The story identified only a handful of those members, including Rep. Yvette Clarke of Brooklyn. She, like other Democrats, praised the bill's job-creation potential, saying, "I see this bill as an exciting opportunity to create the kind of jobs we so desperately need in this country, while at the same time improving the lives of all Americans."

While some of the House members cited in the story offered some sort of explanation or excuse for stating as their own position words that were written by lobbyists, Clarke didn't. I called her office earlier today to see if they had anything to add. I never heard back.

That member, City Councilman Kendall Stewart, said it was a “mistake” for Thompson to campaign on that theme.

Stewart was speaking to reporters after appearing with Thompson and others on the City Hall steps this afternoon, where they announced the creation of “Haitians for Thompson.” "Caribbeans for Thompson."

“He said that he was for term limits,” said Representative Yvette Clarke of Brooklyn, referring to Bloomberg. “Does everyone remember that? All of a sudden, we have amnesia. All of sudden, when he couldn’t maneuver to run for another seat, he decides, well, I want to run to be mayor again.”

Clarke said it was a “violation of our Democratic principles.”

When I asked Clarke about Stewart – who was standing right behind her – Clarke said, “What about him? They were in a position now, where, it was already out there.”

Thompson later stepped in and said, “This was led by the mayor. This change was initiated and led by him.”

Afterward, Stewart said, “I don’t think term limits is an issue in this campaign.”

When I asked if it was a mistake for Thompson to campaign on it, Stewart said, “I think it will be a mistake because people don’t remember the issues and they’ll have an opportunity, they still have an opportunity whether to vote for the mayor or not the mayor. So that in itself is term limits.”

Stewart is facing a spirited challenge for his own City Council in Brooklyn, led by Jumaane Williams, who has the backing of a number of labor unions and has made Stewart’s support of term limits a key issue.

The robocall was recorded by Kirsten John Foy, director of the Criminal Justice Initiative at the National Action Network. Foy says, “Reverend Sharpton, various clergy, community activists, advocates and I are supporting Bill de Blasio for the position of New York City public advocate.”

The call ends with Foy saying, “Thank you for your time, and God bless.”

The mailer, which Foy refers to in the call, is here. It prominently features Sharpton, and includes endorsement statements from Representatives Yvette Clarke, Ed Towns and Charlie Rangel.

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.’”

In the days since Representative Steve Israel decided not to consider a primary against Gillibrand, following calls from President Barack Obama and Senator Chuck Schumer, other members of the New York Congressional delegation have quickly lined up in support of Gillibrand: Nita Lowey, Maurice Hinchey, Brian Higgins, Michael McMahon, Yvette Clarke, John Hall, Michael Arcuri. Soon Nydia Velasquez and Ed Towns are expected to make their support public. Anthony Weiner is considered supportive, too.

"I think what is happening, with all due respect to them, is that when you begin to get a lot of calls of people saying we have got to put this to bed and this has to end, if they get a call from higher-ups in the party they succumb to that," said Serrano. "I understand that. I was there in the early days when you lose sleep over a phone call and you don't know what to do with it. Those days aren't there for me anymore. I've been in office for 35 years."

Serrano, who told Liz that he thinks Obama's White House acted like Tammany Hall in forcing out Israel, said that very few people in the delegation, including those who have endorsed her, are "jumping for joy" about the momentum building around her. He said he now counts himself with Carolyn Maloney and Carolyn McCarthy as potential challengers to Gillibrand.

"Maloney told me she is running," added Serrano. "McCarthy is still waiting to see who doesn't run. And if the field narrows down to no one running, she may do it."

It is quite possible that Serrano has no intention of running, and that his last-ditch effort to cause trouble for Gillibrand is mostly motivated by his objection to the fact that no one has seen fit to take him seriously enough to call. ("I think he is genuinely hurt that he wasn't considered," said one member of the delegation.)  But either way, the fact that he is making these kinds of noises—just as the Gillibrand campaign is attempting to convey momentum in gaining support from the once-aggrieved House delegation—is not great news for the party leaders looking to avoid making the 2010 Senate race any more interesting than it already is.

