“The race is not this year, although you’d think it was,” says former New York Mayor Ed Koch. “It’ll be the longest Senate race in the history of America. I hope people don’t get bored.”

Fat chance. Nauseous, maybe — but the race promises to be anything but boring.

Clinton and Giuliani are both larger-than-life figures whose first names are household words. Hillary! Rudy! Each claims grandiose achievements and a monopoly on righteousness; each is always right, their opponents always wrong.

Both are wildly adored and viciously despised.

Both are historical figures. High schools will be named after them someday.

A Fiorello H. LaGuardia and Eleanor Roosevelt for the millennium — but hungrier, angrier.

The campaign (assuming it happens — neither Rudy nor Hillary has officially declared candidacy yet) is going to be insane. For the media, the only bigger matchup would be Madonna vs. Howard Stern. And maybe not even that.

If the New York Post didn’t already exist, someone would have to invent it, right now, just for this race.

On the political front, it’s already been brutally Darwinian. A year ahead of time, two well-meaning, successful members of Congress — Rep. Nita Lowey, a motherly Westchester County Democrat, and Rick Lazio, a young buck Long Island Republican — have been rudely elbowed out of the way to make room for the stars. Plenty of Hillary Lovers, Hillary Haters, Rudy Lovers and Rudy Haters are already pouring millions of dollars into the appropriate campaign buckets.

Rudy’s May fund-raiser at Midtown’s Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, which featured Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as the honorary chairman, is said to have netted $2.1 million, probably the biggest in state history for an unannounced candidate.

Each campaign is shooting to raise upwards of $20 million, which could make this not just the longest, but the most expensive Senate race in history — topping the 1994 California match between Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington.

If it were just Hillary running, or just Rudy, the fanfare wouldn’t amount to a fraction of this.

Indeed, it’s the combination, the anticipated ugliness, the At-last! pairing of nemeses for each of these intimidating forces of nature.

It’s gonna be great.

A buzzer-beater away from Madison Square Garden, on the eighth floor of a nondescript office building undergoing some irritating and no-doubt symbolic construction, earnest young men and women slave away at the Hillary Rodham Clinton for U.S. Senate Exploratory Committee.

The offices are small and cramped and unimpressive — typical New York fare — and the poor young woman handling the phones this Monday afternoon barely gets a moment to breathe. “Hillary 2000, hold please; Hillary 2000, hold please; Hillary 2000, hold please …”

Calls come in for “Neera” and “Gabrielle” and “Samara,” exactly the kinds of names you’d expect at Hillary 2000. Most, however, are for Clinton’s overworked press secretary, Howard Wolfson, who is more or less running the shop — for now. (New York liberal pols Mandy Grunwald and Harold Ickes, pollster Mark Penn and Hillary’s right-hand woman, Maggie Williams are involved, too, but they’re all doing their best to remain invisible to date.)

The waiting room is covered with immense color images of Clinton in her familiar off-white or dark blue suits, her brilliant blonde coif — a flattering cut it only took her a half-century to find — lending her the celebrity look fans need. It’s no wonder she was on the cover of the premier issue of Talk.

Interns (though you’d think the campaign would come up with a new name for them) shuttle in and out. One spends maybe 45 minutes deliberately stapling newspaper-clipping photos of Clinton to a bulletin board.

But images and a new blond ‘do aren’t going to be enough for Hillary to prevail in this campaign. It’s going to be a relentless, grueling war, leading Republicans to already whisper that, at the end of the day, Hillary might not even run. Polls right now have Hillary and Rudy still relatively close, but, as any seasoned pol will tell you, it ain’t the poll numbers that matter — it’s their direction.

With that in mind, the Battery may be down, but it’s nothing compared to Hillary’s numbers. According to Marist Institute polls, Hillary was beating Rudy 52 percent to 42 percent in January, but since then, their arrows have headed along different trajectories. Support for Hillary has nose-dived all the way down to 40 while Rudy’s numbers have shot up to 49. That’s a net 19-point gain for Rudy in nine months.

“If the election were held tomorrow, Rudy would win,” says Koch, a former Rudy fan who now supports Hillary. “With the passage of time, voters will distinguish between the two in terms of their ability to work in the Senate and get things done for the state of New York. People will ultimately conclude that a Democratic philosophy will be better for New York, and that as a messenger for that philosophy Hillary is a better fit for New York.”

Among plenty of Hillary surrogates, like Koch, you can already hear a strategy to downplay their woman versus the other side’s man, in favor of talking parties instead.

In addition to our booming economy, Hillary has a few other numbers working for her: registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans statewide — 4,999,541 to 3,078,574, as of April 1.

Rudy might be a liberal Republican — he once worked for RFK, and voted for McGovern in ’72, plus he leans left on abortion, gay rights, and gun control. But he came out in favor of the GOP’s tax-cut plans, with more “team-player” moves sure to follow. Democrats therefore plan on tying Rudy to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who is widely perceived throughout the Empire State as being anti-New York and pro-South.

Hillary seems to embrace the partisan approach.“The Republican Party [tax-cut] bill … would be in effect a statement that would ask us to cut and run on our obligations to older Americans,” she said at a Sept. 14 appearance in Great Neck, Long Island, in front of an audience of — you guessed it — older Americans. “It would break our faith with the seniors in New York, and I would fight it, if I were in the Congress now.”

The last Senate fight in these parts was a year ago, between the smarty-pants Democrat, Rep. Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn, and the shameless Republican, then-Sen. Alphonse D’Amato. The main battleground then is the same one now:

The suburbs.

