to David Paterson that they do not support him for election next year; Cuomo insists "at this time" his only plan is to run for another term as attorney general. Period. The trip is entirely work related, Lawsky said, and Cuomo has no plans to meet with Patrick Gaspard, Obama's political director.

And Paterson? His public schedule indicates he's "in New York City and has no public schedule."

Gaspard, who is working on a health care bill and keeping an eye on races in New Jersey and Virginia, will not be at the event, according to a source.

De Blasio worked with Andrew Cuomo, who benefited politically from the maneuver, and has close ties with Patrick Gaspard, the White House aide who reportedly delivered the message to Paterson.

“I respect the president greatly. And I’m a Democrat, a proud Democrat and I do respect the historic role of any president as the head of the party,” de Blasio said. He later added, “The gubernatorial election will sort itself out in due time.”

The main thrust of de Blasio’s critique of his opponent, Mark Green, is that he’s been absent from local political life since he last held office. De Blasio questioned Green during the debate about the mayor’s plan that would have closed several senior centers, which the City Council ultimately prevent. Green expressed opposition to it, but not a firm grasp of the details.

Afterward, de Blasio told reporters that “Anybody who has been active in public life and has a name can lend their name to a good cause.”

All of a sudden, what should have been an easy-to-answer question about this governor’s competence during his 18 months in office—the public has emphatically judged him to be a failure, therefore, goodbye—has become something that is about local political prerogative, that is tinged with race and that is undeniably personal.

“Clearly, I’m running for reelection,” David Paterson said at a Sept. 22 event at Columbia University, one day after an awkward, painfully parsed meeting with President Obama upstate, and two days after it was first reported that the White House had dispatched presidential surrogates to tell the governor that they wished him to abandon a stated plan to run for election next year.

“You don’t give up because people tell you what they think is going to happen,” the governor continued. “You don’t give up because people tell you who’s running and who’s not before they ever announce to do it. You don’t give up because you’re unpopular, when you feel you’ve made the right decisions and when people get a chance to look at what you’re up against and reflect on it.”

Latching on to a Sept. 22 decision from the State Court of Appeals affirming his authority to appoint a lieutenant governor—a decision that, in any other context, would have been recorded as a significant bit of good news—he added, “And if you keep the attitude that you don’t give up, you may get to prove people, when the final tabulation is in, that you were doing the right thing. And that’s what happened with the court decision today.”

That defiant posture is going to change at some point, as local Democrats grow more explicit about their opposition to a Paterson run and its consequences for them.
(“It’s not just some labor leaders or some elected officials concerned about their reelection,” said Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, a Bronx Democrat, in an early reaction to news of the Obama administration’s attempted intervention. “It’s long overdue. I think our best bet would have been for the White House to ask him to step aside and offer him a position, but this is definitely a positive step.”)

It’s perfectly conceivable that, as of now, the governor means what he’s saying. But it almost doesn’t matter. The moment it became public knowledge that he had been approached and warned off a run by the White House’s political director, Patrick Gaspard—a veteran New York operative who happens to have ties to, among many other local officials, Mr. Cuomo—it foreclosed the possibility of a graceful exit.

The Obama administration’s un-private entreaties for the governor to move aside now make it impossible for them to arrange a soft landing for him without it being a blatant trade-off. And if Mr. Paterson abandons his stated plans to run for the office he currently occupies anytime soon, with or without a next job lined up, it will look as if he is doing so under orders from above. So his least awful option, for the moment, is to stay right where he is.

It’s not even clear that the governor sees the election as a hopeless prospect. To believe that the governor perceives the situation the same way as everyone outside an immediate circle of loyal advisers does assumes, as the White House presumably did, that the David Paterson operation is a rational, predictable decision-making entity.

It isn’t. This is due both to the governor’s innate propensity to improvise, as well as to what a number of current and former Paterson insiders describe as compartmentalized staff that doesn’t always act, or provide advice, in concert.

On one side are David Johnson, who currently serves as the governor’s omnipresent “body man,” and Clemmie Harris, a former roommate from the governor’s State Senate days who was hired last year as Mr. Paterson’s “confidential assistant.” Both have been with the governor, who has generally had trouble retaining senior staffers, since 2000.  

