New York, New York : Whites Screaming at Blacks. Chasids Suing the Mayor. Latinos Grumbling They’ve Been Ignored. And Two Flawed Candidates Navigating the Edges of the Maelstrom. It’s a Helluva Mayor’s Race.

Like a carnival barker, the old man leads the procession, past the Odessa Restaurant, past the stalls of food and clothes and dime store toys, down into the milling crowd gathered beneath the old El on Brighton Beach Avenue at the tip of Brooklyn. A cane in one hand, a microphone in the other, he cries out above the buzz of the street in a voice thin with years and thick with a distant accent. “Meet the next mayor of New York,” he says. “Meet Rudy Giuliani!”

In his steps follows an ungainly parade: security guards who look like tree stumps in suits, men and women waving signs, photographers, reporters, television cameramen, and in their midst, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a stone-faced, middle-aged man with close-cropped black hair and a stiff handshake. Four years ago, Giuliani, a Republican and former U.S. prosecutor, narrowly lost the mayoral election to Democrat David N. Dinkins, who became the first black mayor in New York’s history. Now, after a full term of economic turmoil and persistent racial tension that has narrowed his support among liberal whites, Jews and Latinos, Dinkins looks like a marathoner with a stitch in his side. In the polls, Giuliani, the nominee of both the Republican and the Liberal parties, is generally running strongly in the polls, and as he marches through crowds like this, he has the manner of a man who believes himself the master of his fate.

This is the kind of neighborhood where Giuliani is welcomed most warmly, white enclaves that feel profoundly disaffected from Dinkins. From both sides of the street, the families of Italians and Russian Jews who have gathered here for a street fair in the slanting late summer sunshine call out to the candidate, as though welcoming the leader of a liberating army. Men and women knife through the cordon of security to grab his arm or thrust in his hand papers to autograph. A chant ignites behind him: “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.”

“Looking good, Rudy,” one man yells.

“We can’t wait,” another calls.

Giuliani smiles, waves, signs whatever is handed him. As he passes down the long row of vendors, the crowd around him grows. Several yards behind, a thin, agitated, bearded man with a yarmulke tries to start a chant.

“Dinkins out!” the man cries exuberantly. “Stinkin’ Dinkins.”

Across the narrow street, Doug Walker of St. Albans, Queens, watches the procession approach as he loads equipment from his band into a van. “Dinkins, Dinkins, Dinkins,” he calls out in response as the man in the yarmulke passes by.

The man pivots on Walker, who is black. “Sharpton sucks,” he says, savoring like a choice obscenity the name of Al Sharpton, the black activist who has been central to some of the city’s most polarizing racial conflicts during the past decade. “Sharpton and Dinkins suck.”

Before Walker can say anything, a white woman stops in her tracks. “What’s Dinkins done for you?” she demands.

“He’s mayor of my city,” Walker says loudly.

“It’s just because you’re black,” she fires back.

For a moment, Walker’s friends, gathered around the van, tense as though expecting a fight. But when Walker shouts back something about Giuliani wanting to privatize the sanitation department, both the woman and the man in the yarmulke are speechless--as though uncertain how such a potential practical implication of the election fits into the emotional calculus they have built to interpret it. They glare dumbfounded at Walker and then turn to catch Giuliani, the moment of anger passing like a sudden summer storm.

Politics in New York is ordinarily more in your face than in most places. But even by New York standards, the campaign that culminates Nov. 2 is cutting uncomfortably close to the bone. Neither Giuliani nor Dinkins is a particularly warm or charismatic figure, but both are generating strong and belligerent feelings of ownership--like those that flashed between Walker and his antagonists.

From a distance, this election stands as another milestone in the reconsideration of urban liberalism under way in cities across the country. Like Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Giuliani seems on the brink of assembling a new urban coalition composed of whites unhappy over crime and taxes, and Latinos, Asians and other recent immigrants uncertain that their interests are served by the historic civil-rights model of minority politics. Even more than Riordan’s election, a victory for Giuliani in New York--a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1--would signal a dramatic opening of the cities to new directions on issues such as crime, welfare and the reform of the great gray municipal bureaucracies.