Like Chappaqua, for instance, where mishpocheh Clinton just bought a $1.7 million, 11-room Dutch colonial, using a fishy loan from a supporter.

There’s the rest of Westchester County, and Long Island — both Nassau and Suffolk — plus all the women (and as many as possible of the Reagan Democrats) in Buffalo, Erie County, Rochester, Albany and Syracuse.

Schumer tailored his message to these folks by talking about upstate jobs, education and health care. For the women in the suburbs he threw in gun control and abortion rights. He ran a textbook campaign that also appealed to the state’s exhaustion with D’Amato, who had dragged the state through various ethics debacles and a racist joke or two, and by being just generally annoying.

Eighteen years was enough. D’Amato fatigue had set in.

But there’s another kind of fatigue at work this time around, and it doesn’t cut so well for the Democrats.

They know it, too. You can see it in the fact that just last week, Hillary’s brothers, Anthony and Hugh Rodham, backed out of an $118 million scheme to grow and import hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. As first disclosed by the Washington Post, not long ago les freres Rodham appeared at a press conference with Aslan Abashidze, a political leader with ties to an alleged mobster. After a Post op-ed hammered the Rodhams for the deal, the brothers announced they were backing out of it, expressing reluctance “to do any harm to the first lady or the administration.”

One senses that the brothers Rodham didn’t have much say in the matter. It doesn’t much seem to matter if the Rodhams were up to no good.

After all, you can’t buy a blintz in the former Soviet Union without bumping into someone with ties to the mob.

As the Clintons have maybe — finally — learned, it ain’t the impropriety, it’s the appearance, that matters.

Still, it doesn’t even have to be impropriety to make news.

Hillary can’t so much as look at a doctor’s office these days without the New York Post blaring a headline that she’s considering plastic surgery.

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, discovered that one of Hillary’s grandparents had married a Jew and suddenly she was accused of shamelessly pandering, trying to shed her goyish kopf in exchange for one more yiddesche.

“Oy Vey!” blared the Post.

Meanwhile, Hillary 2000 campaign workers say that the Forward came to them, not the other way around, so they faced a no-win situation of either being accused of pandering or denying a link to an important ethnic block. They tried for the middle ground and got slapped for it, unfairly.

Of course, you hardly know who to blame for that. As we’ve all learned the hard way, you never quite know what to believe with the Clintons. With them, a cigar is never just a cigar.

“And Monica’s apartment is only 36 miles away from their Chappaqua estate!” gloats a Republican National Committee staffer.

One of the reasons for the “Oy Vey!” headlines is that Hillary hasn’t yet been able to focus her campaign on the issues she wants to talk about.

“The problem is the same old one,” says a Democratic political operative “The Clintons are all about polling. They don’t know what they believe in. Every question that comes in to that campaign should be put through the context of her message, of her as the ‘Education Senator’ or whatever.”

If you ask her campaign or her supporters, however, they’ll tell you that Hillary is indeed focused on her issues — education and health care.

“The No. 1 issue is comprehensive health insurance and care,” Koch says. “And people will say, ‘Didn’t she muck it up the first time?’ Well, yes, she did. She didn’t bring in people who disagreed with her. But now she is. And when she was talking about it then, 32 million Americans didn’t have insurance. Now it’s 43 million. So the issue is still with us. And it’s a very compelling issue. Women are affected more, since they live longer than men, and 11 million children are involved. The Republican Party is against prescription drugs for Medicare coverage, so I believe that issue is a winner.”

Bring it on, says an executive at the RNC. “The last time she talked about health care was 1994,” he says. “Our candidates ran on it, and we won the House and Senate.”

“Another important question is who’s better on education,” Koch says, “And she can win that one … Rudy can’t work with anybody, and you have to work with people when it comes to education.”

True, Rudy’s battles with the various chancellors of the city school system are legendary, and he also recently launched a $21 million, 3,000-student voucher plan.

But Hillary may not be able to exploit that effectively in the campaign because of those suburban swing voters, many of whom commute precisely because the city’s schools are so abysmal.

Still, Hillary should be able to pluck out her education bona fides from her days in Arkansas — Children’s Defense Fund board member, founder of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families — even though her husband’s administration has been somewhat lackluster on the issue.

In any case, Hillary has yet to blend her talking points into a coherent message. She’s still doing her “listening tour,” taking in what the voters have to say. Hillary staffers marvel at the fans who appear at these events, as if she were a rock star. But groupies only get you so far. September’s Marist Institute poll showed Rudy clobbering Hillary among suburban voters, 62 percent to 28.

Then there’s the carpetbagger issue, which Republicans in the U.S. House tried to highlight last week by adding a provision to the campaign finance bill that would require the first lady to reimburse the government for using Air Force Hillary for her campaign. Forty-five House Democrats supported the measure and it won 261-167. Ouch.

“The carpetbagging issue has resonance now, but it won’t in six months,” Koch says. Koch and others are quick to point out that Sens. Robert Kennedy and James Buckley won seats despite the fact that their paths to the Senate began along I-95.

But, as pollster John Zogby recently pointed out, RFK ran just a year after his brother was assassinated, and it wasn’t the easy task one would think. While RFK won New York City overwhelmingly, as Hillary will do doubt do (Rudy’s people have already written off scoring more than 35 percent or so in the mayor’s own city), RFK did so when the city held 42 percent of the state electorate.

Today, the city vote accounts for only 27 percent of the state’s total.

Besides, in his 1964 Senate race, RFK lost the suburbs.

Zogby’s summer poll asked New Yorkers what he called “a simple, open-ended question: ‘What is the No. 1 thing you would ask (Giuliani/Clinton) if (he/ she) were to run for the Senate?’”

