Making his second national television appearance in three weeks, the 60-year-old Quinn forecasted on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Blagojevich, his sometime rival over the years, will be impeached and convicted by the Illinois legislature before Abraham Lincoln’s February 12 birthday.

There’s really no reason to doubt Quinn’s assessment, given Blagojevich’s legal position and the complete lack of public sympathy for his plight. The only question seems to be whether the governor will tough it out all the way through an impeachment inquiry or fall on his sword before he’s officially expelled from office.

Either way, the suddenly conspicuous Quinn, whose resume includes stints as state treasurer and commissioner of a county tax board and several losing bids for statewide office, will soon become the governor of the fifth-largest state in the nation – a promotion that will give him an enormous leg-up heading into 2010, when he’ll have the opportunity to win election to a full four-year term.

In the annals of American politics, Quinn’s story is hardly unique. Through sudden resignations, deaths and other unforeseen circumstances, previously anonymous men and women like Quinn have been catapulted to political stardom, embraced by a public that previously didn’t even know they existed. How exactly Quinn’s story will play out, no one can say for certain. But history offers some clues.

Generally, accidental governors are well-received by the public, although there are exceptions (like Jane Swift in Massachusetts, who took over for Paul Cellucci in 2001 and found herself the least popular politician in the state within months). Mostly, they are given an initial honeymoon by the public, especially if they take over under less-than-ideal circumstances – like, say, after scandal forces the previous governor out. Textbook examples of this can be found in New Jersey, where state Senate President Dick Codey amassed an 80 percent approval rating less than a year after following Jim McGreevey, and in Connecticut, where Jodi Rell attained similar numbers (and won election in 2006 with 65 percent of the vote) after John Rowland was carted off to prison.

And once accidental governors are in office, the high profile of their position affords them opportunities to build goodwill with the public that simply don’t exist in other elected positions. This is how Richard Schweiker, nine months after succeeding Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania, suddenly became the most popular man in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2002, thanks to his highly visible role during a mining rescue operation that gripped his state and the nation.

What accidental governors choose to do with their newfound prominence and popularity varies and generally depends on how far their ambitions stretch.

For instance, an acting governor may only have been in position to succeed to the governorship because he or she really didn’t have much ambition and had been willing in the first place to settle for an anonymous second-tier office like lieutenant governor. Without fate stepping in, a politician like this could easily have finished out his or her career without reaching for a major office. These acting governors might aim to hang on to their governorships for a full term or two, but they don’t see their positions as potential stepping-stones to the national stage. Rell in Connecticut, who sought and won a full term but has shown no interest in climbing higher, and Codey in New Jersey, who wanted to seek a full term but grudgingly yielded to Jon Corzine, are cut from this cloth.

Others, though, see in their unexpected promotions a potential entrée into national politics, one that otherwise might never have materialized. Just consider the cases of Mike Huckabee, Howard Dean and Bruce Babbitt, all accidental governors who found themselves running for president within a decade of taking office.

Huckabee, unlike Rell and Codey, was clearly ambitious when he took over in Arkansas from Jim Guy Tucker, who was convicted of arranging a fraudulent loan in connection with Whitewater, in the summer of 1996. Huckabee, who was elected lieutenant governor in a 1993 special election, had challenged Senator Dale Bumpers in 1992 (losing by 20 points) and had already secured the G.O.P. nod to run against Senator David Pryor in 1996 when Tucker announced his resignation. With the governorship in his grasp, Huckabee no longer needed the Senate: He had the ticket to national visibility that he craved. After two full terms, he set off to seek the 2008 G.O.P. nod, and now he’s among the front-runners for 2012.

Dean and Babbitt, by contrast, only seemed to develop national ambitions after serving as governor for a few years.

Dean, Vermont’s part-time lieutenant governor when Governor Richard Snelling dropped dead from a heart attack in 1991, slowly built a national name for himself (among think tank-types, if not the masses) during the ‘90s, thanks mainly to his work on health care and his stint as chairman of the National Governor’s Association. His presidential campaign in 2004 was fueled not by anything he did as governor, but by his strident opposition to the Iraq war. But without the title of “governor,” he wouldn’t have been a credible candidate.