But those are currents more likely to flow from the election than to shape it. Up close, the contest between Dinkins and Giuliani--the African-American mayor who talks about a “gorgeous mosaic” and the Italian-American prosecutor who promises to lock up more drug dealers--is less about changing directions on policy than about power and trust, about standards and double-standards, who owns the streets and who controls the cops, and who can keep the peace between blacks and whites and Latinos and Asians in a city where grievances line up and jostle like straphangers in a rush-hour subway.

THE FIRST QUESTION A VOTER MIGHT LEGITIMATELY ASK DINKINS OR GIULIANI is why anyone would want to be mayor of New York. It is true that in the national psyche, Los Angeles has pretty much elbowed aside New York as the paragon of urban dysfunction. But that is, after all, only a relative measure. In Los Angeles, when people talk about the city’s sudden reversal of fortune in the 1990s, they often seem shellshocked, as if trying to describe a natural disaster that struck without warning and might someday blow back to sea. To New Yorkers, decline seems a more incremental, inexorable process, as though the entire city were stuck on an escalator descending slowly from the penthouse to the basement.

It must, at least, appear that way to David Dinkins. In 1989, he swept to victory in the Democratic primary over Mayor Edward Koch, who had outstayed his welcome after 12 tumultuous years. Then Dinkins slipped past Giuliani by 47,080 votes of 1.9 million cast and settled in office in time for an economic downturn to blanket the city. For four years he has been waiting for a gust of good tidings to lift his sails. He’s still waiting.

How bad has it been? Since 1989, the number of AIDS cases in the city has more than doubled. Tuberculosis is up. In the past three years, the recession has cost the city more than 320,000 private-sector jobs. The city’s welfare population has rocketed past 1 million--a number that would make the New Yorkers on public relief the seventh-largest city in America. The economic strains, inevitably, widened social divisions. In Queens and Staten Island, two of the city’s five boroughs, serious movements to secede are under way. In Manhattan, teen-agers march down Madison Avenue with T-shirts that command “Back the F--- Up.” A black-led boycott of two Korean groceries in Brooklyn, launched just as Dinkins took office, sent race relations into a downward spiral that reached a nadir in 1991 with three nights of bloody rioting by blacks against Hasidic Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

It did not appear possible that things could worsen for Dinkins, but during the summer, it has seemed as if the earth was opening beneath him. Two prominent Democrats--former U.S. Rep. Herman Badillo, a leading Puerto Rican, and Jewish City Council member Susan Alter--agreed to run with Giuliani on a “fusion ticket” for the second- and third-ranking jobs in city government. A city investigation lashed top Administration officials for displaying favoritism in the granting of a huge contract to collect parking fines, causing Dinkins to dismiss his budget director. A state investigation of the Crown Heights violence concluded that Dinkins had failed to “act in a timely and decisive manner” to put down the riot, and though the language of the report was bureaucratic and dispassionate, it painted what many people considered a devastating portrait of disorder and inattention at the top.

Then the opening of school this fall was delayed after city investigators determined that the school board had failed to adequately assess classrooms for asbestos contamination--contributing to the general atmosphere of a government in chaos. In a final insult, Dinkins’ fire commissioner, the city’s top Latino official, resigned, endorsed Giuliani and accused unnamed city officials of bias against Latinos.

“There were 10 plagues, right?” says Norman Steisel, the combative first deputy mayor. “So how many more do we have to go?”

All of this has been inflamed by New York’s feral mass media. Public discourse in New York City is conducted at a pitch suitable for shouting out of a taxi window. Talk radio, the tabloids, the newspaper columnists who choose their words as though disappointed they can’t just batter their subjects with their computer terminals, and the forest of television cameras that elbow into line each time the mayor steps behind a podium, raise every misstep to the level of urban crisis. After just two weeks of this treatment last spring, Bill Clinton was ready to kiss the ground at Kennedy airport on his way out of the New York presidential primary. Dinkins has been dealing for four years with headlines like “The Incredible Shrinking Mayor” (in the Village Voice after the city report on the parking fines contract) and “Out to Lunch!” (in the New York Post after the Crown Heights report). “The toughest race is the race for President,” says David Garth, the venerable New York political consultant steering Giuliani’s campaign. “The second-toughest race is for mayor of New York because you have all the media you have in Washington, plus the New York attitude of ‘We’ll get him.’