"As the dean, I wish we didn't have a primary," said Representative Charlie Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation. "But having said that, I don't think it's up to me or anyone else what their political ambitions should be kept at just for the sake of unity. It's just not fair. I'm not going to tell them not to run."  

Rangel, one of the most senior officials in the House, said that he himself has received no pressure from Gillibrand's office, from Schumer or from the White House to support her, and he said that he would endorse Gillibrand if she ran unchallenged. He said he didn't know what he would do if there was a primary.

"It depends on if there is anyone running," he said.  "And I don't think there would be."

Gillibrand has actively sought to ensure that there isn't one, and has worked to convince some of her former critics, like Velasquez, that she is not as conservative as she was when she represented a mostly Republican district upstate.

But there are still holdouts. And Serrano said they are senior enough to resist even the strongest institutional pressures.

Several sources echoed Serrano's claims that state and national party leaders have aggressively sought to pressure members of the delegation to get behind Gillibrand, and expressed frustration with the White House for injecting itself into a state primary. Gillibrand's office, one Congressional source noted, has offered to help carry pet legislation or talk to senior administration officials in order to get one member's bills moved along.

"When Senator Gillibrand was in the House, then Senator Clinton was always willing to work with her on her priorities," said Gillibrand's spokesman, Matt Canter. "That's the kind of senator she plans to be."

The support Gillibrand most covets is that of liberal downstate representatives, who have thus far been reluctant to endorse. Their support would amount to a kosherizing effect on Gillibrand for many progressives wary of her past positions.

Perhaps first among that class of legislator is Representative Jerry Nadler, who is yet to support Gillibrand.

"You get Jerry Nadler's endorsement, that means a lot to a lot of people," Serrano said. "Jerry is one of the finest legislators and progressive voices we have."

In addition to Nadler and Israel, Eliot Engel, Joe Crowley, Gary Ackerman, Louise Slaughter, Eric Massa, Paul Tonko and Timothy Bishop, all Democrats, have still not endorsed.

"I don't think any of this matters to their reelection," said a member of the delegation, speaking on background. "And if she is successful, they'll reestablish a connection."

And, of course, there is Serrano, who holds a grudge against Gillibrand for her past positions on immigration and what he considers the "botched" way in which she was appointed.

 "We don't have a relationship," he said.

Also expected to endorse Gillibrand, according to one of her aides, are representatives Nita Lowey of Westchester and Brian Higgins of Buffalo.

But it's going to be interesting, as some of the delegation starts to fall in behind Gillibrand, to watch who the holdouts are.

After all, this thing isn't totally settled, even among New York's Democratic House members. Carolyn Maloney insists she is still considering a Senate bid, and Carolyn McCarthy said in a recent interview that she still feels someone—anyone—needs to challenge Gillibrand. And it’s not just Gillibrand’s policies that McCarthy said she finds objectionable: “It’s not just the issues, it’s the personality.”

The roll-out of endorsements today comes the same day that Liz Benjamin quoted an unnamed White House source saying, "We won't do anything else until she produces endorsements from her delegation," and, "[Obama] is sensitive to the fact that none of her colleagues like her."

Except in New York City.

The city may be a bastion of American liberalism, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly six to one, but it can’t win the mayor’s office. Nearly 16 years since Republican Rudy Giuliani ended decades of Democratic control of City Hall, prominent Democrats acknowledge that the party is still debilitated by dependence on special-interest constituencies, political legacies, a resistance to structural reform and an overall absence of new ideas.

Now, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg poised to win a third term, some of the very Democrats who are expected to make the case against him recognize a lack of reinvigoration and the low likelihood of coming back to power anytime soon.