Rudy was asked about education, health care, and upstate New York.

Two of Hillary’s top three: “Why is she running in New York?” And “Why did she stay with him?”

“In other words,” Zogby wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “1 voter in 3 is already ‘off message’ — not concentrating on the issues Mrs. Clinton will want to stress.”

Speaking of issues the first lady doesn’t want to stress, there’s the brouhaha that erupted when her husband announced clemency for Puerto Rican terrorists. Law enforcement, editorial boards, Capitol Hill Republicans and Mayor Giuliani blasted President Clinton’s decision. When asked where she stood, Hillary stuttered, looking not only clueless about what was going on in the White House, but out of her element in New York’s gruelingly demanding ethnic constituency.

In the end, she opposed clemency, but she did so without informing a few key Latino pols. They whined about it, and thus she stumbled once again. Without question, as New York salesman Willy Loman’s wife once said, attention must be paid. During the heated 1998 Senate face-off between Schumer and D’Amato, “the Schumer campaign didn’t order Taco Bell without getting the OK from [Bronx County Democratic Chairman Roberto] Ramirez,” says one in-the-know Democrat.

Ramirez and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and a host of other Latino pols expressed disappointment in Hillary’s move but seemed ready to move on. There’s a lot that’s unfair about the melee, but the substance of it won’t be remembered as much as her incompetence in the sewer of New York City politics, where even a man like Bronx congressman Jose Serrano can command front pages if he knows how to play the fiddle.

At best an irrelevancy as a congressman, Serrano is best known in Washington for talking about his love of Frank Sinatra. But he successfully used the clemency debacle to draw attention to himself making like the Chairman of the Board, even though it’s common knowledge that his two rivals — Ramirez and Ferrer — are the Latinos with the huevos in New York. Thanks to Hillary’s screw-up, Serrano told the press that he was reconsidering endorsing Hillary — which was enough to give the story an extra media bounce, earn Serrano a flattering profile in the New York Times, and make Hillary look like a tourist.

Welcome to New York. Now get the fuck out.

And Hillary still has to contend with Al Sharpton, Irish activists, the Italians, gays, lesbians, Caribbeans, Catholics and ad infinitum. Next up probably will be a small vocal pool of Jewish activists who want clemency for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Rudy has already supported clemency for the man who many feel was given life in solitary because of the lingering anti-Semitism of the Bush administration. But it’s an ugly issue, one that Hillary clearly is reluctant to touch.

“There are going to be a lot more FALN-type controversies,” predicts a White House senior staffer.

Not to mention renewed questions about Whitewater, Rose Law Firm billing records, the health-care debacle, Troopergate, Zippergate, the impeachment hearings and all the stuff we all so desperately want to move beyond.

Oy vey, indeed.

A few miles down Broadway, at City Hall, two-term Mayor Rudy Giuliani is full of kinetic energy, a coiled spring ready to burst.

So far his campaign is bare-bones: a temporary campaign head, his assistant, a fundraiser, and a receptionist. That’s it. The phone calls and checks are coming in, but it’s all disconcertingly low-key. As is Rudy himself, who has been uncharacteristically restrained these last few months. If he chortles over the first lady’s clumsy entrie into the five boroughs and beyond, he does so behind closed doors.

He is, after all, the mayor. He presides. He rules. And, in addition to raking in unbelievable amounts of cash, he somehow managed to dispose of potential challenger Lazio — who had more conservative credibility and therefore more potential for upstate support — with nary a bead of sweat on his public brow.

Word on the street is that the RNC did some polling and found that Lazio, who just turned 41, just didn’t have the stature or celebrity to touch Hillary. The only one who did was Rudy. Thus, the tale goes, some RNC consigliere were dispatched to Albany to pay a little visit on New York Gov. George Pataki, Rudy’s upstate rival ever since Rudy endorsed Pataki’s opponent, Democrat then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, back in ’94. Since then, Pataki has seen his patron, D’Amato, go down in flames, and a Democrat win the attorney general’s office.

“Pataki was faced with the prospect of whether or not he wanted to lose another one for the state GOP,” a Rudy confidante says. Thus, as talk has it, the RNC leaned on Pataki, who leaned on Lazio, who withdrew from the race.

Rudy’s celebrity obviously isn’t all he has to run on. He’ll make the case that voters should let him do for the state what he did for the city. And out will come his three major talking points: 1) New York was once considered the most dangerous large city in America, but FBI stats now show that it’s the safest. 2) New York once was known as the welfare capital of the country, but now it’s recognized for running the largest and most successful welfare-to-work initiative anywhere. And, 3) Rudy shook up the “heavy-taxing, anti-business philosophy” of the city that had resulted in the loss of over 300,000 private-sector jobs between ’90 and ’93.

“Rudy’s targeted tax cuts and pro-business philosophy have led to the highest five-year period of private-sector job growth in the city’s history,” his campaign crows. A $2 billion budget deficit transformed into a $2 billion surplus! And, of course, a stat soon to be as well known to New Yorkers as former Yankee Roger Maris’ 61 season homers: 330,000 new jobs.

When Hillary observes, as she recently did on a listening tour, that “if upstate New York were a separate state, it would rank 49th in job-creation and economic development,” she may be unwittingly leading the overture for Rudy’s aria: 330,000 new jobs; 330,000 new jobs; 330,000 new jobs.

But of course, Rudy doesn’t anticipate much help from Hillary. Rudy’s campaign expects that Hillary, or her surrogates, will attack the mayor’s temperament — and his administration’s disasters.