Some current and former advisers describe Mr. Johnson and Mr. Harris as being protective of the governor, and markedly more optimistic in their tactical advice than some of the other staff. One or both of them are always by Paterson’s side—Mr. Johnson often spends the night at the Executive Mansion when he’s in Albany—and they often serve as liaisons to more senior staffers.

On the other side are the likes of the governor’s communications director, Peter Kauffmann, a Navy veteran and former Hillary Clinton aide who was hired in February 2009 to try to turn around the messaging operation, and Larry Schwartz, the no-nonsense chief of staff who was supposed to have brought order to the office after the abrupt departure last October of former top adviser Charles O’Byrne because of a personal tax scandal.

By all accounts, Mr. Kauffmann and Mr. Schwartz were out of the loop and caught unawares by some of Mr. Paterson’s most grievous missteps, most notably his politically disastrous Aug. 21 appearance on Errol Louis’ morning radio show to complain about negative media coverage.

(“We’re not in the post-racial period,” Mr. Paterson said, saying treatment of himself and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, the only other African-American governor, were being treated harshly in a way other white governors were not. “And the reality is that the next victim on the list—and you see it coming—is President Barack Obama.” Tellingly, it wasn’t until 4 that afternoon that the governor’s press office mustered a statement walking back the racial aspect of his comments.)

The advice the governor is getting now, or at least the version of it that he seems to be listening to, boils down to the following: dig in.

Mr. Paterson left that eventful meeting with Mr. Gaspard—it took place on Sept. 14, a week before it was actually reported—on a cordial, not confrontational, note, according to one source familiar with the dynamics of the situation.
As Mr. Paterson huddled with advisers, “all of a sudden the meeting took a different cast.”

According to the source, Mr. Harris and Mr. Johnson in particular saw it (correctly, actually) as an affront, and over the next few days pushed the governor to resist.

Three days after the president’s request to abandon the campaign was delivered, Paterson 2010 announced it had hired Richie Fife—who ran former comptroller Carl McCall’s successful primary campaign for governor against Andrew Cuomo in 2002—as its manager. (A spokesperson for the Paterson campaign pointed out that Mr. Fife had accepted the job two weeks earlier, prior to the Gaspard meeting.)

And when news finally broke of the meeting with Mr. Gaspard and another, reportedly related one in which Representative Greg Meeks conveyed a similar message, the governor was ready with his statements of defiance.

“I am running for governor right now,” he told reporters gathered on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem.

His core supporters were ready, too. Representative Charlie Rangel, among others, expressed doubt that the Times report could possibly be true, and said he couldn’t believe that Mr. Obama would ever have wanted Mr. Paterson to step aside.

In a separate interview, Councilman Charles Barron made explicit the racial component of a black governor being asked (albeit by a black president, via his black political director) to make way for a white successor.

“For the first black president to be telling the first black governor that he needs to step out—I don’t think he said it, but if he did—people said he needed to step out and give it to Hillary, and then he became president,” Mr. Barron said.

Mr. Paterson’s campaign spokesperson, Tracy Sefl, said, “On Sunday, the governor made three points in his response to the recent reporting. One, he is running. Two, he won’t discuss confidential conversations. And three, his focus is on running the state and getting New York’s economy back on track. All three of those assertions remain true.”

A spokesman declined comment on behalf of Mr. Kauffmann, Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Harris on the internal dynamics of the office.

On Sept. 21, it was a beautiful Indian summer day on the campus of Hudson Valley Community College, set up a hill from the Hudson River at the edge of the city of Troy.
Mr. Paterson was the first to greet Mr. Obama when he landed at the Albany airport.

The visit was scheduled long before the president’s political team had resolved to make a move on the governor, but there was suddenly an obvious, unpleasant political context to their interaction.

Mr. Paterson whispered something into Mr. Obama’s ear, and the two entered separate cars in the motorcade.

As Mr. Obama toured the facilities at Hudson Valley, Mr. Paterson entered a dim room where the president’s speech on the importance of education was to be delivered, chatting with Congressmen Paul Tonko, Scott Murphy and Maurice Hinchey, as well as Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who sat on his left, and State Senator John Sampson.