“The old-guard Democratic machine has dominated politics in the city of New York for so long that it has to date stifled new ideas and individuals from taking their place in the public discourse,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, who several Democratic insiders have pointed to as one of the party’s promising young prospects.     

According to Mark Green, the former public advocate (and current public-advocate candidate) who narrowly lost the 2001 mayoral election to Mr. Bloomberg, the party’s lack of creativity, among other things, resulted in “losing four mayoral elections in a row—possibly five.”

TO BE SURE, the current mayor’s billions of dollars have a lot to do with dampening Democratic hopes.

The money, which he has spent lavishly during each of his campaigns, has allowed him the independence to pick battles against politically influential opposition.

Certainly, there’s an unattractive flip side: Mr. Bloomberg may not have to pander to advocates and interest groups through his legislative actions, but he’s not above spreading his cash around to quell dissent, or essentially cornering the market on political talent to deprive his competitors of competent campaign staff.

But the overall picture, as far as the public is concerned, is of an executive who, by and large, can afford to stay in power without making political deals.

“The current administration is very professional and capable, and to some extent that is the result of a vastly funded, self-financed campaign that has not seen a necessity to build alliances,” said John Liu, a councilman from Queens who is running for city comptroller. “Mr. Bloomberg had some advantages in governing that a Democrat could only dream of. If every political campaign could be run like that, then perhaps we would be better off for it. One in a thousand can be run like that.”

The fact that the mayor can run such a campaign seems to have scared off the Democrat who would likely have posed the toughest challenge: Representative Anthony Weiner, who, before Mr. Bloomberg decided to seek a third term, promised to run a spirited campaign based on the increasingly resonant idea of defending the city’s middle class from extinction. (Mr. Weiner recently announced, in the style of a noncandidate, the decision to defer his decision on whether to run.)

Now, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination is City Comptroller Bill Thompson, the cordial former head of the justly disbanded City Board of Education. So far, Mr. Thompson—by nature a consensus-seeker—has attempted to position himself as an alternative to the incumbent based on the broad idea that Mr. Bloomberg is a mayor for the wealthy, and that there’s a whole other New York that’s being overlooked.

It’s the Ferrer campaign of 2005.

Fred Siegel, an embittered Dinkins-era Democrat turned positive-biographer of Rudy Giuliani (and a lusty critic of Mr. Bloomberg), said that despite the modernization of Democrats around the country, New York remained a wormhole to the 1980s.

“The Democratic Party has changed in terms of personalities, it’s changed in terms of ethnic composition, because the city has changed,” he said. “But in terms of underlying assumptions, social-service and public-sector orientation, it hasn’t changed. In terms of the middle class, the Democratic Party lost touch with the non-public-sector middle class a long time ago. Weiner has half of that. But I don’t think it’s a political campaign that can reestablish that connection. It’s going to be forced to face the future.”

Mr. Siegel said that the decade and a half out of City Hall prevented Democrats from coming to terms with the success of Mr. Giuliani’s policies on policing and welfare.

“One of the unfortunate things about the 2001 election, Bloomberg winning it, is that Democrats, had they won, would have had to adapt to Rudy’s policies. They didn’t,” he said.

Those Democrats don’t necessarily disagree.

Mr. Green, no friend of Mr. Giuliani, said that just as “Eisenhower accepted most of the New Deal reforms and Blair accepted some of Thatcher’s reforms,” he would, if he prevailed in 2001, have adopted such trademark Giuliani ideas as a target-the-symptoms approach to policing and a less lenient approach to welfare.

He also said the party had been ill-served, on an intellectual level, by the frequency of unelected appointments to several statewide offices, because it denied Democrats the opportunity, or saved them the trouble, of defending new ideas in the crucible of closely contested campaigns.

“When Rudy ran in ’93 on broken windows and neoconservative economic ideas, I didn’t vote for the guy, but he had to cheer-lead for plausible Republican urban economic ideas and then govern on them when he won,” Mr. Green said. “And three of the five statewides have been appointed by selection rather than election, and haven’t yet had to run on a philosophy or a body of ideas.”

