A few minutes after Bloomberg introduced the new group as "temporary" and a "band-aid" yesterday, I asked Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., as he left City Hall, if the rationale for mayoral control could be undercut by a successful board.

"It may," he said.

Diaz added, "I would like to go back to mayoral control, but with some tooth in it. I don't think the mayor should have such an exaggerated majority of eight of out 13 members; there should be more empowerment from parents."

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers union, which was eventually won over by the mayor in his efforts to extend mayoral control, saw a similar potential for that particular opposition.

"If [the new panel] works out really well there will be some people that make that argument," she said.

But Weingarten said the current board, while it forces more conversation between the borough presidents and mayor, doesn't  "have the built-in stability of resources that we had under the 2002 law and it doesn't have some of the other checks and balances."

Those hearings, on everything from the union's use of tenure to protect bad teachers to the bureaucracies behind longstanding public school mysteries—the lack of toilet paper, the flickering classroom lights—made her a marked woman, which she says she discovered after leaving the council to run for Manhattan borough president in 2005.

"They took me out," said Moskowitz. "You underestimate the power of he unions at your own risk."

In the end, Moskowitz lost to Scott Stringer, who had the endorsement of the union-backed Working Families Party. Stringer finished with 26 percent of the vote to Moskowitz's 17 percent—a difference of about 12,000 votes.   

And that was it.

At this year's U.F.T. conference at the Hilton New York on May 9, union president Randi Weingarten told a large audience of teachers and elected officials, including all the candidates for comptroller, and representatives Maloney and Charlie Rangel, that "for reforms to be successful, they must be developed with teachers, not imposed on them."

Weingarten punctuated her speech by crouching to the microphone and screaming, "No child was ever helped by blaming a teacher. No promising educator was ever recruited or enticed to stay by being threatened. And no school was ever turned around by demonizing its staff."

Afterward, I asked her if she expected Moskowitz to serve as a cautionary tale to other politicians as they weigh the costs of opposing the union's schools policy.

"We are fierce advocates of our core beliefs, and as a union we actually convince the public of what we are saying," she said. "I am very proud of what we do in terms of our endorsements. There are some races where we are what separates people from winning and losing. But our endorsements are always based on the merits."

A few minutes later, as Weingarten worked the room, I asked Assemblyman Denny Farrell the same thing.

"You surely don't want them against you," he said.

Moskowitz, however, is staking her political future on opposing them. She'd like to run for mayor, maybe in 2013, on a platform of education reform.

The 45-year-old Harlem resident (via Morningside Heights, where she grew up, and the Upper East Side) and mother of three has recently been conducting herself very much like a candidate in the middle of a campaign. She has denounced the "union-political-educational complex" in front of the City Council committee she once chaired, and she has debated Weingarten on New York 1. She supports mayoral control and urges an end to protections for tenured teachers. 

Still, her prime concern these days is her day job running four charter schools in Harlem, the first of which opened in 2006, for a salary of more than $300,000 a year.  She hopes to have 40 such schools over the next 10 years.

Colorful signs reading "Try and Try" "You Can Do It" and "Never Give Up" are taped alongside the staircase leading to Moskowitz's newest school, the Harlem Success Academy, located on the third floor of P.S. 123 on West 140 Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. In the classrooms, Kindergarteners and first graders, dressed in private school-style uniforms—orange ties and blue jackets for the boys, gray dresses for the girls—have their correct answers rewarded with compliments. ("Kiss your brain!")

In a hallway outside a science classroom that still smelled vaguely of the squid the children had dissected earlier in the month, Moskowitz, dressed in a politician's uniform of pinstripe jacket, skirt, beige blouse, BlackBerry and cell phone holsters and pearls, took a seat in tiny school chair, and, once again, made her case.

"I'm a die-hard Democrat," she said. "I'd like to believe that the Democratic Party believes in its principles. This is the party of social justice. This is the party of opportunity. This is the party of fighting for the little guy. And yet, on the issue of education, they are siding with the union bosses."

In the long term, she said, it's a disaster for the party.

"If the Democrats don't catch up with their constituents they are going to be in deep trouble," she said. "We haven't had a Democrat running this city in nearly 20 years, and one of the reasons, I would argue, is because of its education policy. It's going to hurt the party."

Moskowitz argued that Democrats around the country had evolved on education. President Obama advocates greater accountability and performance-based pay for teachers and charter schools, and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, is a forceful proponent of mayoral control.

But according to Moskowitz, Democrats in New York City have been slow to adapt, frozen into place by an unwillingness to break with the U.F.T.

"It's really hard to find people publicly who want to go against the union," she said.

Instead of thinking of ways to improve education, she said, would-be reformers have to worry about "the U.F.T. trying to put us six feet under."

"There will be enormous resources spent to defeat reformers," Moskowitz said. "The union's primary goal is to maintain the power and influence of the union. And that's a somewhat easier mission than educating kids."