After all this cross-fire, Dinkins supporters consider it an achievement that he is standing at all, albeit a bit unsteadily. The city hasn’t burned down, he has balanced his budgets every year and, contrary to popular perception, crime has actually dropped in most major categories during the past two years. Says Norman Adler, a political consultant, “David Dinkins’ legitimate slogan should be: He wasn’t crushed to a pulp.”

ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT SUCH AN APPEAL MIGHT NOT BE SUFFICIENTLY inspiring to earn him another term, the mayor turns up at a mid-town Manhattan hotel the day before the Democratic primary in September to see if he can’t fashion a more invigorating basis for his candidacy. His opposition in the primary is only token; his real target as he marches through the crowd of cheering supporters to a stage brightened with flags and balloons is Giuliani, and even more precisely, the doubts about his own leadership. He is there to address the vision thing.

Whatever else Dinkins has been called throughout his career, visionary isn’t high on the list. Not unlike George Bush, Dinkins has always betrayed the sense that he coveted his current job more to cap his resume than to fulfill any burning policy agenda. In his patient rise through New York politics--as a lieutenant in the legendary Harlem political machine of local Democratic leader J. Raymond Jones, then as a state assemblyman, president of the city board of elections, city clerk and Manhattan borough president--Dinkins acquired a conventional set of liberal priorities but never the reputation as a crusader. If anything, he seemed to be more a conscript than a volunteer in 1989 when blacks, liberal whites and the public employee unions looked to channel the energy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign into a challenge to Koch.

Now, as he stands behind the TelePrompTer on this afternoon, Dinkins is doing his best to convince New Yorkers that he burns with unfinished ambitions for remaking the city. He announces that he will release a series of “future-prints” detailing his plans for reform; he says he will demand “intense and radical change.” And he declares: “It’s time to let New York know that not only do we have the vision, we have the plan to keep New York great.”

It may be an axiom of politics--call it the Bush Theorem--that any politician who feels compelled to tell voters that he has a vision has already convinced them that he doesn’t. For many Democratic activists here, the disappointment with Dinkins has been precisely the sense that he has failed to provide direction for the city’s future. “He is more fireman than road builder,” admits a close political ally. “He responds more to blazes than designs where the city should be going.”

Dealt the bad hand of a poor economy, Dinkins nevertheless has diligently squeezed out some promising social programs--a network of community health clinics for the poor, 20 “beacon schools” that remain open into the evening to provide social services for families--and restored six-day-a-week service in the public libraries, an oasis in some of the city’s roughest areas. Also, he has managed one large investment: a real estate tax increase that will fund an addition of more than 4,600 uniformed police officers through next year. That is a real achievement--if he could match it, L.A.’s Riordan would probably consider it his greatest accomplishment--and Dinkins points proudly to such figures as a 13% reduction in rapes and a 10% drop in assaults during the past two years.

But spending more is what mayors traditionally do best, and the real challenge to New York’s is to find ways to do more with less money. To fund his social priorities like the beacon schools, Dinkins must cut spending elsewhere. And yet, he has not aggressively pushed to reform the city bureaucracy, either to save money, or improve services, or both.

In cities across the country, mayors are forcing city agencies to compete with private contractors to collect trash or provide services, renegotiating restrictive union work rules, decentralizing authority and paring the bureaucracy. There’s no guarantee that approaches successful in other cities would work in New York, but Dinkins hasn’t made much effort to find out.