For Democrats, advocating new ideas, even ones that seem to work, can be an act of mutiny.

Joel Klein, Mr. Bloomberg’s schools chancellor and a Democrat with strong connections to party royalty like the Kennedy family and White House wise man John Podesta, champions mayoral control of the city’s schools. Test scores have risen, and the policy of mayoral control of schools is popular.

Mr. Klein is detested within the local party. And he seems to detest the local party right back.

“Certainly the Democratic Party in New York is a party that is closely aligned with traditionally union interests,” said Mr. Klein.  “If you believe in special-interest-group politics, then divided authority is always a much more attractive form.”

Mr. Klein characterized the proposals of the union and Mr. Thompson—who would prefer the mayor select education policy panelists from a broad pool nominated by panelists and teachers, among others—as “really ahistorical right now.

“Here are all these democratic mayors, Cory Booker, Adrian Fenty, Antonio Villaraigosa, they are classic traditional Democratic mayors, and they all understand what is clear to me,” he said. “That in the absence of mayoral authority, you increase the likelihood of interest-group politics; what you have is divided authority and nobody in charge, and we had that in New York from 1968 to 2002 and everybody knows it didn’t work.”

Ed Koch, a three-time mayor who was once the standard-bearer for the party—and who is now one of Mr. Bloomberg’s most vocal supporters, said, “I believe the local interests, local politicians, have more dominance than ever before.”

“I tamed the party,” he said, referring to his time as mayor. “I pulled its teeth from the party leaders.”

Mr. Koch said that though he liked Mr. Weiner, who had indicated he’d follow in the former mayor’s footsteps, he was “not aware of any hotshot who is whipping up the party” and as far as he could tell, the Democratic Party had gotten worse.

“The spirit of reform that existed when I was in the local club, the V.I.D. (Village Independent Democrats) and others, has all been dissipated as far as I can see. What they need is another effort to reform the party.”

Chris Owens, who in 2006 ran in a primary for the Brooklyn-based House seat of his father, former representative Major Owens, talked about a generational shift that was occurring in the party, in which younger Democrats were more moderate and business-friendly than their predecessors.

“Ferrer was last of the previous generation,” he said

(Mr. Owens lost to Yvette Clarke, whose mother, Una Clarke, was the first Jamaican-born member of the City Council.)

On the evening of March 30, Mr. Bloomberg spoke at an event at the Lighthouse Ballroom in the Chelsea Piers commemorating victims of Sept. 11, which was attended by Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Thompson. “I want to especially thank my predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, who led New York City in those terrible days,”  he said.

The crowd broke out into cheers of “Rudy,” and Mr. Bloomberg continued that “an awful lot of what we’ve done in the last seven and a half years was made possible by what he did in the eight years before, and hopefully whoever follows us will be able to use what we did.” 

I asked Mr. Giuliani, who premised his campaign for president on the notion that he had challenged and defeated Democratic orthodoxy in New York City, why the Democrats still haven’t found a way to win.

“There was a group that supported the changes, but there was always a group that opposed it,” he said as he left the event. “And it seems to me that that group is in more control of the party than the group that embraced the changes.”

This morning brings news of yet another positive indicator: a Siena college poll showing him with a garish 67-17 point lead over David Paterson in a hypothetical primary for governor next year.

But as he sails along on his undeclared but unmistakable quest to become governor, there's at least one uncomfortable issue he'll have to reckon with, at least as long as David Paterson is around: race.

"Aside from taking on a sitting governor in his own party, who I think will be a great governor, the biggest obstacle to Andrew running is it is going to remind people of when he ran against Carl McCall, which is not fair, but it is history," said Charlie King, the executive director of Al Sharpton's National Action Network who was Cuomo's running mate in that ill-fated run in 2002. "If Spitzer was going through the same rough patch as Paterson, there is little doubt in my mind that Andrew would challenge him."