Still, she says, she's optimistic that time is on her side.

"I don't think that I'm personally going to convince the city. The parents are going to do it by demanding what is in their self-interest," she said.

"The dinosaurs looked pretty powerful before they became extinct."

More New York City public-school kids are passing standardized English tests in grades 3 through 8, according to test results released yesterday, and City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is given a platform on the front of today's News from which to characterize the results as a product of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's assertion of mayoral control of the school system, which has resulted in greater accountability for education workers for test-score performance. It's an important argument for Mr. Klein because the 2002 law abolishing the Board of Education is up for renewal in June by the State Legislature, which is now far less friendly to the former Republican mayor than it was when the law was passed, and whose leaders owe much to the political support of the United Federation of Teachers, which has always opposed mayoral control. It's interesting to see this story on the front of the News, when it's generally been the Post that has been covering the dispute over education policy between the mayor and UFT head Randi Weingarten (with that incredible photo-montage logo of Ms. Weingarten manipulating a Pinocchio marionette over the legend, "PUPPET MASTER"). To flag the story, the News gives the largest type on the page to the words "SCORES SOAR," with the subhead: "Klein: Reading success tied to mayoral control." When you get inside, opponents of mayoral control are given their chance to talk back to Mr. Klein, pointing out that the city was actually only in the middle of the pack among many New York cities that improved their scores and do not have mayoral control (Buffalo!) and pointed to things like "staff development" for the improvements. It's all fair enough.

Kiefer Sutherland, who we read yesterday was going to book himself in with the police for head-butting Proenza Schouler cofounder Jack McCollough at a party Monday night, in fact did do that yesterday. He also ordered in Thai food and seemed to be in a good mood. He had nothing to say. Neither, really, did anyone else. So why is this on Page 1? He's got a court date scheduled for June 22, so let's lay off Kiefer on the cover until the 23rd.

New York Post: The murder of Wesleyan student Johanna Justin-Jinich in a Wesleyan bookstore in broad daylight was pretty shocking. Seven bullets were fired at the young woman at near point-blank range, according to reports; after ditching a wig used as a sort of disguise at the bookstore, the suspect in the case, Stephen Morgan, hung out outside the store among the rubberneckers and even spoke to police, giving them his phone number, before making his getaway. Neither the suspect nor the victim is from New York, but there is a city angle here (besides the fact that anything in Connecticut can arguably be classified a suburb of New York, if you stretch the meaning far enough): They met at a summer class at New York University, and it was here that Mr. Morgan developed what looks, from diaries collected from his abandoned car by police, like an obsession with the victim. "His deadly obsession," reads the headline, which sounds a little bit like the title of an awful erotic thriller. Then: "Chilling e-mails in co-ed slay."

A short digression: When will the term "co-ed," which is only used in true-crime contexts, finally go away? Surely it's pretty unremarkable that girls are allowed to go to college with boys at this point. One reason, which really only explains its use in print (it's used all the time in television true-crime programming, too), might be that it says so much in so little space: It tells you that the victim was a college student, usually at a residential college, so it creates the entire background setting. "Chilling e-mails in slaying of Wesleyan undergrad" is not as economical. Still, we think the word is almost getting a campy taint, and in a story that really has to be serious, even reverential, it sticks out as weird.

The Post is not the winner on this story on the merits. They publish more interviews than the News today, but most of it amplifies the basic story available everywhere. And as usual, the News is better on the police-procedural side of the story. It's purely a different measure of the story's interest level that puts it on the front page of the Post today, and not the News. And there is plenty here. The victim is a beauty; the suspect looks deranged. The journals recovered in the suspect's car are full of the kind of insane and outrageous scrawling that raises the body temperature of a certain kind of sensationalist consumer. And to top it all off, both victim and suspect appear to be from "good" families, which allows readers to indulge in a little bit of armchair criminology. It's like an episode of Law & Order, and in fact, you can expect to see this story play out at "Hudson University" before the next season is over, we'll wager.

Back to Manny: The Post, if its front-page treatment of the steroid-scandal story is any indication, has no qualms about presenting the straight news to readers even if it's old news to them. Why not? Because if their take is funny enough on the cover, people will still want to read everything they've got on it. "GIRLIE MANNY" is not one of the paper's best, but it's pretty aggressive! "Drug cheat Ramirez took female hormone." There's a little teaser, too, which leads: "Now this is female trouble." So the Post decided to ride the fact that the drug Mr. Ramirez is accused of taking is a women's fertility drug very hard. Never mind the fact that use of this drug is fairly common among people who abuse steroids to improve performance; aside from the fact that that information is widely available, why would it have been put on the "banned" list by major-league baseball if it weren't? We do wonder if a less eccentric player—one with, for instance, short hair—caught out using this stuff would be treated quite the same way. It's a bit as if he innocently had asked for a Barbie doll for his third birthday. Of course it's all coy. But it proves something: A funny angle, even if it's not important or even counterfactual, can be enough to make print coverage relevant even when its limitations put it behind the 24-hour news cycle.