He’s only modestly trimmed the city payroll (though New York employs more than four times as many public employees as Los Angeles in a city more than twice as big). In negotiations with public employee unions, among his most important political supporters, Dinkins originally demanded that any pay raises be funded with productivity gains, but he dropped the idea when the unions balked. Dinkins actually granted the unions a modest pay increase. But such is the heft of the city bureaucracy that even a modest raise unattached to savings through productivity yields enormous costs. Increases in pay and benefits for public employees during the next three years are expected to exceed the city’s total revenue growth. Partly as a result, the city, whose $31.4-billion budget is greater than in every state except California, New York and Texas, faces massive projected deficits widening toward the horizon.

In a second term, supporters insist, Dinkins would confront these problems with new vigor. He’s appointed a well-respected commission to recommend sweeping reforms in the city’s operation, though the recommendations won’t come out until after the election. That’s a telltale sign for those skeptical that a 66-year-old politician who has never evidenced a hunger for promoting “intense, radical change” in government will discover the passion in his career’s last years. One longtime liberal activist who has worked closely with Dinkins since 1977 minces no words: “There are very few New Yorkers who are enthusiastic for Dinkins. Frankly, the real issue for most New Yorkers is Giuliani or not Giuliani.”

IN THE GIULIANI CAMPAIGN, THE PAST IS ALWAYS PRESENT. HIS CAMPAIGN events feel as if they should be scored to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. His television commercials evoke a city where teen-agers fought turf battles not over crack but Mickey, Willie and the Duke.

One sticky late August afternoon Guiliani takes a sentimental journey to the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx. He has come to Haight Avenue for a game of stickball against the Guardian Angels.

Haight Avenue seems to belong to a bygone New York: It is a street of neat, duplex homes with flowers hanging off the porch; beefy middle-aged Italian men in tight polo shirts that stretch across their gut like Saran Wrap on a roast; teen-aged boys leaning against the schoolyard fence in muscle Ts sipping sodas. “Hey, Pasqual,” someone yells out from a stoop, “you seen Piggie?”

Giuliani mingles amiably in a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt and New York Yankees cap. (His campaign, hoping to inject in the straight-laced Giuliani some of the character that New Yorkers like in their politicians, has made much of the fact that as a youngster growing up in Brooklyn, he was a fan of the Dodgers’ archrivals, the hated Bronx-based New York Yankees.) Introducing Giuliani and Badillo, the Republican Liberal candidate for controller, state Sen. Guy Velella makes plain the point of the afternoon: “We’re going to have a good, old-fashioned New York stickball game. If we elect these two guys, that’s the kind of city we’re going to get--a good, old-fashioned New York City.”

This is a powerful appeal for many New Yorkers. But it leads Giuliani’s critics to say he is running for mayor of the New York of 1960, when whites constituted 85% of the city’s population, not the 53% of today. Even some disappointed with Dinkins question whether Giuliani has the breadth of experience and the depth of empathy to run a city as complex and capricious as this. At 49, Giuliani has no background in municipal administration, urban policy, poverty, health care, working with a city council or defusing tensions on the streets. The product of parochial schools, Giuliani has always been a straight arrow: even in high school, he loved opera. His life, after a youthful consideration of the priesthood, has been the law.

His career has been a steady climb: assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, assistant to the deputy attorney general in Washington, partner in a prominent New York City law firm, No. 3 man in the Reagan Administration Justice Department, and then a triumphant return to New York as U.S. attorney in 1983. It was a perfect match of man and moment and Giuliani maximized the opportunity, collaring corrupt politicians and Mafia bosses and Wall Street inside traders. Toward the end of his tenure, he stumbled a few times. He lost a case accusing former Miss America Bess Myerson of trying to influence a judge, saw one of his principal bribery convictions overturned on appeal, and most embarrassingly, was forced to drop the indictment of three Wall Street traders who had been arrested with great fanfare, one led from his office in handcuffs. By the end of Giuliani’s term, critics in the New York legal world grumbled that his ambition and hunger for publicity were clouding his judgment. But he stepped down in 1989 as the most celebrated and influential local prosecutor since Thomas E. Dewey.

It seemed inevitable that he would run for office. But after he launched his 1989 campaign, many Republicans were hard-pressed to remember why the idea appeared so irresistible. As a politician, Giuliani seemed to confuse voters with witnesses under cross-examination. He was stiff, combative, argumentative, hot-tempered. Yet he came close to occupying the mayor’s seat in his first try for public office.