In that insurgent and disastrous primary, Cuomo made a gross miscalculation of banking on the near-saintly status his family name enjoyed with black voters in New York. But, in a prelude to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary, Cuomo's lead among black voters in early polls disappeared once those voters engaged with the history-making African-American candidate. Cuomo eventually dropped out.

Now, after a resoundingly successful rehabilitation effort that featured a thumping victory in the 2006 attorney general race—a contest in which King, Cuomo's onetime partner, was a candidate—and two impressive years in the attorney general's office, Cuomo is in a better place than ever to bid for the state's top job.

There is even reason to believe that he will be able to do so from a stronger position with black voters than he enjoyed in 2002.

As Siena pollster Steven Greenberg explains: "Currently—and with a long time to go before any election—Andrew Cuomo is viewed very strongly in the African-American community, with a 75-14 percent favorable rating.  For the first time ever, Governor Paterson has a negative favorable rating (44-46 percent) among African-Americans. And right now, Cuomo is beating Paterson better than two-to-one in a potential gubernatorial primary."

(Coincidentally, Greenberg was an aide on the 2002 McCall campaign. He is speaking here only in his capacity as a pollster.)

But if Mr. Cuomo has made ground among black voters, much of New York's black political leadership, at this point, doesn't seem to be on board.

In a series of interviews with black officials and operatives for a story about their view of Paterson's plummeting fortunes, the thing that seemed to prompt the staunchest expressions of support for the current governor was the mention of Cuomo's name.

"Everyone is clear on the ambition of Andrew Cuomo wanting to be governor; he ran before," said Yvette Clarke, a congresswoman from Queens.

"I think Andrew will make his own judgment," said David Dinkins, the former mayor. "I don't know that one can stop him or not stop him. I think from David's perspective, what he's got to do is get some good competent people on whom he can rely. I'm satisfied that if he has that, where judgments are required, in most instances he will make the wise choice among those presented to him."

"If [David] turns it around, I don't think Andrew Cuomo will run," said Bill Lynch, a leading black consultant who used to advise Paterson. "And I guarantee he will turn it around."

Representative Charlie Rangel, the dean of the New York delegation, wouldn't even go so far as to concede that Cuomo is looking to run.

 "I'm not gonna assume that Cuomo is going to be a challenger," said Rangel, who warned against speculating on a potential primary. "You shouldn't do that to Cuomo; you might have him politically crippled.".  

When asked what he thought about Cuomo bulking up his fund-raising operation, Rangel replied, "He's Andrew Cuomo. That's what he does."

As he walked out of a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at St. Bart’s church on 51st Street on March 17, Mr. Paterson told The Observer, “Somebody once wrote that you shouldn’t pity the community for wondering who its leaders are—you should pity the community that needs leaders.”

Mr. Paterson’s point was that the attention should be on Harlem’s problems, not its politicians.

But up there, right now, Topic A is David Paterson. And the conversation isn’t a happy one.

His improbable, fluky rise to the state’s top office one year ago came as Harlem’s longtime leaders neared the end of their careers, and as black populations and sway increased in the outer boroughs. If it wasn’t the dawning of a new era for the city’s traditional power center of black politics, Mr. Paterson’s ascendancy seemed, at least, to have staved off the dying of the light.

“People were elated,” said Bill Lynch, the city’s best-established black consultant, who is based
in Harlem and has advised Mr. Paterson.

The child of former State Senator Basil Paterson—who along with former Mayor David Dinkins, former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton and Representative Charlie Rangel formed the legendary “Gang of Four” that ran Harlem politics for decades—Mr. Paterson was always an unlikely standard-bearer.

To avoid special-education classes for his visual impairment, he attended high school in Hempstead, not Harlem, before moving back uptown as a Columbia University student in the late 1970s. Even after he won election in 1985 to represent his father’s old Harlem district in the State Senate, he seized opportunities to distance himself from his father and the rest of the old guard, running without their approval and without their endorsement for public advocate, and then, again against their wishes, he left his post as Senate majority leader to run as Eliot Spitzer’s lieutenant governor.