“The ‘Tough Rudy’ who everyone liked in his first term has been replaced with the ‘Bully Rudy,’” says the senior White House staffer. “Everything’s going to be viewed through the prism of “police brutality victim Abner Louima and police shooting victim Amadou Diallo.

That Rudy has revitalized New York only by sacrificing certain key threads of the Constitution is a criticism that no doubt will win over a lot of readers of the Village Voice. In his recent kung-fu fighting against the city’s cultural elite, he has been particularly — though characteristically — egregious and tyrannical, critics say. Rudy is threatening to withhold $7 million in city funds if the Brooklyn Museum of Art doesn’t cancel an exhibit that features a collage of the Virgin Mary fashioned out of polyester resin, oil paint, and elephant dung.

But, Rudy’s supporters say, how much will trifles like this sway the suburbanites? They seem more likely to be moved by Rudy’s ability to point to the 50-percent drop in overall crime than anything Norman Siegal of the New York Civil Liberties Union might have to say.

“The city’s homicide rate is at its lowest level since 1964,” Rudy’s campaign documents boast. “According to FBI statistics, between 1993 and 1997, New York crime reduction accounted for a full 25 percent of the nation’s drop in crime. The numbers of shootings have fallen by 61.4 percent between 1993 and 1997.” And, Rudy will counter on the stump, “shootings by police officers have declined 62 percent since 1993.”

Despite that stat, however, the Louima and Diallo cases cast long shadows. But if Rudy has written off the minority vote, and even the majority of his own city which overwhelmingly reelected him just two years ago, that’s going to require attracting a huge majority among those much-coveted suburbanites.

The Louima and Diallo outrages cost Rudy plenty of in-city support from his traditional voting blocks. “Fewer than a quarter of all New Yorkers believe that the police treat blacks and whites evenly, with blacks in particular viewing the police with fear and distrust,” a March New York Times poll revealed. More than two-thirds of the blacks polled believed that the policies of Rudy’s administration have directly spiked an increase in police brutality.

And a March Daily News poll taken in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting showed Giuliani’s approval rating at an all-time low — down to 40 percent after a peak of 65 percent around his reelection in November ’97. Support from Jewish voters was down from 81 percent in November ’97 to 59 percent in March; support from Latino voters plummeted from 64 percent to 24 percent. Two-thirds of all New York voters disapproved of Rudy’s criticism of those who protested the Diallo shooting at One Police Plaza. Fifty-seven percent of those polled said that the mayor’s tough, take-no-prisoners policing “interferes with the rights of innocent people.”

Since March, of course, Rudy’s support has bounced back. But New Yorkers have long memories. And Hillary will no doubt do everything she can to remind them — and their suburban friends — of Louima and Diallo. Rudy can rant and rave that police shootings are down, that the criticism is unfair, that he quickly condemned the Louima incident. But his relationship with those sympathetic to the plight of minorities is strained, and people remember things like plungers and 41 bullets.

And by the time Team Hillary gets done with him — if it does its job, which is by no means a sure thing — it will seem clear that Rudy’s bull-headed, sanctimonious pugilism served him far better when he was a U.S. attorney than it ever would in the U.S. Senate.

When he went after Anthony “Tony Ducks” Coralla, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, his anger and fire worked wonders. But outside the courtroom, where his energy is channeled to combat all sorts of others — former Police Commissioner William Bratton, strippers, vendors, cabbies, gardeners, Tina Brown, New York Magazine advertising executives, and jay-walkers — Hillary (or, more likely, Hillary’s allies) will argue, Rudy’s prosecutorial mien is more histrionics than heroics, and it’s ill-suited to Capitol Hill.

The waiting room of Rudy’s high-security campaign office contains wall blow-ups of the 1997 reelection endorsements of all four major New York daily newspapers — the Times, the Post, the Daily News and Newsday. But more than one of these endorsements also voiced concerns about Rudy’s personality — which makes the wall decorations rather odd and disjointed pages of campaign literature.

“Mr. Giuliani’s combative temperament is a bit like nuclear fission,” the Times reelection endorsement reads. “His pugnaciousness is less attractive when it is aimed at an individual whose only sin was to make a legitimate criticism of the administration.”

What’s unclear is whether Rudy’s prickly exterior will really matter that much in the Senate race.

Though the Marist poll indicates that Hillary is perceived as having a more likable personality than Rudy (69 percent find her likable, just 45 percent for the mayor) and would make a better neighbor (66 percent think she’d make a “good neighbor,” to Rudy’s 57 percent), few New Yorkers seem under the impression that they’re electing a best friend. Rudy’s pugnaciousness has its plusses: He is perceived as more “honest and trustworthy” than the first lady (the first lady!), 59 percent to her 48 percent. And, of course, Rudy wins the election match-up, which is really the only litmus test that counts.

“He can’t help himself,” Koch says. “His temperament is like that of a scorpion. If you ask a scorpion, ‘Why do you sting?’ he says, ‘Because it’s my nature.’ Rudy’s the same way. He can’t help himself when he demonizes people or tries to destroy his critics. He will try to smear her. He will take the low road. I told Hillary she should ignore his personal attacks and leave them to her surrogates to address.”

And she’ll certainly have no shortage of surrogates.

“It’s obvious that Giuliani is awkward dealing with blacks,” powerhouse Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel told reporters during the Diallo aftermath. “He would just rather not see blacks and Puerto Ricans anywhere. I don’t know where he was raised or what school he went to, but it’s abundantly clear that the mayor does not include among his friends any African-Americans. Because if he did, he would get better advice than he’s getting. Whether he likes it or not, we are his constituents, and it’s our community that is feeling the pain and the suffering of his indifference.”