General observations: We started today's Wood War asking about how the speed of the news cycle affects how newspapers sell stories you've already heard about to morning readers, and today provides a perfect example of the two New York tabloids' approaches to the problem. The News, acknowledging the fact that it is not actually giving you news you haven't already heard (after all, if you didn't know, you wouldn't really be able to make sense of their Ramirez display), sacrifices all its urgency and gives us limp analysis. The Post, stoutly refusing to give up its perch as the purveyor of new information even in the face of the facts, puts a camp spin on the story and sells it as a Day 1 story. What does this tell us? Probably not much, except it suggests that maybe the tabloids need to work on entertaining audiences by talking about the news. If the treatment entertains, there might actually be a lower bar for new information. Analysis is not, usually, very entertaining. (Ha! Hoist on our own petard!)

Let's just get this out of the way: Kiefer Sutherland on the front page of the News was wasted space. But we're not inclined to hold that against the News; the two papers seem to be taking turns mishandling this thing on their covers. So let's just forget about Kiefer and hope the tabloids do, too. That leaves us to match up the Post's selling of the Wesleyan murder story against the News' test-score story. It's probably the case that each paper did the right thing here for its own purposes. The News, in its relentless localness, would have to privilege a story about public schools over one about a murder at Wesleyan. And aside from the fact that this is an extraordinary crime story, remember that the Post usually likes its crimes to be "shocking," from an elitist point of view. The News can't treat Wesleyan University any differently from Queens College; this is the paper that doesn't "see" those kinds of class differences. Whereas the Post likely felt compelled to give this the front page precisely because the victim was a student at an elite Eastern university. The Post can also be fairly confident that one day of putting Joel Klein on the front page of the News is not going to steal its thunder on the schools issue, on which the Post has lately been killing the competition. I'm calling these two stories a draw, because neither could have done what the other did and had as good a front page. So it's down to the Manny Ramirez story.

Winner: New York Post.

Do you like Metallica? Do you know who Randi Weingarten is? Then the front page of today's Post is all for you! "PUPPET MASTERS" reads the wood. If you can tell what a "shock charter ploy" is without turning to the inside, we award you the Teachers' Union Monthly Newsletter Close-Reader of the Month award. By the way: It's an important piece. And the tabloids really need to figure out how to sell the story of the teachers' union and its politics: it matters! And it matters on a personal level to lots of New Yorkers. But here's the question: are you picking up the Post to find out information that matters to you? Or are you amusing yourself on the way to the office? We've long felt that there are two magic words that make readers go away: RANDI and WEINGARTEN.

Daily News: Is it Brillig already? No, just cruel April. Those slithy toves! Do you know what I am talking about? Yes, you do: we have your demographics figured out. The Daily News, not so much. See, everyone has heard the name "Friar Tuck," even if they don't know that he's from Robin Hood or that recently there has been a hullaballoo in Britain about the fact that a new television series has him being played as a black martial arts expert (there were no Africans in Britain then, historians object! But of course, there were no friars then, either. Historians need to work on their history!) Anyway! Everyone has heard the words "Friar Tuck" even if they don't know the source. But what about "JOBA WACKY"?
OK, let's humor the News for a minute: Joba was drunk. There was a bottle of Crown Royal. It was Nebraska. What did he do? He said that New York was a tough town. A gay town? A town full of dirty immigrants? No, we'll leave all that to the Atlanta Braves. Just a town where Yogi Berra stops by every now and then and you say, "Yogi, what the f--- are you doin' here?" Yeah, there's not much here. He's not that wacky. The story is a bomb. But it might be the biggest story in New York sports today! Which is why the Post wisely let its back page do all the talking on this one.

So why does this take up two thirds of the Daily News front page? We don't know. We do know this: they got the crop right on the Barack Star (see, the coinage is taking already!) photo. OK, now all you needed to do was take this crop and make it twice as big ... there you go! That is wood.

General observations: There's not much to say today! The Daily News stank. The Post lost the plot on the Obama photo, but played it big enough that it will matter. Do they suffer for having spent valuable space on Randi Weingarten, interest-killer? No, because the competition stank so badly.

Winner: The New York Post.

Yesterday, Bloomberg told New Yorkers to direct their rage over the M.T.A.'s deficit at state legislators in  Albany; today,  the authority's board enacted its doomsday budget.

But the mayor didn't particularly want to discuss it again.

"We really didn't talk about the M.T.A. today," Bloomberg said. "We're here to talk about education and we wanted to make sure that we focused on that. As you know, for the last two years I've been trying to work on the M.T.A., and certainly yesterday addressed the issue, but what I tried to do with Randi today is to focus on this particular issue. I think when you try to do too many things at the same time it sort of takes away the message. We do need mass transit. We do need affordable mass transit. Our city survives with that and can't survive without it, and there'll be plenty of time tomorrow to talk about that."