Then the fates, acting through Mr. Spitzer’s libido, hoisted Mr. Paterson to the governor’s mansion. Harlem had found a new champion.

Except it hasn’t.

Mr. Paterson’s approval numbers are in the gutter and his administration has been a case study in chaos. Mr. Rangel and other old guard Harlem power brokers now sound eager, above all else, not to have Mr. Paterson’s problems reflect poorly on Harlem’s leadership as a whole.

Asked after a recent appearance at the Langston Hughes Auditorium of the Schomburg Center on 135th Street whether Mr. Paterson now represented political Harlem, Mr. Rangel, the reigning Harlem power broker and chairman of the House’s Ways and Means Committee, responded, “I don’t think so.”

“Because remember,” said Mr. Rangel, “Dave Paterson was a senator in the minority for most all of his political career and when things started changing. It changed so fast that he was hurtled into the actual political leadership, because he’s governor. But it’s not as though as senator he was that much more ahead of a Bill Perkins or Keith Wright.”

Mr. Rangel had just participated in a panel discussion with those Harlem assemblymen on how best to capitalize on federal stimulus money, during which he had spoken of “our great governor, David Paterson.”

Outside the auditorium, Mr. Rangel said the very idea of a torch-passing to Mr. Paterson was a false construct.

“I don’t think old-timers like me sit back and say, ‘Now which one of these will receive the torch?’” he said. “I don’t think Adam Powell was waiting for someone to come. I don’t think most communities do that. I don’t know whether they’re looking for a Bill Perkins, or Inez Dickens, or Keith Wright, but these are the leaders that we have in our community; I know our community’s looking for them.”

Then again, as charter members of Harlem’s political elite readily acknowledge, that community has changed.

“Look at the demographic shifts,” said Carl McCall, the former state comptroller who became the Democratic nominee for governor in 2002 after a botched primary challenge from Andrew Cuomo. “Harlem got the attention, because of its location in Manhattan, because of its access to the media. Harlem was always considered sort of a premier black community in the country, but now if you just look at the numbers, the only minority we are talking about running for mayor is Billy Thompson, and he’s from Brooklyn.”

“There are competent black people who hold office in many other boroughs,” said Mr. Dinkins. “It’s not limited to Harlem, as once was the case.”

Mr. Dinkins, who called himself “a friend and a fan of the governor” who he’s known “since birth,” challenged the notion that Mr. Paterson should even be thought of as a leader for Harlem.

“He holds a statewide office, and it is unfair or inaccurate to think of him only as a Harlem leader. He’s a whole lot bigger than that,” said Mr. Dinkins.

“When Governor Paterson was catapulted to the governorship, he, quote unquote, left Harlem as a representative,” said Mr. Lynch.

Before the March 13 panel began, attendees networked and talked about stimulus dollars over a spread of croissants, muffins, orange juice and coffee. A poster of Barack Obama in the corner of the lobby advertised an upcoming exhibit called “Becoming American: African Americans and American Politics.”

“He needs everybody’s support. If he doesn’t have everybody’s support, it’s not going to work,” said Martin Smith, who handed out cards describing himself as the Democratic Male District Leader of West Harlem.

Some Paterson supporters, like Geoffrey Eaton, an N.A.A.C.P. vice president, rallied behind the governor (“he is the leader and he’s going to lead”), but other attendees seemed ready to concede, regretfully, that Mr. Paterson was not going to be the answer to Harlem’s declining influence.

“I know his dad, I love him,” said Alvin Reed, the 69-year-old owner of the storied Lenox Lounge in Harlem. “But I don’t think it’s him.”

Mr. Reed, who has neat gray hair and wears black-framed glasses, picked at a bowl of fruit as he expressed some frustration that the same politicians, like Mr. Rangel, had held a stranglehold on power in Harlem for ages.

