PARTY ANIMALS.(The Talk of the Town)

Political contests are generally thought of as binary affairs: a candidate runs as a Democrat or as a Republican, gets more votes or doesn't, stays up to celebrate or concedes and goes to bed. Last week, in New York, the former scenarios prevailed for the Democratic slate of Hillary Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo, and Alan Hevesi. But, even among the triumphant, there were winners and there were losers. Perhaps nowhere were the nuances of popularity and power more apparent than in Tuesday's various victory parties.

An early stop, for the Election Night schmoozer, was an event organized by the Hevesi campaign. Several weeks earlier, Hevesi, the incumbent candidate for state comptroller, had admitted to using a state employee as his wife's chauffeur. Thus disinvited from a big bash being held at the Sheraton for the rest of the ticket, he'd holed up at a hotel on Thirty-eighth Street. The scene was subdued: stained carpet and no refreshments. ("A lot of people keep asking me where the drinks are," a porter named Alex said. "They don't even have water.") The name of the place--the Jolly Madison Towers--underscored the air of forced gaiety.

At eight o'clock, Nadine Schramm, a trucking executive and a Hevesi supporter, was one of a half-dozen people watching CNN in the hotel bar. She had bumped into the former mayor of Buffalo earlier in the day. "He said, 'Tell Alan that Tony from Buffalo said hello.' " Tony from Buffalo, she reported, was going to be spending the evening at the Sheraton.

"You don't walk from friends," she went on, explaining why she'd bothered to show up. Schramm's rationale was typical of Hevesi partygoers, who tended to frame their attendance in negative terms--why they didn't want to not be there. Nevertheless, several Hevesi guests decided to flee for the Clinton/Spitzer/Cuomo jamboree (which had taken on the exclusive allure of a partisan Playboy Mansion). Now, this was a party: patriotically colored balloons, free-flowing booze, bouncers turning away even those with "Honored Guest" passes in favor of Sheldon Silver and Steven Van Zandt.

Once the state races had all been called, the sound system began blaring "Get Up, Stand Up," and the lieutenant governor-elect, David ...