Babbitt was Arizona’s 39-year-old attorney general when a series of flukes turned him into the governor in 1978. First came Governor Raul Castro’s resignation in late 1977 to become Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Argentina. Then, Castro’s successor, 13-term secretary of state Wesley Bolin, died less than five months after taking over. That left Babbitt in charge of the state. He won full terms in 1978 and 1982, building an image as a moderate and environmentalist, and sought the 1988 Democratic nomination. The press loved him for his intellect, self-deprecation, and complete lack of charisma, but he failed miserably in Iowa and New Hampshire. He went on to serve as Bill Clinton’s Interior secretary and was very nearly tapped by Clinton in 1993 to serve on the Supreme Court.

It’s tough to tell where Quinn falls on the spectrum of ambition. He clearly has more than Rell and Codey; he ran for the Senate in 1996 and has aggressively sought publicity for various good government initiatives, even adopting to Chuck Schumer’s famous Sunday press conference habit. But he’s also 60 years old. There probably isn’t much time for him to climb much higher; Huckabee, Dean and Babbitt were all under 43 when they got their big breaks.

Still, before Blagojevich was arrested, Quinn was a long-shot to rise much higher in politics. Now, he's probably the favorite to win a full term as governor in 2010.

On Friday, Robert Reich formally endorsed Barack Obama, a decision that was greeted as noteworthy since Reich was an old Oxford chum of Bill Clinton’s and served as the 42nd president’s first labor secretary. He also scored a date with a young Hillary Rodham back in 1966, when, as the freshman class president at Dartmouth, he asked Hillary, his counterpart at Wellesley, to meet him for “a presidential summit” in Hanover. (There was no second date.)

Reich, in disclosing his endorsement decision on his blog, dutifully played up this sense of conflict, writing about “the pull of old friendships” but concluding that “my conscience won’t let me be silent any longer.”

In truth, his endorsement was a mere formality, more than 10 years in the making. Numerous times this campaign season, Reich has chimed in to side with Obama—and against Hillary.

And, as some members of the press noted over the weekend, Reich earned the enmity of Bill Clinton when he left the administration after the 1996 election and published an unusually frank memoir, Locked in the Cabinet. From the sidelines during Clinton’s second term, he intensified his criticism, decrying “the interminable Clinton scandals,” branding the president “utterly disgraced,” and charging that under Clinton’s centrist leadership, the Democratic Party has “expired and gone to meet its maker.”

But the history is even deeper than that. Just consider the timing of Reich’s move, on the eve of what could be Hillary’s last stand. Reich was clearly calculating that the news generated by his endorsement—Clinton loyalist jumps ship!—would only further the perception of Obama’s inevitability, thereby perhaps convincing wavering Pennsylvanians to give up on the Clintons once and for all.

Call it payback, because Bill Clinton once played the same trick on Robert Reich. Back in 2002, Reich, who had returned to academia and even co-hosted a public television show in Boston with former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (The Long and Short of It) after leaving Washington, entered the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Massachusetts. Instantly, he became one of two front-runners in a five-way race, vying for the lead with State Treasurer Shannon O’Brien.

Then Bill Clinton came to town, ostensibly to prop up his friend Steve Grossman, who had been his handpicked D.N.C. chairman during Clinton’s second term. Grossman was one of the also-rans vying with Reich and O’Brien for the Democratic nomination, and his doomed campaign (which he abandoned shortly thereafter) was barely registering in polls. Clinton’s real reason for visiting, of course, was to slide the knife into Reich.

First, Clinton made clear to reporters that he hadn’t urged Reich to enter the race, as Reich had suggested: “I didn't like the implication that somehow I encouraged him into the race when you already had one guy in the race (Grossman) that had supported my policies, and at critical points he didn't.”

Then he insinuated that Reich was disloyal and a quitter, noting that Grossman, unlike Reich, “helped us when we were down and out and didn't leave us and believed in what we were doing all the way. And it's hard to quarrel with the results.”

