TWO(?)-PARTY POLITICS TODAY

This is going to make your head hurt, but persevere. The complexities of the contest for governor of New York give a glimpse into what politics becomes when a vacuum of ideas is filled with race and pork.

Time was, until 1964, New York was the most populous state and its governorship made many men presidential aspirants--Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, TR's cousin Franklin, Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller. Today New York has only 56 percent of the political heft of California, has less than Texas and soon will fall behind Florida.

Still, its governorship is not chopped liver, and Carl McCall, state comptroller, wants it. He would be just the second African-American elected governor of a state. (Virginia's Doug Wilder became the first in 1990.) But first McCall must win the Democratic nomination by defeating the son of the last Democratic governor--Mario Cuomo's son Andrew, 44. Then McCall must defeat the man who defeated Andrew's father, George Pataki, who is seeking a third term with some remarkably un-Republican maneuvers.

McCall, 65, is one of six children raised by his unmarried mother on welfare. He graduated from Dartmouth and attended the University of Edinburgh. Tall, dapper and courtly, he has been a vice president of Citicorp and an ambassador to the United Nations and is on the board of the New York Stock Exchange. His liberalism is the tangy Manhattan flavor: when president of New York City's Board of Education, he favored distributing condoms and books (e.g., "Heather Has Two Mommies") to indoctrinate children about "alternative lifestyles." He has been commissioner of the Port Authority and a three-term state senator.

McCall supporters like HarlemRep. Charles Rangel say McCall has paid his dues, and it is his turn, not the upstart Cuomo's. Rangel recently said that if today the choice were between Andrew Cuomo and Pataki, "I'd go with Pataki." Cuomo, say some McCall Democrats, is an "outsider" because he has just returned to New York after eight years in the Clinton administration, the last four as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Such Democrats developed their distaste for outsiders after electing Hillary Clinton, of Illinois and Arkansas, to the Senate.

In 1998 McCall ran 290,000 votes ahead of Pataki and carried 45 of New York's 62 counties. Sen. Charles Schumer in 1998 carried only 11. Clinton in 2000 carried only 15. However, Cuomo is married to the daughter of a former New York senator, Robert Kennedy, and has the prodigious fund-raising powers of his father's and the Kennedys' allies. And he is as aggressive as McCall is diffident.