Mr. Cuomo entered the room several minutes later, smiling. He and Mr. Paterson embraced, briefly, but did not spend much time talking to each other. Mr. DiNapoli and Mr. Sampson formed a quasi-barrier, and Mr. Cuomo chatted with Assemblyman Ron Canestrari, June O’Neill and, eventually, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. At one point, the attorney general waved cheerfully to the cameras. People who sat around Mr. Paterson and Mr. Cuomo said their demeanor toward each other was warm, and local State Senator Neil Breslin, who sat behind the governor, said he was “upbeat.”

Mr. Obama took the podium from Jill Biden, then turned to the corral of politicians on his left. The first “special guest” he thanked was Mr. Paterson, whom he described, without making eye contact, as a “wonderful man, the governor of the great state of New York.”

Then Obama turned toward a smiling Cuomo, whom he described as he “your shy and retiring attorney general” to laughs.

“Andrew is doing great work enforcing the laws that need to be enforced,” he said.

The speech lasted just under half an hour, and Mr. Paterson and Mr. Cuomo both rushed out the back door as Mr. Obama shook hands with a section of students. Neither man took questions. Mr. Obama shook hands with Mr. Breslin and other lingering officials before exiting through the same door.

The president and the governor flew to New York City on separate planes.

Patrick Gaspard, the New York political veteran who runs the Obama White House’s political shop, hasn’t been implicated in any similar scandals and is known to be far more low-key than Sununu, but there does seem to be a significant common thread between them: Even after making it big on the national scene, neither of them—it seems—could resist throwing their weight around back in their home states.

Gaspard’s fingerprints are all over the White House’s clumsy and almost certainly counterproductive bid to push David Paterson out of next year’s governor’s race. Various media outlets are reporting that Gaspard personally conveyed the White House’s position to Paterson last week or that he did so through an intermediary, Queens Representative Gregory Meeks (with whom Gaspard enjoys a solid working relationship)—or both.

The move doesn't have any precedent, precisely. Few incumbent governors have ever been in Paterson’s situation (he trails by nearly 50 points in trial heats for next year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary), but the last one who was—Massachusetts’ Jane Swift, a Republican, in 2002—did not face any meddling from the Bush White House as her poll numbers collapsed.

It seems apparent that Gaspard, whose resume includes stints with Margarita Lopez, David Dinkins, Ruth Messinger, Fernando Ferrer and 1199, has taken a special interest in New York politics.

For example, at least one well-placed Democrat (and presumably many others) received a call from on behalf of Bill de Blasio, his old friend and a candidate for public advocate, in the days immediately before last week’s city primary. This is the White House political director we’re talking about.

By most accounts, his relationship with Paterson—if you can call it that—has not be a particularly close one. At the same time, he’s well-connected with friends and allies of Andrew Cuomo who’s standing just off-stage waiting for someone, anyone, to finish Paterson off. (Cuomo was backed strongly by 1199 in his comeback bid for attorney general in 2006.)

As Gaspard may now be discovering, intervention has its risks. The call for Paterson to exit has succeeded only in humiliating the governor and making a graceful exit more difficult, if not impossible. This, after it was becoming clear that, for all his bluster, Paterson would probably elect to hang it up early next year, when it finally became clear to him just how thin his support was.

(The timing was particularly awkward, given the fact that Obama had to share an upstate stage with Paterson today.)

Gaspard’s undiminished home-state interest calls to mind Sununu, who used his perch as governor of first-in-the-nation New Hampshire to help deliver the state’s 1988 G.O.P. primary to Bush. (The famous story has Sununu calling in favors at WMUR, the only statewide network affiliate, to purchase airtime for a vicious attack ad against Bob Dole the weekend before the vote.) When Bush was elected president that November, he made Sununu his chief of staff.

But Sununu couldn’t let the Granite State go. As the 1990 elections approached, he threw the White House’s support behind Representative Bob Smith, who was vying with attorney Tom Christo for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Gordon Humphrey. Christo’s backers complained, but Smith won.

He also pushed hard for Bill Zeliff, a White Mountains inn-keeper, in the G.O.P. primary race for Smith’s House seat. Zeliff eked out a win over Larry Brady by 314 votes. That infuriated the influential Union-Leader, which supported Brady and which blasted Sununu and the White House for “ham-fisted meddling” and “persistent interference.”