While stimulus money has been earmarked for education, Bloomberg and Weingarten are lobbying to make sure New York schools get enough of it.

Asked for further comment, Bloomberg said, "Today there was vote. We are not going to close down mass transit. If it takes us to raise the fares to a level that really hurts people, the alternative of closing it down would be even worse," he said. "I do think it's the responsibility of Albany to come up with a plan. We had our plan. The governor deserves some credit--he had a study done. Shelly deserves some credit, he has gone with a different plan than I would have done, a different plan than what Ravitch would have done, but all of these things have commonality and get fed from each other. So now it's up to the Senate to do something."

"I'm not saying the deadline is of no concern, but you do the best you can," Smith told reporters waiting on the sandstone steps for him to emerge. "And it doesn't mean you give up if a deadline passes. You have to keep working."

Smith's position as the bad guy in this fight became cemented - rightfully or not - after David Paterson backed the Ravitch Commission's plan and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver floated a modified version.

Smith's counterproposal was panned roundly. The fingers have stayed pointed at his new majority: in the last week, over a thousand faxes have been sent to senatorial offices by those supporting the Ravitch framework, according to Neysa Pranger of the Regional Plan Association, which has lobbied extensively since last year and mapped out the service cuts by legislative district.

"In the last few weeks it has certainly turned there as it became clear the Senate Democrats wouldn't have the votes to pass a healthy plan," she said.

Rank-and-file Democratic senators grumble about the way they're being portrayed.

"This is just the next round of negotiations," State Senator Diane Savino told me outside the chamber Monday. "They're just pushing the envelope."

I asked her whether she thought it was fair that her conference was being blamed. Last week, David Paterson said the chamber was "hijacking" negotiations and felt their plan was not workable. He was more diplomatic Monday morning.

"It's not about fair or not fair, it's the responsibilities of leadership," she said. "You take the criticisms with the accolades."

State Senator Ruben Diaz Sr. was floating around the lobby as well, fresh from defending his newly indicted friend and colleague Hiram Monserrate. I asked Diaz what he thought about being held responsible for a fare hike by people like the ones who demonstrated outside his office.

"The gays demonstrate in front of my office, too. Everyone demonstrates in front of my office! I love those people," he said. "We have the best, the best, the best option for the community. We have it. No fare increase. No cut of services. No toll, and no layoffs. That's the best plan."

Randi Weingarten, the teachers' union president, was walking by. Diaz Sr. turned to say hello, and I noted that Weingarten was one of many signatories on a letter to legislators urging them to adopt a plan in the Ravitch framework. I asked her about this, and she nodded.

"There's a big difference between believing something different about the M.T.A  and condemning them," she said of Diaz Sr. and his conference-mates. "The differences on a couple of issues do not mean that this is not a terrific senator."

Diaz Sr. jumped about six inches. As Weingarten escaped, Diaz Sr. grabbed my left arm (my writing arm) with both hands, and slowly spun us around, saying, "Print that! Print that!"

Carl Kruger was talking to more reporters just down the hallway. I asked him the same question: did he feel it was fair that the Democrats were being blamed?

"Did you read the New York Times today?" He said. "There's going to be a fare increase regardless of whose plan we take."

"What are their numbers? What's their plan?" Kruger continued. Glenn Blain from the Daily News said their plan was Ravitch.

"They said they needed $5 tolls to finance their plan, now they said they can do it with $2. Maybe they can do it with a dollar. Maybe they can do it with none. They have zero credibility. Zero. And you know what? We're not going to subject ourselves to a back-door approach to congestion pricing."

State Senator Eric Schneiderman flitted by. He hasn't said much about the M.T.A., citing his preoccupation with budget proposals concerning drug sentencing reform. I asked him about Paterson's "hijacking" comment.

"The governor, for years, has been obsessed with the film ‘The Taking of Pelham 123,' which involves hijacking an M.T.A. train," Schneiderman said. "I know this for a fact. I suggest you look into it."

He flitted away.

On Sunday, Paterson had said he was "not really optimistic" about reaching an agreement by Wednesday. Monday morning he suggested the M.T.A. should raise the fares. Despite that, Smith emerged Monday evening from his meeting with the governor "optimistic."

"Remember the fare hike takes effect in June. In terms of calibrating machines and other things, that doesn't really start for about 35 to 45 days out," he said. "I'm still optimistic. Because everybody recognizes the importance of the M.T.A. getting their capital, and we're going to work to make sure that happens, as well as making sure that there are no service cuts and people aren't laid off."

And so we continue, even as everyone I speak to says a deal is far from imminent.

Pranger offered the most definitive step going forward: she said transit advocates will be at the Capitol (again) on Tuesday.

It wasn't Weingarten. 

Last night, she had to wait for the governor again, this time at the Hilton hotel, for an American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center dinner thrown in her honor.