“Ouch!” you might say.

But how much will Rangel’s rhetoric matter to an unemployed white guy in Rochester?

“This race, in many ways, will be about who makes the most mistakes,” says a professional New York Democrat.

Hillary’s up on that count so far, but it’s a few lifetimes until November 2000. Both Hillary and Rudy are following their business plans — Hillary’s listening, Rudy’s talking, and both are raising gobs of cash.

Not much has stood in the path of either candidate. But now Rudy has in front of him a woman just as presumptuous and pugnacious as he. “Fat Tony” is a lightweight compared to Rudy’s latest foe.

Two mighty, mightily flawed leaders, undeclared candidates facing off in the undeclared capital of the country: Millions will pour in to fund the shockingly bright reds and blues that paint Hillary and Rudy as heroic; millions more will be devoted to the uglier hues — the dingy grays and muddy reds.

Hillary as a vicious, carpetbagging Lady Macbeth, presiding over the most corrupt, tax-happy administration in history and suddenly presumptuously buying a Yankees cap.

Rudy as a bigoted totalitarian, taking all the credit and none of the responsibility, awkward and mean-spirited and all too willing to take a lesson from Faust.

Hideous egos seeking power and standing for nothing!

Maybe, by the time this ends, one of them won’t have a high school named after him or her, after all.

Leave for another day the debate over capital punishment itself, or whether Davis deserved mercy for the brutal murder of a pregnant Jacksonville woman and her two young daughters. What remains stunningly incomprehensible to me is why, on the eve of the new millennium, Florida would want to remain one of four states that still use the electric chair when lethal injection is available.

More than a century after the electric chair was invented, Florida leads the nation in electric-chair executions. The only other states that exclusively practice electrocution are Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska. Nearly all of the other 38 states with a death penalty give prisoners at least a choice of lethal injection, with rare alternatives including the gas chamber, hanging or firing squad. Texas, where George W. Bush is now governor, led the majority of states in switching to lethal injection in 1982.

Since 1976, Florida has executed more people than any state except Texas and Virginia. Twice in the last decade, in 1990 and 1997, flames have sprouted from the heads of executed men at Florida State Prison. There have been electrical burns to heads and legs. But Davis’ execution was the first that became a bloody spectacle.

I was there because my name had come up in the reporter pool. I debated whether to take the spot because I knew I would soon be taking another assignment with my newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, that had nothing to do with death penalty reporting. Besides, it wasn’t a local case. But in the end, I told myself that as a citizen, I ought to have the guts to witness the most important act the state commits in the public’s name.

I did not sleep the night before at the Day’s Inn in Starke, an aptly named rural town in north-central Florida where the prison is one of the area’s largest employers.

Davis, 54, was so massive that he had to be rolled to the chamber in a wheelchair. To accommodate his girth, the wooden frame of the electric chair had been specially rebuilt, for the first time since inmates constructed Florida’s original chair in the 1920s. The fear was that if the chair collapsed, guards and other attendants in the execution chamber might be electrocuted by the exposed wiring.

There was a microphone for his last words, but Davis shook his head and said nothing. With his head shaved, he looked like Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz in the movie “Apocalypse Now.” Until they put the mask over his face, Davis could see us. Among the witnesses were the victim’s husband and father, who did not speak or change expression.

To the end, he would not explain why he had beaten to death Nancy Weiler and shot and killed her two young daughters, Kristina and Katherine, in their home. Was he mentally retarded, as his lawyers had claimed? Or just plain evil, a man willing to commit a heinous triple murder in what may have been a botched robbery? His parents, quiet people, lived in the same neighborhood as the victims. They had no answers either.

After the microphone was turned off, the mask was placed over his head, and with a whirring buzz, the electricity came on. I thought I knew something about what to expect. I had written about the electric chair and covered reactions to previous executions on the prison grounds. I was prepared for the chest heaves that went on minutes after what state experts said was an instantaneous death, the so-called “agonal breaths.”

But I was not prepared for Davis’ two moaning, muffled screams shortly before 2,300 volts coursed through his body. Nor was I prepared for the blood that poured down his white shirt.

Outside the chamber, dazed reporters compared details. The blood had appeared first on his chest. Had it formed a jagged circle? A cross? Eight inches across? Ten? When doctors lifted the mask briefly, we could see blood on his face. Was it from the nose or the mouth? We flipped through our notes, written with state-issued pencils on notepads provided by the Department of Corrections.

Corrections spokesmen huddled for a brief conference about what to say. Pressed, one admitted the blood was “not normal.” But the execution had been carried out properly, he said.

Later in the day, Bush said state doctors found the blood came from a nosebleed. Davis, who suffered from high blood pressure among other ailments, had been taking blood thinners, including aspirin.

The execution was a fitting end for man who had committed a horrible crime, Bush concluded. “I remain convinced that the electric chair is an appropriate way to carry out death sentences in Florida,” Bush said.

His opinion is shared by Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth and a majority of legislators. They cite the prevailing medical opinion that the executed person dies the instant the electricity surges through, although that is the subject of periodic debate in court.

But there is a whiff of something else in their defense of the electric chair: If the person does suffer, so be it. If the body is mutilated in some way, let that send a message to other criminals. Their victims suffered terribly. So should they.

There is a chance the court may be on the verge of retiring the chair. The last vote, in 1997, upheld the chair 4-3. The dissenting justices called the chair “a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein than the death chamber at the Florida State Prison.”