In ’90, Sununu’s wife also made news by threatening to challenge the state’s other G.O.P. congressman, Chuck Douglas, saying that she’d “never appreciated his values and his morals.” In a stunning upset, Douglas went down to defeat that fall to Democrat Dick Swett. And Sununu also used his clout to give his old rival, Judd Gregg, headaches. As the guest of honor at a New Hampshire business event, Sununu made sure to sit next to the state’s G.O.P. Senate president, who was then considering challenging Gregg.

By ’91, when he was forced out of the White House, Sununu had many new enemies in his home state. A few months later, Bush was humbled in the state’s G.O.P. primary, held to barely 50 percent of the vote against Pat Buchanan—the first sign that his re-election might be in serious danger. And that fall, for the first time since 1964, the state voted Democratic in the presidential election, favoring Bill Clinton over Bush.

Sununu wasn’t to blame for all of Bush’s Granite State woes. But he sure didn’t win the adminstration many friends there. And when it comes to New York today, Gaspard isn’t doing his boss any favors either.

Both Meeks and Gaspard are reported to have carried the message from Barack Obama to David Paterson telling him not to run next year.

The event is a fund-raiser for Meeks, with tickets ranging from $75 to $750.

Al Sharpton had just stepped out of a meeting with Barack Obama.

It was January 2007, and he was down in the Obama Senate office during a trip to Washington to meet with a number of Democratic presidential contenders. Mr. Obama had been almost uncannily pitch-perfect, Mr. Sharpton thought, hitting every talking point and preempting every question.

As he was leaving, he caught sight of a familiar face in the reception area of the office.

“I said, ‘That looks like Patrick.’ And Patrick starts laughing,” Mr. Sharpton said. 

At the airport on the way back to New York, he said, he had a further revelation.

“It hit me when I got to the shuttle that a lot of what Obama was saying meant that he must have been talking to Patrick Gaspard," Mr. Sharpton said. "Obama made me feel like he knew every move I made. I said, ‘Patrick did it again.’”

Earlier this year, Mr. Gaspard, a Brooklyn-based, 41-year-old Democratic operative, succeeded Karl Rove as the White House director of the office of political affairs. Unlike Mr. Rove, Mr. Gaspard is at his most comfortable making his presence felt without actually being seen.

“He’s become a real player in the White House, the president himself told me,” said Representative Gregory Meeks.  “He’s a low key, behind-the-scenes, no-fingerprints kind of guy. I need something, I call Patrick. And if he calls, it’s a big deal. He’s close to the president.”

Mr. Gaspard’s official responsibility is to provide the president with an accurate assessment of the political dynamics affecting the work of his administration, and to remain in close contact with powerbrokers around the country to help push the president’s agenda.

In practice, he’s something of an all-purpose fixer, if not the carte blanche policy architect that Mr. Rove was for George W. Bush, or the number-one politics guru that David Axelrod is for Mr. Obama.

And while he looks after the president’s interests in Washington, he also uses his position as a lever to manage politically messy situations closer to home.

Earlier this month, for example, when a Republican coup in the State Senate threw Albany into chaos—with potential implications for the congressional redistricting process in 2010--Mr. Gaspard began making calls.

Mr. Gaspard was in touch with Governor David Paterson, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations. He also called Hiram Monserrate, one of the two Democratic legislators whose defection cost his party its 32-30 majority in the Senate.  

The two, who have known each other for years, spoke continuously in the hours and days after the coup. According to one source familiar with the substance of the calls, Mr. Monserrate twice asked for Mr. Gaspard to get the White House involved, and was twice rejected.

Soon after, Mr. Monserrate declared himself back in the Democratic fold.

Mr. Gaspard’s political sensibilities were formed in part by his cosmopolitan (almost Obama-esque) personal background.

He was born in present-day Democratic Republican of the Congo to Haitian parents, but raised in America, in Manhattan and Queens.

He writes poetry and considers as a personal hero Aimé Césaire, the pioneering black-pride poet and politician who taught the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon. He also likes Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet of the Acmeist school.

He has acted in plays and performed spoken word, holds strongly positive opinions about Otis Redding and collects Marvel comics. (His prize possession is the first issue of Conan the Barbarian.) He is a big Mets fan. He was married on the grass of Prospect Park; his wife and two children are about to join him in Washington after living for years in Park Slope.

