STILL RUNNING.(The Talk of the Town)

A quick recap of the mayoral campaign thus far: Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker and the Democrats' top fund-raiser, received fewer Bronx votes in last month's primary than did a man (Christopher Brodeur) who spent less than two hundred dollars and never once visited the borough. The former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, meanwhile, secured the least enthusiastic Times endorsement in memory ("Inanimate objects have been as dynamic as Mr. Ferrer") and won the nomination. Mayor Bloomberg managed to fend off a primary challenge on the Republican side, by contesting the petition signatures of his lone rival, Thomas Ognibene, and has since begun tacking left, even issuing an unsolicited position paper on John Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court, which he opposed. Still, Bloomberg continues to be dogged on the campaign trail by an unknown antagonist wearing a George Bush mask--a pesky reminder of his role in helping to reelect the President.

Tom Ognibene, for one, does not find the Bush stunt to be particularly apt, given that Bloomberg has always been, in his belief, "a left-wing, liberal-Democrat ideologue." Last week, Ognibene, a former councilman from Middle Village, Queens, dropped by City Hall to make the case that conservatives who are angry with the Mayor should protest not by supporting Ferrer but by supporting him. Ognibene, who is sixty-one, is now running on the Conservative Party line, in an attempt to rescue old-fashioned Republican ideals--low taxes, the sanctity of marriage, an end to abortion--from what he considers a dying local G.O.P. establishment. He's playing Pat Buchanan to Bloomberg's George W. Bush.

"See, what we did in the nineties with Rudy was substantive, and what Bloomberg's doing now is more smoke and mirrors," Ognibene said, standing at the back of the rotunda, where ...