It didn't have to be awkward. But these days, that's just the way things seem to be going for the governor.

Paterson called Weingarten "one of the great educators of the 20^th and 21^st century" and joked that she had led the teacher's union for over a thousand months.

The crowd wasn't sure what to make of that and there was some grumbling mixed in with the scattered applause.

"Take it easy everyone, a thousand months is only about ten years. Take it easy," Paterson told the audience. "She's a very good friend of mine. I'm not trying to make fun of her age."

And then, evoking Gillibrand's apparent intention to "evolve" on statewide issues, he referenced what sounded a lot like a joke Weingarten recently made at the new senator's expense.

"We were at a meeting recently, and we were all introducing ourselves, and she said ‘Randi Weingarten. Evolving stateswoman,'" he said.

The crowd laughed nervously. 

"Congratulations Randi," Paterson concluded.

After the event, Paterson responded to a question from the Observer about why he ultimately chose Gillibrand over his apparently serious standby, Weingarten, in those early morning hours last month.

"I'm not going to discuss the relative merits of the candidates," he said. "Just the fact that it took a while meant that they were all highly qualified and Randi Weingarten, who is a very dear friend of mine, was certainly one that we thought of quite extensively."

Then he said, "And by the way, the order in which people were called is not necessarily the order that they were--sometimes it was the order in which we found people."

“What makes me so successful is that I’ve developed so many relationships,” she said in a phone interview on Jan. 27, hours after being sworn in as a U.S. senator, as she walked to the Senate floor to cast her first vote. “Because I did fund-raising and organizing in New York for 10 years before I ever ran for office, I developed so many great relationships with all the people that care about elective politics. From the public servants to the donors to the community organizers.

“These were all the relationships I called upon when I decided to run,” she continued. “When I did my first poll I asked Hillary Clinton to review it. I asked Andrew Cuomo to review it. I asked Eliot Spitzer to review it. These are all people that I had worked with helping them to get elected, working on their causes, so they all had become friends through my 10 years of organizing in New York.”  

Ms. Gillibrand, who replaces Hillary Clinton as New York’s junior senator, has been portrayed, alternately, as an apple-fed upstate yokel and a grasping Tracy Flick.

Both ideas underestimate her.

She is a leviathan—a Schumer-esque fund-raising monster with a political pedigree; a careerist overachiever who has studiously cultivated ties to a surprising number of the most powerful Democrats in the state and the country; a fearsome campaigner who, despite her wholesome appearance, is comfortable in the mud.

Ms. Gillibrand is the pure, unadulterated political creature that a state like New York demands. And now that she is a senator, it seems impossible—naïve, even—to picture her as anything else.
“Like Schumer, her eye has been on that prize for a long, long time,” said Jonathan Schiller, a founding partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where Ms. Gillibrand worked as a partner early in the decade. “She is no hayseed, she is no newcomer, she’s no shy, reclusive country girl. She is someone who grew up in a political family.”

Her wont to travel in elite circles isn’t news to the political cognoscenti.

Last year, Anthony Weiner thought he had scored as the only member of Congress to make it into an exclusive Hillary Clinton event with New York’s top fund-raisers and power brokers at the Museum of Modern Art.

That is, until he looked around the room and noticed that a junior colleague, Representative Kirsten Gillibrand from the yonder Hudson Valley, was already there, going from one bigwig to the next collecting business cards, shaking hands and extracting campaign contributions.

“She’s working the tables,” he recalled. “She’s shmoozing. It was chutzpah, but you’ve got to admire it. She represents Hudson. It’s not like she happened to be at the bar at the Modern. And even more interesting, from my perspective, is that she seemed to know a lot of those people already.”

Ms. Gillibrand is clearly resented by some of her former House colleagues (though not, Mr. Weiner made clear, by Mr. Weiner). She probably doesn’t much care.

Born into an elite Albany political clan—she is the daughter of an influential lobbyist with Republican ties and the granddaughter of a close aide to Erastus Corning, the longtime mayor of Albany—the 42-year-old has nurtured deep Clinton ties and Cuomo connections. She is the pick of the Patersons and a favorite of Rahm Emanuel.

Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director and now a key aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, acted as media guru for her 2006 campaign. Her longtime pollster is Jefrey Pollock, of Global Strategy Group, which represents the governor and Mr. Cuomo. She counts as friends the city’s top lawyers and fund-raisers.

“From very early on, she would say that the family was from upstate and that she would one day go home and run for Congress,” said Ann Lewis, a close aide to Mrs. Clinton who first met Mrs. Gillibrand in 1999. “I think her family was better connected than I knew.”

She went to college at Dartmouth, studied in China, interned in Austria and then came home and worked at a prestigious law firm. Later, she worked as a special counsel to Andrew Cuomo when he served in the Clinton administration as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  

Even after she went back into the private sector to work as a lawyer at a white-shoe firm, the public sector was never far from her mind.