“He has a right not to support my policies and to leave and say whatever he wanted to,” Clinton said of Reich.

But the kicker came when Clinton—unprompted by anyone—began talking up O’Brien, Reich’s real competition for the nomination. As the Boston Herald reported at the time: “At four separate points during the 15-minute session with reporters, Clinton mentioned O'Brien with no solicitation. Twice, Clinton called O'Brien a ‘very impressive woman,’ and noted that she was leading the other four candidates in opinion polls.”

It was a humiliating day for Reich, who ultimately lost the primary to O’Brien by eight points. The Clinton visit was hardly the main reason for his defeat, but might it have been on Reich’s mind when he sat down to write his blog entry last Thursday night?

Another grudge seemed evident on Sunday morning, when Bill Bradley and Jon Corzine appeared on CNN’s Late Edition for one of the “dueling surrogates” segments with which television producers seem so enamored. On the surface, it was a dull and predictable exchange. Neither Bradley nor Corzine are known for their magnetism, and they both hewed to familiar, pre-approved talking points—Corzine for Clinton and Bradley for Obama—that anyone who’s followed this campaign even casually could probably recite on cue.

But the argument between Corzine and Bradley was about Clinton and Obama less than it was about two rivals who each wanted to look better than the other on national television. In fact, some of those who know Corzine well insist that, in his heart, he prefers Obama to Clinton, but that a sense of obligation to the Clintons (who both lent considerable assistance to his 2005 gubernatorial campaign) and the persistence of Bill (who maintained almost daily phone contact with Corzine last year while he weighed his endorsement options) compelled him to side with Hillary.

The differences between the two stem from the radically different paths they pursued in the New Jersey political world, where old-school patronage machines still tend to dominate both parties.

Bradley was an outsider through and through, a man who spoke and lived the credo of the reformer. His strength came from the popular support he accrued as a star basketball player at Princeton and with the Knicks, and he won his Senate seat in 1978 without the support of any major county organizations—and almost unheard-of feat. In his three Senate terms, he largely ignored the state’s Democratic establishment, among whom he was—and remains—thought of as arrogant.

Corzine played the game differently: He spoke like a reformer, too, but he dipped into the fortune he made at Goldman Sachs and essentially purchased that same party establishment, one county chairman, one consultant, and one union leader at a time, showering them with cash and promising them whatever they wanted, so long as they’d back his campaign.

The Bradley approach and the Corzine approach came into conflict in 2000. Bradley was running for president. Corzine had just jumped into the race for an open Senate seat. The New Jersey establishment that despised Bradley decided it was time for revenge and lined up with Al Gore, embarrassing Bradley with stories about widespread home-state defections. They told Corzine he should go along with them. And he did.

One of the very few powerful New Jersey Democrats to stick with Bradley that year was Richard J. Codey, who was then the party’s State Senate leader and who would become the Senate president and acting governor a few years later. When Corzine ran for governor in 2005, he pushed Codey—then the acting governor—out of the way. In the fall campaign, Bradley agreed to do one high-profile event with Corzine—a photo-op at a basketball court. Codey was also present and Bradley used the occasion to sing Codey’s praises to the press and to publicly suggest that Corzine, upon being elected as governor, appoint Codey to replace him in the U.S. Senate—not exactly on-message and about the last topic that Corzine wanted to deal with at that point.

Eight years after Corzine teamed up with the New Jersey Democratic establishment to help derail his presidential ambitions, Bradley is seemingly on the verge of returning the favor: If Obama does win the nomination, he will have defeated the candidate backed by Corzine and the party establishment.

“This,” he declared, “is the Empire State!”

“It’s the Garden State!” the crowd shouted back.

“I’m looking across the river,” Mr. Brown replied. “Even though we are physically in New Jersey, we are spiritually in New York.”