Since then, three justices have retired, including two in the pro-chair majority. There are hints newer appointees may be leaning toward lethal injection.

Still, it’s a big step to overturn nearly 80 years of established Florida practice. It’s a bigger step given that Bush and the state’s Republican legislative majority remain firm advocates of the electric chair. On Aug. 30 leaders of that majority inspected the chair and concluded it is doing its job, blood or no blood.

Observed state Rep. Victor Crist, “No one has ever walked away from it.”

I did walk away, but I will never see the electric chair the same way again.

And second, for many Americans, the Kennedy presidency — the Kennedy brand name — still represents not just glamour, not just Camelot, but an aspiration to a politics of idealism and possibility. The fact that the Kennedy White House, and various Kennedys themselves, so often betrayed that aspiration is beside the point. Older Bostonians remember in their bones that Jack Kennedy’s election, overcoming naked hostility to the idea of a Roman Catholic president, seemed to blast open an order that had once declared, “No Irish Need Apply” and that in 1960 still preserved the upper reaches of power and finance as bastions of Brahmin privilege.

An airplane crash has no politics. But the political yearnings aroused by the Kennedy dynastic name emerge in a summer of unprecedented dynastic campaigning, into which JFK Jr’s death intrudes so violently. The United States has always had political families, from Sam, John and John Quincy Adams to the Roosevelts to Huey and Earl Long. Yet never have the heirs to political fortunes placed such a chokehold on the electoral process. This all may go back to the day Jack Kennedy signed up his brother Bobby as attorney general. But today’s dynastic regime is ubiquitous and relentlessly bipartisan.

Start the list, of course, with a dynasty in the making, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign. Her mad-dog strategist Harold Ickes is the son of a New Deal cabinet secretary and advisor to Eleanor Roosevelt, giving the Clinton-for-Senate campaign a sort of liberal dynastic blessing.

In the presidential race, George W. Bush Jr. and Al Gore each count as triple dynastics: Bush has his Florida-governor brother Jeb, his former-president father George and his grandfather, the late Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush; Gore is not only Clinton’s political heir, but also the son of a fabled Senate majority leader and scion of an old Southern political family. In the presidential race, Elizabeth Dole brings up the dynastic rear.

It is not only at the Olympian heights of the presidency that royal families rule. Mayor Richard M. Daley runs Chicago with support wider even than that enjoyed by his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, without whose clout there would have been no Kennedy White House in 1960, while brother William Daley perches in the Clinton White House as Secretary of Commerce. In California, former Gov. Jerry Brown is now mayor of Oakland; his sister, Kathleen Brown, ran for governor against Pete Wilson; both are idealistic and idiosyncratic actors; both are children of former California Gov. Pat Brown.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., constitute the recognized face of African-American politics (and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference just raised its profile with the installation of Martin Luther King III as director). Pat and Bay Buchanan (a one-generation sibling dynasty) rule the conservative airwaves and primary-ways. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the 1996 Democratic National Convention and a short-list 2000 vice-presidential prospect, is the son of fabled Cold Warrior Sen. Thomas Dodd, censured and evicted from office in 1970. Andrew Cuomo, son of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, is secretary of HUD with a long political career in the cards, and his wife is a Kennedy — Kerry Kennedy Cuomo.

And, then, naturally, there are the rest of the Kennedys: Sen. Edward Kennedy and former Rep. Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts; Lt. Gov. (and soon, perhaps, governor) Kathleen Kennedy Townsend of Maryland; and Rep. (and Democratic National Congressional Committee chairman) Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island.

Some of these dynasty members are liberal, some conservative; some are vigorous and principled public servants, some opportunistic louts who prefer to be known as brand names rather than for tough and clear political postures. But they are together the beneficiaries of a great, too-little-noted narrowing of American politics and power.

In part, this narrowing goes directly back to the Kennedy White House. Whoever occupied the presidency in 1961 would have had the same opportunity, but Jack Kennedy learned especially well the lessons of Hollywood, and understood in a profound way the radical new power that television would give incumbent office holders. He wrote the book by which media politics are still played. It was with the Kennedy White House — and later, with Robert Kennedy’s anti-war presidential primary — that the terrain of American politics began its seismic shift from the smoke-filled room to the television screen. Today’s dynasty members like Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are incumbents in the only office that really counts: the media spotlight.

It was the Kennedys, too, who created the office-holding family as glamorous celebrities and established the country’s long fascination with the Kennedy children, first seen playing under their father’s desk and then standing mute at his graveside. It was the drive of Robert and Edward Kennedy, and later some of their children, to follow Jack into the electoral arena, that made the whole idea of a political dynasty safe for public consumption. In that sense, Hillary, George, Al and Liddy are all Jack Kennedy’s children.

If there is one major generation gap between today’s political sons and daughters and their parents, it is the shift in power from those old smoke-filled room to the corporate conference room. In 1960, Mayor Daley, the father, could deliver to JFK, the father, the presidential nomination and the White House through the power of his Chicago patronage machine. Patronage still matters, but the patronage that matters today is the campaign contribution. Mayor Daley, the son, spends the kind of time hobnobbing with Chicago bankers that Mayor Daley, the father, spent with neighborhood precinct captains.

If the Kennedy-inspired media spectacle is the engine of dynastic elections, its fuel line is the campaign-finance system established in the 1970s that turned the democratic vehicle of politics into a money-guzzling limo for the wealthiest political donors and interests. Large-scale campaign contributors are investors, and, like Goldman-Sachs, they prefer to risk their money on blue-chip stocks.