He jogs regularly and lives cleanly.

“Let me put it to you this way,” former city councilwoman Margarita Lopez, an old boss of Mr. Gaspard, recalled telling Obama vetters who asked her if he ever used drugs or alcohol. “That man doesn’t drink Coca Cola.”

 He can be brutal, though.

“Don’t be mistaken about him being a gentleman--don’t even go there,” said Ms. Lopez. “When a situation got to a point that there was no resolution I would reach Patrick and say, ‘Go for it, and bring me no hostages, this battle is going to be won with no hostages.’ And I can tell you Patrick delivered every single time.”

Mr. Gaspard declined requests to be interviewed for this article.

Mr. Gaspard’s father moved with his wife from their native Haiti to post-liberation Zaire, when its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, appealed to French-speaking academics of African descent to teach there. Three years after Mr. Gaspard’s birth, the family moved to the Upper West Side, where they lived until Mr. Gaspard turned 11.

He fell in love with the 1973 Mets, and especially Tom Seaver. Soon the Gaspards, including his brother Michael, who currently works as a consultant for the Advance Group, moved closer to Shea Stadium, to St. Albans in Southeast Queens, from which Mr. Gaspard commuted to high school at Brooklyn Tech. 

He attended the School of Visual Arts and later Columbia, but like Mr. Rove before him, Mr. Gaspard left college early to submerge himself in politics. He interned in the office of Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins.

He got his first taste of campaign work doing advance for the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, during which time his energy and affinity with local political organizations caught the notice of Harlem-based consultant Bill Lynch, whose office floor Mr. Gaspard got in the habit of crashing on. 

Mr. Lynch later brought Mr. Gaspard on to Mr. Dinkins’ first mayoral race, and then to City Hall.

“He was smart and loyal and really knew his way around,” Mr. Dinkins recalled.

By the time Mr. Gaspard left the Dinkins administration to do consulting for unions and political campaigns, he had already cemented a lasting reputation as an organizer with extraordinary political and sartorial sense.

Councilman Bill DeBlasio, who worked with Mr. Gaspard in Mr. Lynch’s shop, remembered his friend helping him pick out a new wardrobe when he went to work as state director for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.

“He took me to Barneys and showed me how to dress well,” said Mr. DeBlasio. In 1997, outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger enlisted Mr. Gaspard for her doomed campaign against Rudy Giuliani. Now, as the head of the American Jewish World Service charity, she still seeks his help, recently meeting with him in the White House to discuss Darfur aide programs and policy. 

“His job is to connect people,” she said.

After working on outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger’s extremely unsuccessful mayoral campaign against Rudy Giuliani in 1997, Mr. Gaspard became chief of staff to Ms. Lopez, a radical feminist from the Lower East Side who was one of the mayor’s most raucous critics.

She once declared on the floor of the City Council that Mr. Gaspard was “an honorary lesbian,” and recalled that, at times, he outdid her.

“One time we have a staff member who saw this man, and when she saw this man, she said, ‘Oh my god that man is so handsome, it’s so sad that he’s gay,’” Ms. Lopez said. “Patrick looked at her and said, ‘What did you say?’ And she said, ‘He’s gay, that is so sad. Because he is so gorgeous.’ And Patrick said to her, ‘You mean to tell me that because he is so gorgeous, he should not be gay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it’s not useful to women!’ And he said, ‘You are the biggest homophobe I have ever met in my life, and you don’t even know it.’”

(Just this week, on June 22, Mr. Gaspard led an administration call with LGBT activists frustrated with President Obama’s incremental approach to gay rights.)

In 1999, Ms. Lopez loaned Mr. Gaspard out to help 1199 SEIU, the politically powerful labor union, to organize a march in protest of the police shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant. Mr. Gaspard impressed them.

“He knows what buttons to push and in what order,” said Jennifer Cunningham, who was then the union’s political director, and who went on to work closely with Mr. Gaspard for the next eight years.

George Gresham, the current president of 1199, said that Mr. Gaspard often took a “statistical” interest in candidates, just as he did to baseball box scores and farm systems, wanting to know not just their vision or why they should hold office, but how they expected to win.

“Patrick could distinguish between those who were serious and those who weren’t,” he said.