Governor Moonbeam had a point. His campaign, freshly rejuvenated by his stunning upset of Bill Clinton in the Connecticut primary, was gunning for a follow-up win in New York on April 7. New Jersey, which wouldn’t vote until June 2, was a distant afterthought, to Mr. Brown and to everyone else.

Last in the nation and utterly irrelevant: Such was the Garden State’s fate for 20 long years.

In June 1984, New Jersey’s Democrats, miffed by Gary Hart’s ill-advised and highly unoriginal crack about their state’s reserves of toxic waste, turned on the Colorado senator and handed Walter Mondale a decisive win that sealed the Democratic nomination for him. But that was New Jersey’s last stand. From 1988 through 2004, both parties’ races were settled earlier and earlier. But New Jersey treated its June primary like its full-service gas stations and 24-hour diners: as sacred and untouchable.

This time, it was supposed to be different. After years of stubborn opposition from the state’s political leaders, then-Governor Richard J. Codey declared himself sick of presidential candidates who saw his state as nothing more than an A.T.M. and in 2005 pushed through a radical reform: In 2008, New Jersey would vote in February.

Originally, the date was set for the end of February, but soon enough it was bumped up further, to Feb. 5—the earliest allowed by the Democratic National Committee after the initial stand-alone contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Grass-roots activists, bit players in the national game for decades, salivated over their new king- (or queen-) maker role. Clifton would be like Council Bluffs, Metuchen the new Manchester.

And the early date has made a difference. Previously, the only time candidates showed up in New Jersey was for exclusive, walled-off fund-raising events. This year, they’ve actually tried to meet some voters. The day after his humbling setback in New Hampshire, Barack Obama fired up an overflowing rally at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. Two weeks later, Hillary Clinton was summoned to Hackensack by one of the state’s mightiest Democratic bosses—who had promised his backing only if she’d make a personal campaign appearance with him.

It’s a far cry from June 2004, when New Jersey staged its last Democratic primary. John Kerry had long since wrapped up the nomination and was deep into his running-mate search when the state gave him 92 percent of the vote (to Dennis Kucinich’s 4 percent) in what was one of the all-time least consequential election events.

But there’s a catch: Other states—lots of other states—had the same idea as New Jersey. Twenty-one others, along with Guam and Americans living abroad, will hold nominating contests next Tuesday—the most expansive single day of contests ever seen in either party. There will be 1,688 pledged Democratic delegates at stake—about 40 percent of the entire convention.

In other words, in their quest to maximize their relevance, New Jersey and her Feb. 5 sisters have all diluted their individual impact.

What’s more, 2008 is a throwback campaign, the first since the days of Hart and Mondale in which a Democratic nomination has not been settled early. After Mr. Obama’s energizing South Carolina landslide, which was followed by high-profile endorsements from Ted and Caroline Kennedy, the smart money is now on a Feb. 5 draw, with Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton splitting the national pot of gold. Each of them could emerge from the day with close to 1,000 delegates, far from the 2,026 needed to claim the nomination and enough for each of them to claim momentum going forward.

And that would make 2008—just like every campaign since 1984—another missed opportunity for New Jersey. Suddenly, the comparatively few states that didn’t join the rush to Feb. 5 would be empowered to settle the race. Between Feb. 9 and June 3, another 23 states (plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico) will hold caucuses and primaries. Two weeks, for instance, separate the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary and the March 4 Ohio primary. Conceivably, the entire political world will be based in Columbus for that time.

It figures: New Jersey’s leaders wasted two decades clinging to their late primary, and then they get rid of it the one year it could have been meaningful.

A few years ago, Alexander Payne’s insightful film Election introduced us to the character of Tracy Flick, a self-centered climber who regards a high-school election as the first rung on a ladder that will one day lead her to the White House.

She was pushy, calculating, friendless and phony, a symbol of the kind of unchecked ambition that conservative activist Grover Norquist probably had in mind when he stated that “anyone who’s ever been a Student Body President should be drowned.”

Of course, Tracy Flick won her race, and Election illustrated a truth about American politics: We roll our eyes at politicians who seem like they were rehearsing future inaugural addresses in the bathroom mirror when they were 9, yet they’re the ones who usually end up winning anyway.