Mr. Schiller said that “throughout the time she worked here, and closely with me on complex federal litigation, she was in touch with Hillary Clinton, she was in touch with the Democratic Party. She never stopped thinking about and planning her career.”

“This was when email was emerging as a political tool, and she was very organized, always hosting meetings, and storing information about events that were going on around the country,” said Ryan Karben, a former assemblyman who worked across Lexington Avenue at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett when Ms. Gillibrand worked at Davis Polk Wardwell in 2001 and 2002. “She clearly had great political organizational skills.”

“She was one of the early volunteers for Hillary and was one of the original volunteers of women for Hillary,” Ms. Lewis said.  (Karen Persichilli Keogh, Clinton’s former state director, is already advising the new senator, and Ms. Lewis said she would gladly help, too, if asked.)

And Ms. Gillibrand, running in a race in 2006 that nearly no one expected her to win, was a much more vicious campaigner than anyone knew. She savaged Republican incumbent John Sweeney--once again, in a style eerily reminiscent of Chuck Schumer, who dismantled incumbent (and onetime Gillibrand mentor) Al D’Amato in 1998.

“Early on you could see that she was a tough cookie,” said Jen Psaki, who worked on the Gillibrand race in 2006 for the DCCC.  
Ms. Psaki, now a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, recalled that Ms. Gillibrand essentially forced the race onto the DCCC’s radar, and that she became a favorite of the psychotically aggressive DCCC chair Mr. Emanuel, who is now Barack Obama’s chief of staff.

According to another Democratic aide who worked on the campaign, when Mr. Sweeney demanded that Ms. Gillibrand release her tax returns to demonstrate whether she paid New York City residency fees—a tactic intended to frame her as a rich, Brit-marrying cosmopolitan elitist—she demanded that Mr. Sweeney release his police records. According to the aide, the campaign knew Mr. Sweeney had several arrests to his name dating back to the ’70s, including an episode in which wine, Mr. Sweeney’s car and an electric pole combined to leave several people stranded on a ski lift. She never released her tax returns, and with the help of Mr. Sweeney’s subsequent run-ins with the law, won the race by a healthy margin.

Once in the House, her votes on gun, immigration and gay issues frustrated many of her Democratic colleagues. But even more infuriating to some members, including Nancy Pelosi, was her attempt to jump ahead of more senior members to fill a vacant seat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
But even colleagues who disagree with her policies can’t help but marvel at her political acumen.

“As a freshman, to come in and be put on the Steering and Policy Committee, that’s huge,” said Yvette Clarke, who came into the House with Ms. Gillibrand in the 110th Congress.
When asked how that happened, Ms. Clarke said, “If I had the answer to that, I’d be on Steering and Policy.”

There is every reason to expect that Ms. Gillibrand will be equally hard to ignore in the Senate. Asked how she expected the dynamic to work between her and Mr. Unignorable himself, Chuck Schumer, she said, “I really feel like our areas of expertise are complementary. Yes, he will always be senior and I will be junior, but I don’t see that as a relationship of one lesser than the other. I just think he has much more experience, which obviously is going to make him very effective and powerful.”

(Her initial Senate committee assignments, for the record, are Public Works and Environment, Foreign Affairs and Agriculture.)

If she remains a work-in-progress on the issues, Ms. Gillibrand has the routine of actually being a winning politician down.

“She was an accomplished attorney, so there’s that whole world she could tap into in,” said Ms. Clarke. “Bill and Hillary both went to support her in her run; that in itself opens the door to a whole other cadre of donors. She knows how to establish those relationships and cultivate them. And from those relationships you get to move on to other relationships.”
She added, “She just parlayed whoever she knew into influence.”

To be sure, the Park Avenue penthouses and townhouses of New York’s rarified fund-raising community is familiar terrain to Ms. Gillibrand.

Hassan Nemazee, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser who served as a co-finance chair on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said he had first met Ms. Gillibrand before her 2006 race and was impressed by the case she made as to why she could win in a reliably Republican district. The down-home upstate routine, he suggested, was only part of the picture.

“Look how successful she has been at raising money in Manhattan,” Mr. Nemazee said. “If you are just a parochial candidate you are not as successful as she has been.”

“She’s fabulous,” said Ellen Chesler, a prominent donor and early fund-raiser for Ms. Gillibrand, who was introduced to her by mutual friends in the Clinton universe. “She raised close to five million dollars for a seat where nobody who gave her money lives.”

Sometimes, the admiration is grudging. But, at least in process terms, it’s always there.

Teachers union head Randi Weingarten, the apparent runner-up to Ms. Gillibrand in Mr. Paterson’s post-Kennedy senate search (she was the last candidate to receive word that she would not be a senator), said Ms. Gillibrand was something of a “star” among female Democrats.