After this loss, Giuliani did what he probably should have done in the first place. He took more time to learn about the city by holding quiet meetings with interest groups and community organizations. He lost weight and shed some of his tough-guy attitude. His smile still seems cast in plaster, but, with coaching from adviser Garth, he is more natural and relaxed. On weekends, he campaigns in shirt sleeves with his 7-year-old son, Andrew, and even pokes fun at himself--a skill for which he had never been known. When his son interrupts him about two minutes into a speech one Sunday to ask if he could go outside and play, Giuliani smiles and says, “That’s about the attention span for one of my speeches.”

What’s still missing from Giuliani’s speeches is much sense of how he would govern New York. After four years of learning about the city, he hasn’t produced anything intellectually arresting. His stump speech is heavier on attitudes than programs. Giuliani says he will be tougher on crime and arrest more street-level drug dealers than Dinkins; he’ll worry less about social engineering and point the schools back to basics; he’ll listen less to the elites in Manhattan and more to the ordinary folks in the boroughs; he’ll cut taxes and reduce city spending. He’s taken a moderate stance on most polarizing social issues: he’s pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-rent control, and not willing to endorse school vouchers. (It’s those positions that have inspired a challenge on the right from George Marlin, the Conservative Party candidate, a municipal finance specialist from Queens.)

Recently, Giuliani has spoken about examining ways to privatize more city services, particularly components of the city’s vast public hospital system. But he hasn’t put much flesh on his initiatives, and there’s some remedial math that would be necessary. “His program doesn’t add up,” says Mark Levinson, chief economist for New York’s principal public employees union. “He is going to cut revenue and create a huge hole in this already difficult budget and not cut services. It is simply not serious.”

Giuliani’s real message is the classic challenger’s taunt. “If you are happy with the condition of things in the city of New York right now, my challenge to the electorate is to reelect David Dinkins,” he says. It’s a compelling argument in a city at the low end of one of its mood swings.

And then there is the other issue in New York this fall: Race.

SHOCK SEEMS THE FIRST REACTION for most people strolling on Malcolm X Boulevard when they see Rudolph Giuliani shaking hands in the heart of Harlem on a recent crystalline Sunday afternoon. But when Giuliani passes Perry McLord’s small jewelry stand just below 126th Street, McLord doesn’t hesitate. “If you do right, beautiful,” he calls out, as Giuliani bustles by with the president of a Harlem block association who has surprisingly endorsed him. “If you mess up, we will tear this city apart.”

Giuliani doesn’t hear McLord. But as the candidate’s entourage pushes toward 125th Street, past the stalls piled high with basketball caps and T-shirts, jewelry and brightly colored African shawls, McLord, a thin, wiry black man with a goatee, tries to explain what he meant. “I wish him well, if he means what he’s saying about governing this city with a fusion party,” he says. “But if he thinks he can just get in there and play a game, forget it.” He pauses, then adds: “Maybe the city with him as mayor would be better. A lot of people wouldn’t be so sedated.”

Asked about Dinkins, McLord says, “Dinkins tried his best to bridge and do good things for everybody, but the mayor only has so much power. Plus Dinkins messed up because he wasn’t really grass-roots. He’s too bourgeois.”

“He came up through the system,” says another man who has stopped by the stall.

Other voices join in and suddenly McLord finds himself hosting a black street-corner McLaughlin Group. Will Jarrett, a tall man in a natty, lime-colored, double-breasted suit, gets in the next word. Jarrett is in New York from Detroit for the National Baptists Convention, and he suggests to McLord that Dinkins is too worried about maintaining enough white support to win reelection. Dinkins, Jarrett says, should have approached the job like Coleman Young, the black mayor of Detroit since 1974, and focused on helping his own community, even if it meant losing after one term.

Austin Hughes, a lifetime New Yorker who recently retired to North Carolina, can’t swallow that. “New York politics is different than Detroit,” he tells Jarrett. “Dinkins didn’t get elected only by black votes. He had to be for everybody.”