Asked who the future of black leadership in Harlem would be, Mr. Reed said, “That’s what everybody’s wondering.”

The organizers of the meeting called everyone into the auditorium (“any seat after row four is yours, baby”), and Mr. Rangel made his grand entrance, squeezing palms with one hand and holding a white Styrofoam cup of coffee with the other. Leaning against the stage, Councilwoman Inez Dickens said Mr. Paterson’s ascent had surprised everyone.

“Who knew what happened was going to happen?” she said.

She said that she fully supported the governor, who, she said, had inherited an awfully tough economic situation. She said it was no more clear now who would emerge as the next recognized leader of Harlem than it had been in the 1960s, when “it was not clear” that Mr. Rangel, Mr. Dinkins, Mr. Sutton and Basil Paterson were amassing power and influence. 

What was known, she said, was that “they were young, they were ambitious.”

Down the block, outdoor furniture had started appearing on the balconies of the sprawling Lenox Terrace luxury apartments, where Mr. Rangel, Mr. Paterson, his father, Basil Paterson, the former Borough President Percy Sutton and several other Harlem leaders have residences (some at particularly low rents). A plaque honoring Marcus Garvey, for whom Mr. Paterson’s paternal grandmother worked as a secretary, was mounted next to the front doors of the complex’s Devonshire apartments, where uniformed doormen bid good day to the people coming and going.

Bill Jackson, a longtime resident, returned home carrying a Daily News and wearing a beat-up Yankees cap. He said that he could see “some type of power shift” happening away from Harlem and expressed disappointment that Mr. Paterson’s popularity “took a dive” after the senate selection process, which he called “horrible.”

The governor, he said, had “gotten caught up in the power stream.”

As far as identifying a new leader for Harlem, he said, “I can’t think of anyone who comes to mind on the state level.”

Further down on Lenox Avenue, regulars and tourists and political operatives sat down for breakfast at Sylvia’s, surrounded by framed and aged photos of Mr. Rangel, Mr. Dinkins and other members of the old Harlem leadership. At the front counter, Raymond James, a 47-year-old corrections officer wearing a wool hat pulled down to his ears, ate a plate of salmon cakes and scrambled eggs.

Mr. James, who lives in Harlem, said he liked Mr. Paterson but noted that he held his current position because of an “accident,” and offered that he didn’t think the governor was up to the job.

“I think he’s trying to be fair,” Mr. James said, “but Carl McCall might have been better because he was more mature.”

Still, Mr. James said, the field was wide open for the next wave of Harlem leadership, because the old guard was about done.

“Rangel’s on his way out,” he said.

Or maybe the idea of any sort of cohesive political “Harlem” is already an anachronism. Certainly, that’s the reality that leading black officials from the more demographically significant outer boroughs are already operating under.

“As far as culture, as far as being historic in nature, Harlem will always play that role, but as for black politics, black politics is different than what it was,” said Representative Gregory Meeks of Queens. “Harlem is not going to have a Gang of Four anymore, just for Harlem. Those days are over. If there is going to be a gang of anything, it’s going to be multi-borough.”

Representative Yvette Clarke of Brooklyn agreed.

“In the black community, you see more coalition-building as opposed to one particular power center,” said Ms. Clarke over coffee at a midtown deli. “There is a changing of the guard.”

At a press event on the morning of March 16 to highlight the completed renovation of the South Ferry Terminal station, dozens of television cameramen and still photographers squeezed like rush-hour commuters into a car of the No. 1 train and took pictures of Governor David Paterson, who stood silently in front of a subway map, waiting for the maiden voyage from the revamped station to begin.

Councilman Alan Gerson, who had a staked out a spot nearby, broke the silence by suggesting that the governor, instead of exiting after the photo op one stop later, ride all the way uptown “for old time’s sake.”

Mr. Paterson broke out with a smile.

“There we go!” he said.

jhorowitz@observer.com