The fact that many elected officials evoke that character explains why, as a class of people, politicians are held in such disfavor. But few voters seem to realize that the political world is also teeming with anti-Flicks—authentic, grounded, guileless people who’d rather go home and watch a baseball game at the end of the day than work the room at a fund-raising dinner.

Because they can’t—or won’t—do whatever it takes to succeed, they rarely make it to the top. But sometimes fate steps in and gives the public a look at what they’re missing.

That’s what happened in New Jersey back in 2004, when James E. McGreevey, a summa cum laude graduate of the Tracy Flick school of politics, dramatically resigned as governor, his personal and political life drenched in scandal.

Mr. McGreevey was replaced by his polar opposite: Richard J. Codey, a lifer in the New Jersey State Legislature, who immediately fell in love with the job (and wanted to keep it full-time), but who hadn’t signed over his life to chase it. He coached basketball on the side, collected bobblehead dolls and was memorably described in The New York Times as “a bona fide Jersey guy, complete with rumpled suits, a comb-over and a spaghetti-and-meatballs belly.”

The rest is history: Mr. Codey, essentially anonymous even in his years as the president of the State Senate, was a hit with Garden State voters, who had lost hope that a politician might actually be, well, normal.

Jon S. Corzine’s imposing wallet ultimately kept Mr. Codey from seeking a full term in 2005, but he still left office with one of the highest approval ratings in New Jersey’s history before returning full-time to the State Senate.

This past week, fate stepped in again, although the circumstances are vastly different. Mr. Corzine, elected to succeed Mr. Codey in 2005, very nearly lost his life in a horrific traffic accident on mile 43 of the Garden State Parkway. He faces a prolonged rehabilitation and may not leave the hospital for days, or even weeks. And so Mr. Codey is, again, the acting governor of New Jersey.

His role should be primarily ceremonial this time, with most of the administrative duties being handled by Mr. Corzine’s staff. (Although, should Mr. Corzine’s incapacitation linger deep into the budget season, Mr. Codey will once again find himself in the peculiar spot of leading both the executive and half of the legislative branch.) Nonetheless, his fleeting re-emergence should edge his already-muscular poll numbers even higher.

Maybe Mr. Codey is so well liked precisely because he came to occupy the state’s highest office by accident. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the fact that he was right under the nose of Garden State voters for three decades without them ever noticing him.

For all those years, he demonstrated remarkable savvy in the State Senate, earning the trust and respect of his colleagues while pursuing a pragmatic, populist agenda. In a state notorious for its political machines—both Democratic and Republican—he went to war with his own party’s bosses, standing alone but beating them anyway.

But he had a life, too—a house in West Orange, two kids, a standing Saturday-night movie date with his wife, an addiction to basketball—and an admirable aversion to traditional grandstanding.

The irony is that someone like Mr. Codey can’t get elected. He doesn’t look or sound the part of a chief executive, and more importantly these days, he doesn’t have the sort of independent wealth that could allow him to buy support and affection.

Had he actually run for governor—something he briefly toyed with doing way back in 1989—his candidacy would have failed miserably. No one would have paid attention. But after Mr. McGreevey resigned—and the disgusted, dispirited voters of New Jersey were forced to pay attention to him—Mr. Codey shined.

There are, and always will be, plenty of Tracy Flicks and Jim McGreeveys in American politics.

But there are Dick Codeys, too. It’s just a shame that it takes a scandal or a tragedy before anyone notices.

According to Council spokesperson Maria Alvarado, it came from outside City Hall.

"The speech was written by Eric Shuffler, who's done speech writing for Corzine, Codey and Coscia. The Council paid for it."

Shuffler, who lives in New York, was counselor to former New Jersey Governors Jim McGreevey and Richard Codey, and worked for former Senator Bob Torricelli before that. He's now a lobbyist.

In the past the Council has had speechwriters on staff. This time, the Council put out a bid for the speech. Shuffler got the job.