“New York City is crazy,” offers McLord.

“It’s an international place,” says a woman who squeezes into the group.

“You have to mediate,” says Hughes, a compact man with a shock of white hair who wears on the lapel of his suit a pin in the shape of Africa.

Half a dozen voices collide in the crisp fall air. The loudest comes from a tall woman in a flowing blue gown, who complains in a lilting Caribbean accent that while whites were blaming Dinkins for the violence in Crown Heights, the real problem was that the Jews who lived there received special treatment. “Why must the Jewish people always be satisfied?” she asks insistently.

Hughes can’t swallow that either. Jews, like blacks, only constitute a minority of New York’s population, he reminds the woman. She looks at him defiantly. “They can only be 1%,” she says. “They still want to be above everybody.”

So it goes on corners around New York as the city approaches an election that illuminates in the harshest light its enduring fault lines. In many neighborhoods, after everything is stripped away, the equation in this election is as simple as it appears for the Caribbean woman in Harlem or many of the whites who flock to Giuliani: a stark choice between us and them.

This has been, in fact, an election in which each side regularly accuses the other of seeking to exploit racial division. Even President Clinton, speaking recently in support of Dinkins, worried aloud that “too many of us are still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are.” But the gradations of opinion around McLord’s stand suggest that it’s a mistake to see the choice solely in racial terms. However much these powerful currents of ethnic identification shape this election, and life in this city, they do not alone define it. As political consultant Adler suggests, most New Yorkers want as a mayor not a racial champion, but a racial conciliator.

Dinkins won election four years ago largely because he appeared to be that man. His victory in the Democratic primary came just weeks after Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black, was murdered by young whites in Bensonhurst. Framed against that bloody moment, Koch’s sharp tongue seemed no longer amusing but reckless; Dinkins, with his quiet dignity and his evocation of New York as a gorgeous mosaic, appeared a better bet to keep the peace than Koch or Giuliani.

“The notion that a black mayor uniquely could increase the stability of race relations in this town was the argument in 1989,” says Richard C. Wade, an urban historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “I don’t think many people now believe that.”

That was asking much of any mayor. Conflict between the races may not be more endemic here than anywhere else, but the opportunity for insult is. (“In the subways, the streets, the office buildings we are probably the most integrated city in the U.S.,” says Leland Jones, Dinkins’ press secretary. “We are in each others’ faces all the time.”) Add to these frictions of daily life a political culture in which community leaders--arguably to a greater degree than the people they represent--rigidly define their political identities and cast their grievances in ethnic terms, and the possibility of satisfying all sides becomes almost nil. In the city that has raised to its fullest expression the rainbow coalition vision of politics centered on group rights, almost all leaders seem to view government as a zero-sum game where any advantage for one group instantly becomes a slight to another.

“When he tries to work with the Jewish community, the African-American community says he wears too many yarmulkes,” says state Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., a black Democrat who represents Crown Heights. “When he tries to work with the black community, people say he’s showing favoritism. It’s just a very difficult time to be an African-American mayor in New York.”

In these turbulent waters, Dinkins has steered with characteristic caution. He has relied on quiet negotiation with community leaders during times of conflict and on an extensive street-level outreach program to defuse conflicts before they erupt. He can point to successes: As the mayor reminds audiences at every opportunity, New York did not follow Los Angeles into flames after the acquittal in the first Rodney King trial.

And yet at key moments, this reliance on quiet mediation has failed Dinkins, particularly in two critical cases involving blacks. In the 1989 black boycott of two Korean groceries in Flatbush, his Administration spent months in futile negotiations with the protesters. As the protest became increasingly vituperative, calls mounted for the mayor to move more forcefully. But Dinkins didn’t speak out against the boycott until four months later and he did not move to symbolically break it by shopping at the stores himself for eight months. During that long siege, the city did not aggressively enforce a court order requiring demonstrators to remain at least 50 feet from the store until a state appellate court firmly ordered compliance, just days before Dinkins visited the store.