Asked about the various complaints having to do with Ms. Gillibrand’s win-at-all-costs reputation in the House, Ms. Weingarten did say, “One of the things that Hillary taught everyone was how much she was a team player. Ultimately collaboration becomes very important for getting things done.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 23, Ms. Gillibrand put on her team-player hat as she stood in Meeting Room 6 in the Capitol building. That didn’t stop all the state’s power brokers from jostling for a coveted place in the camera shot at her side.
Onstage, Mr. D’Amato alighted over his old intern’s right shoulder. Mr. Schumer signaled for her to shuffle closer to him. The Albany legislative triumvirate of State Senator Neil Breslin, Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari, and Assemblyman Jack McEneny entered the room just before Ms. Gillibrand’s family.

When Ms. Gillibrand spoke, she turned on the folksy charm. Wearing a black pantsuit and pearls, she expressed bewilderment at the mass of reporters assembled before her and deferred to Mr. Paterson in the running of the question-and-answer session. When her young son hopped onto the stage, she put her hand on his head. She affected an oh-my-gosh air and talked about licking envelopes in her grandmother’s office. The audience, aware that her grandmother was a power player in the capital’s Democratic machine, nodded knowingly.

“She comes from a very important political family in Albany,” said State Senator Neil Breslin after the event.

On Jan 26, Ms. Gillibrand kept doing the modest thing. Without any apparent security detail, she walked into the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. Two reporters behind her didn’t immediately realize who she was. She again deferred to Mr. Paterson during the press conference, but in her answers, she made it clear she was a player to be reckoned with. She talked about dining with Harry Reid and said she’d sit on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee. When asked about her stance on immigration, which has been criticized by Latino and other immigrant groups as cynically nativist, Ms. Gillibrand indicated that she’d maintain a less-than-lenient line.

“My view has always been that we need to right-size immigration,” she said, adding that she believed in a need to “have a database in the Department of Labor of immigrants who have been cleared, who are legal, that are part of our system, and the number has to be the right number.”

“I’m going to be a voice to solve this problem,” she said.

Ms. Gillibrand knows the cold realities of politics. But she also knows there is time for softballs and smiles.

At the end of the Hyde Park event, as reporters swarmed Ms. Gillibrand with questions, she thanked them for the work they did and promised to speak with them in the near future. As she left the room, a diminutive elderly woman came up to greet her.

“I’ve met you once before,” said the woman. “Congratulations.”

“Oh, it’s good to see you. Thanks for your support,” Ms. Gillibrand said. “God bless you!”

“She’s being portrayed as a lightweight,” Tom Poelker, a party chairman in a neighboring county, who has watched Ms. Gillibrand closely, said after attending the event in Hyde Park.

“My opinion is that there’s not much that gets by Senator-designee Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s very sharp—very perceptive. Extremely perceptive. Very perceptive politically.”

And how does Ms. Gillibrand herself respond to those people who say that she is, in fact, an overblown lightweight? Or an overambitious climber?

“It doesn’t bother me at all, because at the end of the day, this is just the short term,” she said in the phone interview. “I think all of this will smooth out as I demonstrate my effectiveness and my work ethic and as I partner with all the constituency groups in our state and make a difference for them.”

Apparently, this was a prerequisite.

Hours before Governor David Paterson called Gillibrand to inform her that she would replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in the early morning hours of Jan 23, a member of the governor's camp reached out to Gillibrand to inform her that she needed to improve her lackluster standing with gay groups before she could win Paterson's appointment, according to one Democratic source.

"There are two key leadership points that could provide the cover that you need," Gillibrand was told by a Paterson ally, according to the source.

The “leadership points” in question were Empire State Pride Agenda Executive Director Alan Van Capelle and Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

At around 5 p.m., Gillibrand and Van Capelle started playing phone tag. They finally connected at around 8 p.m.

"I want to start off by saying that I'm in favor of marriage equality," Gillibrand began the call, according to Van Capelle.

Van Capelle said that position was news to him, as she had held a more conservative stance during their last discussion years earlier. But Van Capelle said he was confident that her position had evolved over time, and not just in the hours before their conversation.

"She did not suddenly have her come-to-Jesus moment overnight," he said.

Asked if he reported his conversation with Gillibrand back to anyone in the Governor's office, Van Capelle declined to comment.

According to Quinn's spokeswoman, Maria Alvarado, Gillibrand and Quinn also had a "productive conversation."

Paterson's advocacy for gay marriage has helped secure his popularity with progressives downstate. But with gay marriage legislation unlikely to pass this year, Paterson apparently worried that appointing a senator with a weak record on gay issues would further erode his record and threaten that support.

Gillibrand would seem to have been far from ideal in that respect. As late as the day before her selection, she had the lowest rating of all of New York's Democratic representatives from the LGBT advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, which gave her dismal marks for her opposition to gay marriage, the repealing of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and legislation to grant same-sex partners of U.S. citizens and permanent residents the same immigration benefits of married couples.