The campaign-finance system, in turn, only reflects an even deeper and more ominous development: a great concentration in power and wealth upward. It is this concentration that makes possible the huge, steaming heaps of campaign cash accumulated by the Bush campaign — so much money that he is already rejecting federal campaign aid and the restrictions that come with it. JFK Jr’s grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was a bare-knuckle millionaire, but I doubt that in his wildest imaginings he could conceive of a country in which Bill Gates alone controls as much personal wealth as the bottom 40 percent of the population.

The great irony is that the dynastic politics of this summer turn upside-down what the Kennedy name once seemed to promise. The shift from candidates representing issues and constituencies to political brand names advertised like aspirin or automobiles narrows political engagement and puts power even more nakedly into the hands of wealthy donors and media brokers. Brand-name politics makes more distant the promise that many of those who mourn JFK Jr. this week once heard in his father’s oratory on civil rights and economic justice, and later in the passion of Robert Kennedy’s final crusades.

The debris washing up on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard is no metaphor, for politics or anything else. Three people are dead. But it would be a mistake to write off the public response to JFK Jr.’s death as just another ghoulish dance around celebrity catastrophe. In that response, instead, lies both solace and warning: solace that the embers of Kennedy-era idealism still stir some loyalty and emotion; warning that the politics of dynasties and dollars, rooted in the Kennedy years, now are closing off like steel barriers the very avenues whose broadening the name “Kennedy” once seemed to represent.

The 82-page report makes a simple enough argument: Many of the Republicans who preached morality during the impeachment trial are hypocrites in their personal lives, and the public deserves to know this. In the service of this argument, however, the editors have presented such a wild blend of rhetoric, reporting and rumor that readers will sometimes feel Hustled by a new species of pornography — political wanking at its lurid lowest. But they may nonetheless enjoy this new, candid and highly entertaining entry in the annals of American advocacy journalism, in which Rep. Henry Hyde is described as a “huge blood-swollen tick in a rumpled suit”; Rep. Bob Barr “could teach slippery behavior to a greased weasel,” and Hyde, Indiana Rep. Dan Burton and Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth — admitted adulterers all — are referred to as “snap[ping] and salivat[ing] like one huge three-headed beast.”

So what does the Flynt Report actually say that hasn’t been said (and printed and broadcast and posted) already? That depends on who you are and how closely you have been following the private lives of the GOP. Allan MacDonell, Hustler’s executive editor and the unnamed author of the majority of the report, says it’s aimed at a readership that doesn’t necessarily follow Washington politics. “We tried to write it in a very engaging, funny manner for the normal person to learn something about these politicians, and see conclusively that they were not motivated by moral values,” he explains. His mother-in-law read early drafts, he said, to make sure it was written for people like her. “But for any kind of Beltway insider, there is not a lot of new information.”

Although there are no bombshell revelations, the report does offer a cohesive collection of profiles, with many new and little-known details. Flynt’s writers and researchers have consolidated myriad facts not only from their own investigation but from scores of other journalistic outfits — Salon, Mother Jones, the Riverside [Calif.] Press-Enterprise and other local papers — and created easy-to-read, sordid fairy tales for the millennium. The result is an odd mix: Think of Grimm’s Tales populated by blandly suited elected officials and streetwalkers instead of handsome princes and glamorous orphan girls.

Former Speaker-designate Robert Livingston and Barr get the most thorough attention, and though their foibles have been widely exposed, these profiles offer details that may surprise many readers. Barr’s tale of adultery and abortion, for instance, gets a painstaking re-telling, and thoroughly illuminates the hypocrisy of the white-supremacist-loving Georgia congressman. For journalists who followed Flynt’s original release of the story, the damning details — Barr’s asking his wife, who worked as his secretary, to arrange his lunch dates with his mistress, Jeri Dobbins, who became his next wife; his driving his wife to an abortion clinic, and paying for her abortion, while being rabidly “pro-life” — are not news. But for the average reader, they will be. Flynt reproduces excerpts of the Barrs’ divorce transcripts, which show Barr and Dobbins responding to questions about their affair by repeating “I decline to answer” over and over like a pair of autistic parrots. Barr insisted that comparing his refusal to tell the truth about his affair under oath with Clinton’s legalistic acrobatics was like comparing apples to oranges, but the report quips: “The difference between Bill Clinton’s truth-fudging and Bob Barr’s refusal to answer honestly is the difference between a wormy Red Delicious and a rotten Granny Smith.”

A section of nine profiles called “The Hall of Infamy” contains what may be the most explosive information in the report. “Ken Calvert: Touched by a Hooker” recounts the poignant tale, first reported in the Riverside Press-Enterprise, of the Southern California Republican representative being caught with his pants down with a hooker in his car. Corona police reportedly found him with a prostitute’s face “laying [sic] in the driver’s lap” while the congressman “was placing his penis into his unzipped dress slacks and … trying to hide it with his untucked dress shirt.” When asked his reasons for his conduct, he allegedly answered: “I was feeling intensely lonely.” In a similar face-in-lap sighting, an aide to Newt Gingrich reportedly approached the former House speaker’s car to spot “a woman with her head buried in Newt’s lap.” Pennsylvania Rep. John E. Peterson, who has admitted to having been an “excessive hugger,” is accused of grabbing an 18-year-old’s breast in an elevator and greeting a woman lobbyist with a forced “deep throat kiss,” when she visited him to say that a mutual friend had died.