With all the attention now devoted in politics to message and spin and spin-doctors, it’s easy to forget that office-holders are often defined for their constituents by a handful of moments--usually moments different from those they would choose. At the time, Dinkins aides recall, the boycott of the two merchants appeared far less pressing than the fiscal crisis that greeted them upon inauguration. But in retrospect, the boycott appears to have been a defining moment for Dinkins. “The Korean boycott--that was the beginning of the chain reaction,” said Elie Weitzman of the Bronx as he watched Giuliani play stickball in August.

Thus Dinkins’ handling of the Crown Heights riot was seen largely through the prism of his hesitation in Flatbush. The state investigation found no evidence to support the charge that Dinkins deliberately held back the police to allow black demonstrators to vent their anger, and that conspiratorial view now seems confined almost entirely to the Hasidim still suing the city on that theory. But the state report also carefully documented management breakdown at the highest levels of Dinkins’ Administration during the violence and deepened the impression that the mayor couldn’t act decisively in a crisis that placed him in conflict with the black community.

Failures of management to Dinkins’ supporters, these two painful incidents rise to the level of moral failure for his critics. No one who knows Dinkins describes him as anything but even-handed in his personal dealings with people of all races. But a number of critics say that in his public life Dinkins has been unable or unwilling at these critical points to articulate a common standard of behavior for all New Yorkers--especially when doing so would jeopardize his political base in the black community.

“Dinkins, because he is a black man, could speak out against the abdication of standards,” says Badillo, putting a polish on sentiments frequently expressed in more caustic terms in white and Latino neighborhoods. “But he has failed in the most important thing: to point out that in this city, there has to be one standard for blacks, whites and Latinos.”

As much as anything else, the steady hardening of that perception about Dinkins has brought Giuliani within sight of victory. But there remains for him the hurdle of convincing New Yorkers that he would be better at keeping the city together. In that cause, Giuliani has been preaching a vision of inclusiveness that inverts the traditional liberal formulation of elevating and celebrating difference.

Riding through Brooklyn late in the summer, Giuliani tells me that Dinkins’ vision of race relations--the “gorgeous mosaic” that assumes people relate to government primarily through groups that encompass their ethnic or sexual identity--is based on a “false notion.” The next mayor, he says, will have “to show people that we have a common stake as New Yorkers.”

“All of those groups are very valuable for personal reasons,” he goes on, “and they are very valuable for self-worth, but our governmental relationships don’t happen because of those groups. Our governmental relationships happen because we belong to these larger groups: being a human being, being an American, being a New Yorker.”

The car stops outside the original Nathan’s in Coney Island, and aides gesture for Giuliani to get out and greet the crowd. But he continues: “We’ve created the impression that you have to retreat into your group to protect your rights. And what we should be doing is creating a society in which we can reach out to the largest groups we belong to to find our rights.”

To some weary of New York’s obsessive racial politics, this is an attractive notion. Despite the charges that he’s calling for racial division, I heard nothing in several days of following Giuliani that could be considered even a coded appeal to such a rift. But throughout his career, Giuliani has been known for a sharp temper, for relying on a narrow, like-minded circle of advisers and for a tendency to remember grudges. Some wonder if he will be able to reach out beyond his base, particularly to black leaders who have universally opposed his candidacy. For his part, Dinkins maintains that Giuliani is too volatile to mediate such a tense city. “New Yorkers know that Jefferson’s words ring true: If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, can he then be trusted with the government of others?” he asked the day before the Democratic primary. Dinkins has one piece of compelling evidence: an expletive-laden attack on the mayor that Giuliani delivered last year at a beery police union rally that had already escalated into a virtual riot outside City Hall.

The angry, intemperate image from that day still shadows Giuliani--like a glimpse of a truncheon tucked beneath pin stripes. It has raised the bar he will have to cross to convince New Yorkers that he intends to play fair if he wins. “He’s going to go in there and try to be J. Edgar Hoover and he’s going to get a lot of resistance from the black community,” said Austin Hughes, the former New Yorker who watched Giuliani sweep through Harlem in September. Even among Latinos, who are far more open toward Giuliani, he still has something to prove, says Ninfa Segarra, a Giuliani supporter who represents the Bronx on the board of education. “There are two hurdles he has to overcome,” she says. “One is obvious. The issue of race--do people feel comfortable voting against a black mayor? The other question is minorities feeling comfortable with this prosecutor. Are they going to be safe with him? The question is: Is he just another cop?”