Several of his former colleagues said the most difficult time for Mr. Gaspard during that period was in 2002, when the union supported Republican Governor George Pataki over Carl McCall, then a two-term state comptroller who was attempting to become the first black governor in the history of the state.      

“All of us developed a political maturity at that time,” said Mr. Gresham. “We say we don’t have permanent friends, we have permanent interests.”

In 2003, Mr. Gaspard went national to work as the deputy national field director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, and after Mr. Dean was knocked out of the race, as the national field director for George Soros’ political action group America Coming Together.

In 2005, he took a leave from the union to work for another underdog Democrat, Freddy Ferrer, in a landslide loss to Michael Bloomberg. A year later, when 1199 played a major role in backing Andrew Cuomo, who had challenged Mr. McCall in the 2002 Democratic primary, in his run for Attorney general, Mr. Gaspard worked on races in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington, DC. 

He also worked on local races.

“Without Patrick Gaspard, Yvette Clarke would not be in Congress,” said Josh Isay, a consultant to Mr. Bloomberg who worked with Mr. Gaspard on that heated race, a four-way primary in 2006 for a House seat in Brooklyn vacated by Major Owens.

In that race, as in most other matters, he did his work quietly.

In December 2006, Mr. Sharpton asked Patrick Gaspard to help him assemble an emergency meeting of about 300 activists, black nationalists, union and political leaders to decide on an appropriate response to the police shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed young black man.

At one point, things got ugly¸ with one activist criticizing the attendance of the teacher’s union president Randi Weingarten at the meeting.

“One guy who nobody knew got up and said, ‘I don’t know why we got the head of the teachers union here, these white teachers are destroying our community,’ and went off on her,” recalled Mr. Sharpton. “And Patrick ran over to me and said, ‘I think you should call for unity and talk about how important it is that whites, blacks, everybody march together. I could say it, but I think it is better for your to say if, for the crowd, and for your own beliefs.’

“And I got up and said it,” Mr. Sharpton continued. “And as I said it, he was whispering something in Randi’s ear, and Randi got up and started talking about how committed she was and she didn’t care who didn’t appreciate her working with Reverend Sharpton. And it occurred to me that Patrick was going around the room telling everybody what to say.”

As the presidential election neared, it became increasingly clear that Mr. Gaspard’s home senator, Hillary Clinton had designs on the White House. Friends of Mr. Gaspard said that he was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, whose inclusive campaign was, as Mr. DeBlasio put it, the “clear and pure” iteration of the pan-racial “gorgeous mosaic” Dinkins campaign of 1988. Publicly, Mr. Gaspard remained neutral, but as early as January 2007, he was involved.

After unofficially helping out Mr. Obama, Mr. Gaspard met with the Illinois senator and Mr. Plouffe in Washington in February of 2007 to discuss coming aboard.

“President Obama and I met with him and really liked him, because he wasn’t your traditional political schmoozer,” Mr. Plouffe said. “There was a depth to him that we found attractive.”

(According to the New Yorker, this was the meeting during which Mr. Obama famously told Mr. Gaspard, “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”)

As Mr. Plouffe noted, Mr. Gaspard turned them down.

But true to form, Mr. Gaspard pushed Mr. Obama’s case behind the scenes within the union, and played a critical and active role in blocking an endorsement of John Edwards before the Iowa caucus. That paved the way for SEIU to endorse Mr. Obama, and when they did, Mr. Gaspard openly expressed his support, heading to Wisconsin and eventually leading the union’s volunteer efforts in primary states like Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

He eventually joined the campaign as political director, and shared a long table in a small office in Chicago with Jen O’Malley and Jon Carson, where they’d pore over maps and manage activity in the states.

He was responsible for notifying many of the country’s leaders that Mr. Obama had selected Joe Biden as his vice president, and during the Democratic convention in Denver, he joined Mr. Plouffe and a few others in working out the exact logistics of Hillary Clinton’s campaign role and choreographing her casting of New York’s convention ballots for Mr. Obama.

During the presidential transition, influential New Yorkers had already started stepping up efforts to catch his ear.

In October of 2008, Kevin Sheekey, Michael Bloomberg’s closest political aide, wrote Gaspard asking if he could make some time for him, and they stay in touch on issues relating to the city. Lots of local officials have done the same.

