EW YORK - In her latest television ad, Hillary Rodham Clinton walks alongside a lanky man whose tousled hair and frosty blue eyes make you swear for an instant that you've seen a ghost - then you realize he's the closest thing to one.
He is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father once occupied the US Senate seat that Clinton wants to win, and who is now endorsing her as the fallen legend's natural heir.
The spot is just the latest, if most graphic, sign of how persistently Bobby Kennedy - though dead for 32 years - has haunted this race from start to finish.
The most obvious parallels have long been noted.
When Kennedy ran for Senate in New York in 1964, he was widely attacked as a ''carpetbagger'' for being from out of state. He inherited much favor from his popular brother, President Kennedy, who was assassinated in the previous year. And he rode to victory on the coattails of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide in that year's presidential election.
Similarly, Hillary Clinton, an Illinois native who lived for many years in Arkansas, is routinely lambasted as a carpetbagger. She rose to prominence as the wife of President Clinton, who is as popular here as he is anywhere. And, if she wins on Nov. 7, it will be in part because of the expected landslide in this state of her party's presidential candidate, Al Gore.
From the outset of the first lady's campaign over a year ago, her supporters cited Bobby Kennedy as a way of dismissing her lack of New York roots. Kennedy, too, was a newcomer to the state, they would say, and that did not stop him from winning big.
Despite extensive travels across the state, Clinton is still bogged down by the carpetbagger charge. Her opponent, Representative Rick Lazio, cites it as his most powerful campaign theme. In a recent Republican fund-raising letter, Governor George Pataki wrote, ''Heaven knows we cannot have an opportunistic carpetbagger like Hillary Clinton `representing' New York.''
The charge is potent enough, especially outside New York City, for Clinton to call in Kennedy's eldest son to bat it down.
''New Yorkers come from everywhere,'' Kennedy says in the ad, which started to air statewide on Friday. ''It is against everything we stand for as a state to say that you can't participate in public life in this state because you weren't born here.''
Still, Democrats with a lively sense of history know that the Kennedy gambit is a shaky one. Yes, the elder Bobby Kennedy beat his opponent, a fairly popular Republican incumbent named Kenneth Keating, by a healthy 720,000 votes.
In New York's presidential balloting that year, however, Johnson crushed his foe, Barry Goldwater, by 2.7 million votes.
To put the issue starkly, 2 million New Yorkers who voted for Johnson - nearly 40 percent of his supporters - voted for Keating for senator.
''There was a lot of anti-Bobby feeling,'' recalled Ronnie Eldridge, a New York City councilwoman who actively campaigned for Kennedy in 1964. ''He wouldn't have won if LBJ hadn't won so big.''
Today, the New York polls show Gore far ahead of George W. Bush, but not by anywhere near Johnson's margins over Goldwater.
So the question is: Will Gore's coattails help Clinton enough?
In many ways, Clinton goes into the final weeks of her campaign in much better shape than Kennedy did.
As Evan Thomas notes in his new book, ''Robert Kennedy: His Life,'' RFK jumped into the Senate race just 11 weeks before Election Day. Even by the standards of those times, when campaigns were of shorter duration, this was a very late entry.
Also, Kennedy hardly campaigned outside New York City and hated it when he did. After he won, as a joke, his brother Edward gave him a book titled ''What I Know About New York Politics.'' The pages were blank.
By contrast, Clinton has been to all of the state's 62 counties, many of them repeatedly, and has clearly educated herself on every fact and foible about them.
For all her efforts, though, Clinton's successes and shortcomings in the polls are strikingly similar to RFK's in the 1964 election.
For the most part, Kennedy won by large margins in the big cities, and lost every place else. Clinton seems likely to do the same.
In New York City, Kennedy won, 62-38 percent. Clinton leads, 61-31. In the suburbs, Kennedy lost, 48-52 percent. Clinton trails, 46-48. And upstate, Kennedy won, 51-49 percent. Clinton trails 44-49 percent.
This last figure may be crucial. Kennedy took upstate only because he stomped Keating in such cities as Buffalo and Rochester. He lost all the rural areas.
Clinton's problem is that, in the 1970s and 1980s, New York City's struggling economy sparked a population shift that tipped the political balance of power toward the more conservative suburbs.
New York City has enjoyed a revival, but it has many new immigrants who do not vote in nearly the same numbers as the native white residents elsewhere.
When Kennedy ran, 40 percent of those who voted lived in New York City, 20 percent lived in the suburbs, and 40 percent upstate.
By contrast, in the 1998 Senate election, New York City still provided 40 percent of the state's population - but only 28 percent of its voters. The suburbs made up 30 percent of the vote, while upstate supplied 42 percent.
This is why, as the race nears its end, Clinton, who still holds a slight lead in the polls overall, continues to dash all across the state.
One persistent obstacle is that upstate residents have grown more resentful of outsiders during a national economic boom that has mostly eluded the region.
This is why Clinton has summoned the spirit of Bobby Kennedy: the most politically potent symbol of the claim that anyone can be a New Yorker.
