EW YORK - So, with Rudolph Giuliani on the sidelines, this is what the nation's hottest Senate race comes down to? Hillary Rodham Clinton and who? Rick Lazio? Perhaps the most famous woman in the world against a back-bench congressman from the outer shores of Long Island?
Suddenly the clash of titans has dwindled to a what seems to be a mismatch, such as Alf Landon against FDR, the Padres versus the Yankees, Wily Coyote and the Roadrunner.
Then again, there's an alternative history of mismatches - David and Goliath, the Broncos versus the Packers, the tortoise and the hare.
Right now, Clinton appears to be crushing the 4th-term congressman - 50 to 31 percent in the most recent polls, $6.6 million to $3.5 million stockpiled in their campaign war chests.
Still, not even the happiest Democrats foresee a cakewalk to the Capitol.
Much of the race could hinge on whether Lazio - a boyish-looking 42-year-old who has never campaigned outside New York's Suffolk County - comes across over the next several days as a lightweight neophyte or a seasoned legislator of energy and substance.
Two things are certain.
First, this will be a rough-and-tumble contest.
Already, Clinton's advisers are publicly denouncing Lazio as a puppet of Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and what one aide called ''the rest of the radical Republican leadership.''
For his part, Lazio has hired as his campaign manager Mike Murphy, Arizona Senator John McCain's media chief, who once described his approach as: ''Make the charge, and let the other guy spend $1 million to explain it.''
In his campaign announcement yesterday, at a high school in West Islip, Lazio said, ''Here in New York, we love an underdog,'' and attacked Clinton as an out-of-state ultraliberal who flies around on Air Force One. (His campaign T-shirt reads, ''Lazio - Made in New York.'')
Second, this is not the race that anybody had in mind, or would have wanted, a few months ago.
New York's Democratic leaders begged Clinton to run for the open Senate seat last summer only after the party's A-list - US Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, state Comptroller Carl McCall, and environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr. - declined to challenge Giuliani, who was at his peak of popularity.
The one Democrat who had entered the race, Representative Nita Lowey from Westchester County, agreed to drop out if Clinton came in.
The state's Republican leaders embraced Giuliani, despite their longstanding problems with the New York mayor's personality and positions, because they saw him as the only candidate who could beat Clinton.
The Republican camp, too, had a Lowey-like legislator who was even more ambitious to run, but he agreed to step aside for the sake of Giuliani. That was Lazio, who reenters the race with the full backing of the party machine after Giuliani withdrew Friday, citing concerns over treatment for his prostate cancer.
Had the Democrats thought Lazio would end up their opponent, the local big names might have joined the fray to begin with. Even Lowey would have been a formidable match for Lazio, and the race would have been a more traditional bout.
Now the race pits a conventional New York Republican against the proverbial 400-pound gorilla.
A 400-pound gorilla has certain advantages, but also some drawbacks.
Clinton's problem is that many people deeply dislike her. In a poll taken two weeks ago by John Zogby, running her against each of six New York Republicans (including Lazio), Clinton never attracted more than 50 percent of the voters surveyed. Over 40 percent of those polled would not vote for her under any circumstance.
If Giuliani had been the opponent, he would have had his own set of negatives to offset Clinton's. What made that race so exciting was that both candidates sparked passion among the voters - some adoring, some hateful. One of the bigger assets for each was the negative image of the other.
Now Clinton still has her negatives - but her new foe, Lazio, has none, at least for the moment.
For months, Clinton and Giuliani had been tied in the polls - with Clinton way ahead in New York City, the mayor way ahead in the suburbs, and the two running even in the rest of the state. It is too soon to say how Lazio alters this equation.
In the city and suburbs, many white liberals who favored Giuliani, because they liked what he had done as mayor, may swing back to the Democrat rather than vote for a suburban Republican.
However, many blacks, who tend to vote in smaller numbers but were yearning to cast their ballots against Giuliani, might not bother turning out with the mayor out of the contest.
Lazio, though, is Catholic - like 42 percent of the state's voters, and a higher share still upstate - who, despite his alliances with Gingrich, has a fairly moderate voting record. He is for gun control, the environment, and breast-cancer research. He is also in favor of abortion rights, though he has voted to ban ''partial-birth'' abortion.
His stance against that abortion procedure means Lazio will probably get the nomination of the New York Conservative Party. Giuliani, who opposes any restriction on abortion rights, would not have won that party's ballot line, which could have drained away at least 5 percent of the vote. Lazio is expected to get that 5 percent back.
At the same time, Clinton will now capture the state's other major independent faction, the Liberal Party. Its leader, Raymond Harding, is a friend and adviser to Giuliani, and probably would have put the mayor on his ticket had he stayed in the race.
Both shifts are important: No Republican here has won a statewide race without the Conservative line since 1974; no Democrat has won a statewide race without the Liberal line since 1944.