-- Azi Paybarah

Joe Lieberman debates his primary opponent, Ned Lamont.

The Sun reports that Republicans allied with John Faso are planning to oust New York Republican State Committee Chairman Stephen Minarik.

—Nicole Brydson

Introducing him was the man he hopes to replace: Acting Governor Richard J. Codey, a 32-year veteran of the New Jersey legislature who found himself in the state’s top job last November, after a series of scandals forced Governor James E. McGreevey to relinquish his post in Trenton.

Amid screams of adoration from the hometown crowd—Mr. Codey lives in West Orange—the acting governor strolled out to the microphone. “I just came back from Rome,” he joked, playing off an earlier speaker who’d compared Mr. Codey to Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer turned statesman, who rose to lead an empire and then returned to his plough. “I was there for six days with my wife,” Mr. Codey continued. “And I’ll be paying it off for the next three years!”

The audience howled. But beneath the joke was a jab, a barbed reminder of what Mr. Corzine has and Mr. Codey does not: multiple millions of dollars.

“Well, I haven’t gone to Rome, so I don’t have to pay it back,” Mr. Corzine later retorted, during an interview with The Observer. He laughed, then added quietly: “I didn’t mean that in a bad way.”

Behind the repartee, however, lies a genuine tension. Were it not for the unlimited campaign coffers of Mr. Corzine, who spent a record-shattering $63 million to win his U.S. Senate seat in 2000, Mr. Codey would have had an excellent chance at winning his party’s gubernatorial nomination and, perhaps, the Nov. 8 general election as well. Instead, Mr. Codey is going back to the farm—actually, back to the State Senate, where he serves as that body’s president—and Mr. Corzine is running the best campaign that money can buy.

In New Jersey politics, the price of admission is staggering. Mr. Corzine’s current net worth has been estimated at about $260 million. His Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, while less wealthy by a decimal point or so, is also a multimillionaire businessman who spent an estimated $11 million of his fortune just to win the G.O.P. primary. When both candidates released their 2004 income-tax filings, New Jerseyans learned that they had declared $12 million apiece in annual income.

Asked about the influence of such enormous wealth on his candidacy, Mr. Corzine insists that money without merit is worthless.

“It’s not as if just being wealthy gets you through the door. Although some would like to claim that we’re turning into a plutocracy, I don’t see that as a reality,” he said. Mr. Corzine diverged for a moment and asserted his belief in the value of public campaign financing as a force to “level the playing field.”

It’s true that New Jersey has a strong history of supporting publicly financed campaigns; in 1974, New Jersey, Minnesota and Maryland became the first states to offer candidates the option of campaigning on public dollars. Currently, however, public funding for New Jersey gubernatorial candidates is capped at $2.7 million for the primary and $6.4 million for the general election. In comparison with the great sandbags of personal cash that the candidates have set aside to bolster their campaigns, the public sums seem to shrink. Mr. Forrester is reportedly prepared to spend up to $20 million in this election. And Mr. Corzine’s supporters have vowed that they’ll spend whatever it takes to win. In his case, Mr. Corzine said, the drive to win is a moral one, and not evidence of a creeping plutocracy.

“The answer is, I don’t think we’re shifting in that direction,” he reiterated. “It’s clear that people who have been successful in their private lives have a responsibility to give back and, if they’re imbued with those values, then you’re going to see these people more and more come into the political arena, I would suspect.

“Actually, sometimes I’m disappointed that we don’t see greater participation as opposed to lesser,” he added, “because I’m a believer in ‘To those whom much is given, much is expected.’”

By that logic, well-to-do candidates on either side of the Hudson River have certainly been, well, exceeding expectations lately. As Mr. Forrester and Mr. Corzine duke it out in New Jersey, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign is in full financial flower. The focus has also begun to turn towards the 2006 New York gubernatorial race, in which Elliott Spitzer, the son of a wealthy real-estate developer who ran for his current post on family cash in 1998, seems sure to win the Democratic nomination, and Tom Golisano, a billionaire businessman from Rochester, is jockeying for the G.O.P line.

