An article last Sunday about the way in which the legacies of former New York City mayors are affecting the mayoral campaigns of Joseph J. Lhota and Bill de Blasio misidentified the mayor for whom Ester R. Fuchs, a political-science professor, was a special adviser.
He has also worked in politics, creating more than 30 television commercials for the mayoral campaigns of Bret Schundler, Jersey City's mayor from 1992 to 2001.
As for Mr. Haggerty, who labored in two mayoral campaigns and who socialized with the mayor, well, he was just a volunteer.
With two relatively popular New Yorkers on the ballot, their rivals — recalling that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg personally spent $160 million on his two mayoral campaigns in the nation's most expensive media market — have invested their scarce resources elsewhere.
"No one this early in that cycle thought that we wouldn't have a Democratic mayor," said Scott Levenson, a Democratic consultant who has worked on past mayoral campaigns.
Until Mr. Bloomberg entered New York politics, mayoral campaigns did not start TV ads until August — and the mayor, who has broken nearly every spending record, did not run TV ads until mid-May in 2005.
For three decades, Katherine Feinstein, the only child of Senator Dianne Feinstein, quietly observed the milestones in her mother's struggle to reach the top of national politics: Two failed San Francisco mayoral campaigns before the assassination of George Moscone elevated her to mayor; a bitter and unsuccessful race for governor; and, finally, a triumphant Senate bid in 1992.
Mr. Buckley's 1965 candidacy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said this week, "will live on as one of the defining mayoral campaigns of the city's history".
By mid-October, the mayor had pumped an astonishing $245 million of his own money into his three mayoral campaigns — more than any American has ever spent in pursuit of public office.
CONTRAST that to mayoral campaigns of yore.
"The boundaries of New York's mayoral campaigns are infinite," Professor Moss said.
