WASHINGTON - A bald man in a gray pinstripe suit enters a building on North Capitol Street and announces that he wants to go to the Fox News studios.
''Do you have a photo ID?'' asks the security guard.
The man searches his pockets. ''No, I don't,'' he says sheepishly. ''I forgot my wallet.''
''Well, I'll have to call upstairs,'' the guard rejoins.
Finally, a young woman from Fox emerges from the elevator. ''Sorry about the mixup, Mr. Secretary,'' she says.
Mr. Secretary?
Yes, in the flesh. For William M. Daley, US commerce secretary and new chairman of the Gore presidential campaign, such invisibility is standard - and welcome. In a town of virtuoso publicity magnets, he is an expert second fiddle.
He's the Daley who's not the mayor of Chicago (that's his brother, Richard); the Cabinet secretary who fainted from nerves at the announcement of his appointment.
Daley, by his own admission, is a throwback. He wears a fedora in winter, sport coats on weekends. He instituted ''casual Fridays'' in the Commerce Department but still wears dark suits. He likes Sinatra and ''easy listening.'' He doesn't use foul language or tell racy jokes. He opens doors for ladies.
Above all, Daley, 51, is retro in his love of doing politics in the shadows. ''He's done that not only in politics but in life generally,'' said his brother, John. ''He's more back-room.''
This kind of power has increasingly become a lost art in the capital. Fund-raisers such as Terry McAuliffe and lobbyists like Vernon Jordan take center stage on Washington's social scene; lawyers like Greg Craig and Bob Bennett command greater name recognition than most pols. A former White House staffer like George Stephanopoulos aims for celebrity, while an ex-Cabinet member like Robert Reich publishes a kiss-and-tell book about the president.
Daley, who has never held elected office and thrives on anonymity, can nevertheless be as vain as the next guy, as he readily concedes.
''I've got an ego, a healthy one, don't get me wrong,'' he said. ''So far I've managed to keep it in check. In some of these jobs you tend to think you're the Second Coming.''
To that end, he likes to play the fixer. He takes on embattled causes - NAFTA, the Commerce Department, trade relations with China. He fights doggedly for them, subjugating his own ego, and usually engineering come-from-behind victories.
Now the question is: Can he do the same for the vice president?
Daley, the youngest of seven children, learned early on that he liked living on the fringes of power. He got to visit JFK and LBJ and swim in the White House pool; he got to see the Democratic conventions of '64 and '68; he met the queen of England.
The senior Richard Daley, who ruled Chicago from the 1950s through 1976, preached to his children the Catholic virtue of humility. He lived in the same house his whole adult life, a half-block from where he was born, in a blue-collar neighborhood.
''All his friends were policemen, mechanics, whatever,'' Bill Daley said. Today, he often cites the wisdom of his mother (''Keep your ears open and your mouth shut'') and his father (''Take a small job. It'll last longer''). He also remembers his father's lesson that ''there's nothing better than a dead politician'' for measuring the ephemeral nature of political power. When his father died, Bill, then 28, found that to many supposed pals, ''suddenly I wasn't quite their friend.''
A decade later, he was directing his brother's mayoral campaigns. After managing his brother's losing 1983 bid for mayor, Daley scrapped the old campaign playbooks and cobbled together a winning multiracial coalition.
''Bill is the political brains behind his brother,'' said Chicago Democratic consultant David Axelrod.
Daley, who loves political machinations, was the lord of Chicago's back-room deals in the 1980s. When Michael Whouley, now a top Gore adviser, was collecting delegates for Michael Dukakis in 1988, Daley gave him a few names. One man, told that Whouley had been sent by Daley, filled out the paperwork before even asking which candidate he had agreed to represent.
In promoting his brother, Bill Daley was also perpetuating the power of the Daley name, which has given him a good life so far. A graduate of Loyola University and John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Bill Daley practiced law with a brother; their father steered them in business. Later, Daley landed on various boards, including Fannie Mae's, and after a stint in the early 1990s as a Chicago bank executive, he became a partner in 1993 at the Mayer, Brown & Platt law firm.
While Daley acknowledges his family name is responsible for much of his ascent, he has taken it into new places: corporate boardrooms and the federal government. When his mayor-brother helped Bill Clinton in Illinois in 1992, Bill Daley became close to the campaign and expected a Cabinet post. He was passed over in the first term but finally was named commerce secretary in 1996. Daley, unaccustomed to being the one onstage, collapsed while the president was announcing his appointment.
Asked by Clinton to lead the push in Congress for normal trade status for China, an unpopular cause with organized labor, Daley worked behind the scenes. He counted votes and decided which Democratic members to target, and talked House Speaker Dennis Hastert into holding the vote well in advance of the fall elections, taking the political heat off Democrats so that they could join most Republicans in passing the measure.
At Commerce, he had the dubious task of salvaging the reputation of the department, targeted by some in Congress for elimination. Commerce's critics on the Hill charged that the late Ron Brown had turned the agency into a Democratic fund-raising arm, using foreign trips to woo donors.
Daley put a moratorium on trade missions and slashed Commerce's political appointees from 256 to 140. He made sure the department passed its financial audit for the first time, and he took care of each of the top 10 problems cited by Commerce's inspector general.
''Nobody talks about dismantling us these days,'' said David Lane, Daley's staff chief.
Daley, who will leave the commerce post on July 15, buried himself in the humdrum tasks, such as working the phones to make sure Congress didn't let legislation against overseas bribery die, thus saving an international agreement.
It almost goes without saying, then, that Daley will demand that others adopt his love of anonymous toil at Gore headquarters. ''There's only one face of the campaign and that's Al Gore's,'' he said. ''I don't think there should be personalities around the campaign. Everyone's going to get their 15 minutes of fame out of this.''
How old-fashioned. But then, we're talking about Bill Daley, who is traditional to the point of cliche. He has been married to one woman, Loretta, for decades, and calls his siblings and 93-year-old mother almost daily. He owns one pair of bluejeans, purchased for gardening at his summer home in Michigan, which he never got around to doing. He vacations with family and keeps photos of his parents, his mayor-brother, and his four children, one deceased, in his office. He reads historical biographies. He plays golf. He likes the White Sox and big steaks.
''I've known him for 12 years,'' said Whouley, the Gore strategist. ''I don't know anything provocative about the guy.''
Daley offers a characteristic demurral. ''It's the way I've always been,'' he said. ''You are what you are. When you're 52 years old, you don't change.''
Daley is that rare man in his fifties who rounds his age up a year. His birthday is Aug. 9.