“Maybe this is a new executive career ladder?” proposed Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. “Some go to jail, some go to Albany, some go to Trenton.”

Their Own League

But locally, and even nationally, no other business leaders turned politicians can compare to the wealth and spending habits of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Corzine.

“Bloomberg and Corzine are in a league of their own—a two-man league—because of their net worth. The amount that they were willing to commit to their elections really kicked it up a notch,” said Jennifer Steen, an assistant professor at Boston College. Ms. Steen, the author of the forthcoming book Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections, has been studying self-financed politicians across the country for nearly a decade.

“Over the course of the 1990’s, each year you’d see more and more rich candidates running for office and spending a few million dollars. Those numbers were increasing, but in 2000 and 2001 you had Bloomberg and Corzine, and to say that they raised the bar wouldn’t even capture it,” she concluded, in tones of awe. “They were off the charts.”

So how did they get there? Apart from the most obvious advantages—television ad buys, contributions to local political warlords—wealthy, self-financed candidates can often sell the idea that they’re not beholden to special interests. Ms. Steen likes to recall a slogan coined by Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl, of Kohl’s grocery and department-store fame, during his first run for office in 1988: “Nobody’s Senator but yours.”

But not everyone agrees that wealth is freedom. Wealthy politicians tend to have powerful friends; in some cases, those friends have powerful appetites. “George Bush is wealthy, but the oil industry is reaping tremendous profits,” said Professor Joseph Marbach, chair of the political-science department at Seton Hall University. For the oil barons, Mr. Marbach added, “It doesn’t hurt to have him and Dick Cheney in the White House.”

Another commonly held notion is that successful businessmen can translate their financial acumen into political prowess. While Mr. Corzine disagrees with this as a general principle, in his own case he heartily agrees.

“If you were investing in a new business at Goldman Sachs, you didn’t go from zero to a hundred miles an hour in that business instantly,” he told The Observer, drawing a parallel between his strategies as a former C.E.O. with those of a career politician. “You tried to develop a seed, see if you were off on the right track, see if you’re getting results, and then you add to that business over a period of time,” he explained.

Mr. Marbach argues that for Mr. Corzine and Mr. Forrester in particular, this isn’t necessarily the case. “Both these guys, and even Bloomberg, were essentially neophytes before they decided to run,” he said. “The problem with businessmen as public officials is that government doesn’t run like a business.” Measuring capital gains isn’t the same as metering the effectiveness of public policy, he explained, adding: “You can’t fire civil servants as easily as you can fire people in the private sector.”

Lately, Mr. Corzine has been attempting to dispel his image as a captain of capital to cultivate a more folksy, casual image that he hopes will resonate with the slate of social programs he has proposed to help New Jersey’s less fortunate. Recent television commercials emphasize his childhood in rural Illinois, where his father was a farmer and an insurance salesman and his mother taught at a local public school. And last Sunday, Mr. Codey, the son of a funeral director, finally joined the chorus. With as much enthusiasm as he could muster, he praised the Senator, saying, “He’s down-to-earth …. He’s not above us, he’s with us.”

As the election nears, Mr. Corzine seems closer to Trenton than ever. He holds a double-digit lead over Mr. Forrester in the polls and it’s widely assumed that, come Nov. 8, he’ll win a job invariably described as one of most powerful governor’s offices in the nation. This would be a far cry from his role in the Senate, where, as a member of the minority party, his power to enact policy was severely curtailed.

Still, some New Jerseyans look back on the days of Mr. Corzine’s $63 million Senate campaign and wonder whether wealthy business leaders, driven by a desire to do good, might be better off making their investments outside of politics.

David Rebovich, the managing director of the Rider Institute for New Jersey Politics, remembered teasing Mr. Corzine about just such a plan last year. The Senator had a speaking engagement at Rider and, together, they were preparing to take the stage. Mischievously, Mr. Rebovich recalled what he said to Mr. Corzine: “This could have been Corzine University, if you hadn’t run for the Senate and had given the money to us instead.”