As Gillibrand called Quinn and Van Capelle, Paterson went about the business of delivering bad news to the other candidates. He made a round of calls at 5 p.m. to tell longshot candidates like Danny O'Donnell that they were not his choice. More serious candidates received their calls after 10 p.m.

But he kept one candidate as an alternate. Even after midnight, Randi Weingarten, the openly gay teacher's union leader, had still not been told by the governor that she was out of the running. While Weingarten, whose mother is very ill, waited to hear if she would be the next Senator, Van Capelle and Quinn had apparently extracted enough guarantees from Gillibrand to give their support.

With that obstacle cleared, Paterson could pick Gillibrand. He called her at around 2 a.m.

"Good morning senator," he said, according to a source close to Gillibrand.

The morning of Gillibrand's selection, Van Capelle released the following statement. "After talking to Kirsten Gillibrand, I am very happy to say that New York is poised to have its first U.S. Senator who supports marriage equality for same-sex couples," said Van Capelle. "She also supports the full repeal of the federal DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) law, repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) and passage of legislation outlawing discrimination against transgender people. While we had a productive discussion about a whole range of LGBT concerns, I was particularly happy to hear where she stands on these issues."

Hours later, during a press conference to introduce herself as the state's next senator, Gillibrand stood on a stage with many of the state's elected officials and, to reporters and television cameras, stated a position on gay issues that seemed to go further than Clinton before her and Chuck Schumer, standing next to her.

"I will strive for marriage equality," she said.

The idea that her public performance has damaged her chances, maybe seriously, seems to have become the consensus take.

But Charlie King, at least, has a more charitable view.

“You have to give somebody context,” said King, who ran for lieutenant governor in 2002 with Andrew Cuomo and became executive director of Al Sharpton's National Action Network. (He says he’s still particularly close to Cuomo, as well as to Jerry Nadler and Randi Weingarten, whose names are also in the mix of hypothetical Senate appointees.)

“It takes a certain amount of time to get the rhythm of politics, regardless of how accomplished you are in any other place," he said. "And you can look at Bloomberg or you can look at anybody. It doesn’t mean they’re not qualified but it does mean she that she’s not going to be this polished politician. Or Obama for that matter. It doesn’t mean they’re going to be this polished politician right out of the box. If people are looking for Caroline during these interviews to basically talk sound and espouse her positions on her issues coming into this the way Hillary Clinton would sound like going out, I think that’s an unfair and unrealistic assessment.”

King also said that the circumstances of her rollout, created by a genuinely extraordinary demand in the media for stories about her, was less than ideal.

King said that even for an accomplished attorney and author “who sits down for back-to-back-to-back-to-back interviews with all of the press in the state, what would be your expectation of that presentation?”

And he said that Kennedy, unlike the other candidates, is in the awkward position of having to introduce herself and make her case, publicly, without appearing to campaign for the seat, since the vacancy will be filled by an appointment, not election.

“In Caroline’s defense,” said King, “everyone is pestering her because she’s an unconventional candidate and they want to know about her, but she can’t put on a full-force campaign because then she’ll be criticized for campaigning for a position that nobody else is campaigning for.”

]]> The reaction to Caroline Kennedy’s recent rollout, at least among unaffiliated political observers I've spoken to, has not been so positive.

The idea that her public performance has damaged her chances, maybe seriously, seems to have become the consensus take.

But Charlie King, at least, has a more charitable view.

“You have to give somebody context,” said King, who ran for lieutenant governor in 2002 with Andrew Cuomo and became executive director of Al Sharpton's National Action Network. (He says he’s still particularly close to Cuomo, as well as to Jerry Nadler and Randi Weingarten, whose names are also in the mix of hypothetical Senate appointees.)

“It takes a certain amount of time to get the rhythm of politics, regardless of how accomplished you are in any other place," he said. "And you can look at Bloomberg or you can look at anybody. It doesn’t mean they’re not qualified but it does mean she that she’s not going to be this polished politician. Or Obama for that matter. It doesn’t mean they’re going to be this polished politician right out of the box. If people are looking for Caroline during these interviews to basically talk sound and espouse her positions on her issues coming into this the way Hillary Clinton would sound like going out, I think that’s an unfair and unrealistic assessment.”

King also said that the circumstances of her rollout, created by a genuinely extraordinary demand in the media for stories about her, was less than ideal.

King said that even for an accomplished attorney and author “who sits down for back-to-back-to-back-to-back interviews with all of the press in the state, what would be your expectation of that presentation?”

And he said that Kennedy, unlike the other candidates, is in the awkward position of having to introduce herself and make her case, publicly, without appearing to campaign for the seat, since the vacancy will be filled by an appointment, not election.

“In Caroline’s defense,” said King, “everyone is pestering her because she’s an unconventional candidate and they want to know about her, but she can’t put on a full-force campaign because then she’ll be criticized for campaigning for a position that nobody else is campaigning for.”

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