IT WASN’T EASY TO AVOID Ed Koch when he was New York’s mayor. It’s more difficult now. With a newspaper column, a radio show and a slot on a local television show, he’s like Woody Allen’s overbearing mother in the movie “New York Stories”--just when you thought he’d disappeared, he turns up in the ether over Manhattan, full of opinions.

He now works from a small corner office in a law firm on Sixth Avenue, where his partners call him the oracle. On the afternoon of the Democratic primary, he settles into a couch underneath a frame where he has juxtaposed a photo of a Jewish boy leaning over his injured father during the Crown Heights riot with a famous picture of a child being led away by Nazis during the Holocaust.

It isn’t surprising then to hear that he has soured on Dinkins, whom he had endorsed against Giuliani four years ago after losing the primary. “I think the mayor is basically incompetent,” Koch says, with his usual indirection. “I don’t want that in any way to convey that he isn’t intelligent. He’s highly intelligent. But he doesn’t have the charismatic leadership qualities that are required in difficult times. Nor is he someone who conveys a spirit of confidence. You have to believe that the mayor in difficult times is going to lead you through, across the Red Sea, across the desert. He can’t do that.”

How about Giuliani? “I don’t know if he will be a great mayor or not. I know that he will be at the very least a good mayor in the sense of a technocrat. I don’t have the slightest doubt about that--that he will bring good people into government. Whether he has the vision and the charismatic qualities and the temperament to be a great mayor only time can tell that.”

And his betting on the race? Koch stresses that he hasn’t endorsed either man. But, of course, he has an opinion: “I think it’s overwhelmingly Giuliani’s race and it’s his to lose.”

Koch’s assessment reflects conventional wisdom in New York, even among Democrats. Having won narrowly last time, Dinkins began with virtually no margin for error. Demography may give him a modest boost: Many analysts suspect that blacks and Latinos now constitute a slightly higher share of the city electorate than in 1989. And if the more purist conservative message of the Conservative Party’s Marlin siphons as much as 5% of the vote from Giuliani, it could influence the result.

But Dinkins may not be able to count on black turnout as heavy as in his first, precedent-shattering race, when African-Americans constituted nearly 30% of the total vote in the city. And he is facing erosion on three fronts: white liberals dissatisfied with his overall record, and among Jews and Latinos, largely out of the belief he has favored blacks.

Dinkins’ strategy is to raise questions about Giuliani’s temper, accuse him (mostly through surrogates) of trying to divide the city along racial lines and remind everyone, at every opportunity, that Giuliani is a Republican.

In a city so heavily Democratic, it’s impossible to count out an incumbent Democrat, but it’s an uphill climb for Dinkins. He wants to make the election about Giuliani, but as George Bush discovered last year, it’s extremely difficult to shift the focus toward a challenger, even a flawed challenger, when people are unhappy with the incumbent. “The problem with the numbers is that as an incumbent, he has done nothing to broaden his base,” one Dinkins adviser lamented to me. “In fact, he’s shrunk it.”

This conversation took place in a dreary basement ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel, where a small crowd of supporters had gathered on primary night to congratulate Dinkins on his victory. Just before 11, an aide asked the crowd to move forward to fill the space between the television cameras and the stage. A few moments later, after the local reporters had done their stand-ups for the 11 p.m. news, Dinkins arrived to a thin chant of “four more years.”

“Tonight the fight begins for the soul and future of New York,” he read from the TelePrompTer.

Politicians say such things all the time, and Dinkins invested the words with no more conviction than most. But the declaration had a brittle edge of truth to it. In choosing between Dinkins and Giuliani, New Yorkers will be making judgments about whom can balance the budget, reform the bureaucracy and clean up the streets. But mostly they will be deciding whom they trust to try to bring together a city that, like much of America, no longer seems to believe it shares a common future.