“From the delegation point of view, if need be, we know we have a person,” said Representative Joseph Crowley. “We have access.”  

In May of this year, Al Sharpton went back to Washington, this time for a meeting with the president about education policy.

At one point, as Mr. Sharpton waited outside the Oval Office with Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, Mr. Gaspard stopped by to say hello.

As Mr. Sharpton tells it, he turned to Mr. Duncan and said, “You guys are real shrewd in this administration.”

He motioned to Mr. Gaspard and said, “It’s hard for me to march against you if I ever get mad, because you’ve got our best organizer.’”

During an interview last night on The Perez Notes, Monserrate, who also ran for the office in 2006, said, this time around, he may get the endorsement of the Queens County Democrats, as well as several other organizations.

“I also understand that this time, I have some support that I didn’t have two years ago,” Monserrate said, around the 7:30 mark. “Namely Assemblyman Peralta, who has publicly stated that he is prepared to support me. Several members, union players, particularly 1199 and the hotels trades also stated that they will support my election. These are very important support networks in politics that we count on, and I think that obviously they are another factor in this decision.”

But Patrick Gaspard, executive vice president of 1199 SEIU emailed me to say, “We haven't made an endorsement yet in this race. We're still weighing the candidacies. I think that Hiram is encouraged because we backed Senator Sabini in 2006, but have yet endorse in this cycle.”

Monserrate also spent a portion of his nearly hour long interview swatting away unflattering stories.

In an echo of the slush fund scandal at the City Council. Monserrate steered money to a local group whose legitimacy has come under scrutiny. Monserrate said Michael Bloomberg should have done a better job of vetting organizations that got money in the budget (around the 9:57 mark). “I don’t know how any organization that didn’t file its proper paperwork was given any money. That’s a question that really needs to be directed to the administration.”

As for his brief appearance once at a Republican fund-raiser, Monserrate said he was visiting a friend at the event. Then, taking a Bloomberg-esque approach, said (11:55), “I’m a Democrat--I can’t walk into a room of Republicans? That’s ridiculous. I should be able to walk anywhere that I legally can walk into in this city. To try to say that I’m working with the Republicans is just nonsense. I’ve been a very progressive Democrat for just about all my life.”

He added, “Again, it’s just desperation by certain members of the New York State Senate that live in my area that are concerned about primaries.”

On his relationship to Scientology, which is the foundation of a detoxification program for 9/11 rescue workers he supports, Monserrate, who is a Christian, said, “It’s beyond me how that was used. I’ve gotten this question several times at the New York Observer ad nauseam, the New York Post, Daily News, and many others. I think that, like I said, everyone should really just back off on this one.”

Monserrate went on the offensive when discussing congestion pricing, which he supported. Saying it was a way to reduce air pollution, Monserrate told Perez (17:45), “We have a responsibility to act. The state legislature did not act. Shame on them. We acted. Unlike a certain senator from my neighborhood who decided, instead of voting, he was going to boycott the meeting and not even participate. He didn’t even show up to vote. That’s unfortunate because leadership is about taking tough decisions even though at the moment it might not be a popular decision.”

UPDATE: A spokesman for Monserrate called to clarify that Monserrate said in the interview he thinks the mayor's administration, not the mayor himself, should have vetted community groups.

And a major Bloomberg campaign player who has, until now, escaped notice is Maura Keaney. On loan from the union UNITE HERE, she's running Mike's GOTV operation, playing a similar (if better-funded) role to 1199's Patrick Gaspard on the Ferrer campaign.

Her low-profile spot running an election day operation expected to include about 10,000 people (not the 50,000 number the campaign touts, but still a lot) says some interesting things about labor politics.

For one thing, her union, UNITE-HERE, has quietly become a more important political force in the city than it gets credit for.

"We don't have a process, as some unions do, about generating a lot of press about the numebrs we have," the union's chief of staff, Chris Chafe, says. "We just put our shoulders into it and get it done."

It's also a reminder that, for all the (accurate) reports of the decline of labor, unions are still the masters of GOTV. Keaney's working for Mike under ex-1199er Patrick Brennan.

And, as Chafe notes, Keaney's and Gaspard's roles are a sign of the strength of the Change to Win unions, which include SEIU and UNITE HERE, and which recently split from the AFL-CIO.