The report also delivers a hailstorm of lesser-known scandals — many of which are sourced merely as hearsay. One article focuses on the Republican sex rumors that have circulated among mainstream reporters but have not been reported — and reports them. Rep. Mary Bono, House Whip Tom DeLay and Sen. Tim Hutchinson are among those named with no sources or evidence given. And in chronicling Speaker-designate Livingston’s dramatic fall from power — as a result of reports that Flynt had information about his extramarital affairs — the report suggests that those affairs involved lobbyists for whom he favorably influenced legislature, but again, does not name names or elaborate on sources.

Between these well-worn and barely told tales, the report also offers a banquet of scandalous morsels. There’s a historical account of presidential indiscretions headlined “Our Philandering Fathers,” a cross-cultural comparison of “Mistresses Worldwide” and a collection of comic strips from Hustler about the scandal. An ad calls for more informants to step up to the phone and dish dirt; a cost analysis compares Flynt’s and Starr’s investigations and their efficacy; and a photo of a naked woman accompanies a piece profiling the kinds of informants who responded to the original ad.

Whether the reader is relishing or retching over this crazed souvenir from the weirdest year in American politics, the mix of unsubstantiated rumors alongside fact-checked stories raises a credibility problem for the Flynt Report: What should the reader believe? Likewise, just what is news in the report is not immediately transparent. The cover features a trio of mug shots — Livingston, Hyde and Barr, whose sins have already been exposed. Below that there’s a tease, with smaller headshots: “Fresh Dirt on: Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Mary Bono, Governor Jeb Bush, Charles Canady and Tim Hutchinson.” But a few pages into the magazine, in the “Statement of Intent,” the report confesses: “We will prove our case with information that is already part of the public record, at the risk of disappointing those who are reading this report in the hope of finding new disclosures.”

So what’s the truth — is this information fresh or stale, old or new?

“There’s dynamite there, and I was a little surprised to hear about it,” says Dan Moldea, the Washington reporter who oversaw the Flynt investigation from Nov. 23, 1998, to Jan. 22, 1999. “I’ll be curious to see how it plays out in the report, and the firestorm that could result from it.” Moldea refused to disclose which items were brand new, explaining that confidentiality agreements with informants might put him in an awkward legal and ethical position if he disclosed their information.

Moldea left Flynt’s investigation after “a friendly disagreement” about whether Flynt should continue to name new names. The day that he heard that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., — one of Clinton’s sternest critics — had announced that he was going to propose a resolution to dismiss the charges against the president, he quit. “At that moment I felt that we had won,” he explained. But even before Byrd’s announcement, Moldea had begun to question how far the investigation should go. In his account, three events shook his resolve.
The first was Bonnie Livingston’s call to Flynt, begging him not to publish details of her husband’s adultery. When Flynt told Moldea to hold off investigating Livingston, Moldea protested, but he was moved by Flynt’s change of heart. Later, on Jan. 11, Moldea received a call from a friend high up in the GOP who had a friend who believed he was the next to be outed. “She told me sobbing that he was going to commit suicide as soon as his name became public,” he explained. “That was the moment that I was chilled.” Finally, he lost all desire to expose more scandalous stories when, a few days later, one of the targeted politicians discovered the identity of an informant, and they began to worry about her safety.

“I’m not interested in the sex lives of public figures,” Moldea says. “If I had my way I would take all this material and throw it in the Potomac, but I have come to trust Larry’s judgment.”

Larry Flynt himself contradicts his former investigator’s claim that the report contains some bombshells. “There’s nothing earth-shattering,” he says. “It’s just more comprehensive. If we had anything really big, we would have a press conference.”

When pressed to say whether all the report’s information — so much of it unsourced or attributed to hearsay — is credible, Flynt insists he has multiple sources for everything published. Sometimes the investigation wasn’t quite complete, he says, and sometimes the informants ended up wanting too much money. In the end, Flynt may have gotten to have his cake and eat it too, publishing as rumor things he knows to be true, without actually paying informants for their complete, published accounts. He can breezily attribute the stories to rumors, continue to keep his investigations open and hold onto his cash. And what if some of the rumors are not true? Flynt has given credence to them, and politicians wishing to counter his stories are faced with an uphill battle: to prove these scandals never happened.

But if the rumor-mongering isn’t bad enough — and for many a skeptical reader, it will be — there are sections in which Flynt’s purely partisan motives undermine his own stated moral ground. In a gratuitous, vaguely racist anecdote contained in the profile of Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts, the great black hope of the Republican Party, the report recounts the misfortunes of his sister, known in Oklahoma City as “Chocolate,” who was arrested on lewdness charges when entertainers in a strip club were allegedly caught trading dances for food stamps. What did she do to deserve this publicity? Likewise, when Newt Gingrich’s unsavory moral character is in part pinned on his mother’s mental illness and his half-sister’s lesbianism, Flynt and family succumb to the same leering tone of intolerance that they criticize in the Republicans. Despite their protestations that this is all about “hypocrisy,” their recourse to such personal detail is cruel and only seems relevant if you are a right-wing, homophobic family values crusader.

But Dan Moldea defends Flynt, even though Flynt ignored his advice not to publish the report. “Since the beginning of his project Larry has demonstrated restraint and compassion. He demanded the highest standards of documentation and responsibility. I believe that he was effective. History will cite the resignation of Bob Livingston as well as Larry’s role in that decision as the critical moment that diffused the entire impeachment process, and I’m proud to have been associated with him.”

Flynt himself is riding high on his contribution to history. “It’s a historical document. No one else has published anything like it.” In the end, he hopes the report’s lesson is not that politicians are
loathsome, but that we shouldn’t expect them to be perfect in the first
place. “We shouldn’t put legislators on a pedestal,” he says. “They suffer from the same frailties and foibles as the rest of us. They’re all human beings.”