NEW YORK - The man in charge of crushing the hopes of Hillary Rodham Clinton is not your typical Republican consultant. He's been called ''an evil genius,'' a ''mad scientist,'' and a man ''desperately in need of adult supervision.''
And those are his friends talking.
''I'm an iconoclastic, weird personality, no doubt about it,'' confessed Mike Murphy, the hired-gun in question, as he knocked back another Diet Coke in the Four Seasons hotel bar.
''But,'' he added, half-annoyed, half-sly, ''I'm not as crazy as people think.''
Last month, after Rick Lazio suddenly became Clinton's Republican opponent in the nation's hottest Senate race, he shocked all the local pols by picking Murphy as his media strategist.
Murphy had just come from playing the same role in Senator John McCain's rollicking presidential campaign, and had ticked off the New York Republican establishment by trying to crash its coronation of George W. Bush.
It was Murphy who coined McCain's most biting slogans in his fight to get on the New York ballot, comparing the Republican committee to the Soviet Politburo, calling Governor George Pataki ''Comrade Pataki,'' and staging a photo-op in front of the Russian consulate to complain that the former Communist Empire now had more democratic elections than the Empire State.
And now here was Lazio - Pataki's handpicked choice, after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dropped out of the race - rejecting the state GOP's lineup of advisers and going with McCain's loose cannon.
Some dismissed Murphy as too brash, too much the self-promoter, too new to New York politics. But others see these traits as giving Lazio an edge.
George Arzt, a Democratic consultant, said, ''Most of the people who do this in-state, you know exactly what they're going to do. Murphy operates as a guerrilla unit against the old guard. You don't know what he's going to do. That's the scariest thing to a rival campaign.''
With McCain, the ingredients were ready-made for Murphy's image-machine - war hero, stoic torture victim, fat-cat-busting party rebel. With Lazio, he has a tougher challenge: turning the boy next door with a middle-of-the-road record into the man of the hour.
Murphy started out easy when Lazio hit the campaign trail last month. The candidate painted himself as a mainstream native New Yorker, and took mild jabs at Clinton as an out-of-town extremist. Very quickly, the two were tied in the polls, and Clinton's strategists went negative, airing TV spots that challenged Lazio's centrist claims, and slammed him for opposing a hate-crimes law and a patients' bill of rights.
Clinton and her aides may have had no choice - they needed to define the little-known Lazio before he did. But they played into Lazio's - and Murphy's - hands. Last week, he bounced back with a response ad: ''It's a lot easier for Mrs. Clinton to attack me than to name a single thing she has ever done for New York,'' the candidate says, then adds, ''So, Mrs. Clinton, you can run the negative campaign about tearing people down - I'm going to run a campaign about building New York up.''
It was widely considered a clever punch - anti-negative and slashingly negative all at once.
This sort of thing is Murphy's specialty. His license plate used to read ''GO NEG.'' He once described his strategy as ''Make a charge, then have the other guy spend $1 million to answer it.''
But something else is driving Murphy in this campaign - a dread of Hillary Clinton.
''Hillary,'' he said, ''has this typically leftist tactic of lying to get in power. I don't know her personally. I know ideologically I disagree with her. I want to deny her political power because I think she'll hurt the country and I'm a patriot.''
This remark, uttered with stark seriousness, seems out of whack with Murphy's otherwise fun-and-games demeanor - 38, unmarried, disheveled blond hair, fashionably geeky glasses, a slight stubble that betrays a rush job with the morning razor, and a fondness for black leather jackets and Hawaiian shirts.
On McCain's campaign bus, he sat at the candidate's side, cracking jokes and spinning the press. McCain called him, at the time, ''one of the funniest guys I've ever met in politics.''
After the Lazio campaign is over, Murphy wants to get out of politics for a while, write movies for Hollywood, and fly gyrocopters, a sort of wind-glider with rotary blades on top. The gyrocopter industry has its annual convention next month. Murphy plans to take two days off, in the middle of the campaign, to go.
He's also keen on antique mechanical watches (''I own about 20 of them,'' he said), locksmithing, construction cranes, and high-end consumer electronics.
''I love eccentric hobbies,'' he said, ''and I have a lot of them. When I'm in a campaign, I give my life to it, but it's not my life. I have a sense of perspective. I want to have a fun life.''
Murphy grew up in the Detroit suburbs, his father a lawyer, his mother, a writer and a Democratic Party activist. His politics turned staunchly conservative while studying foreign policy at Georgetown University. He took a leave of absence his senior year, to work on a political campaign, and never came back. But he still reads up on military strategy - and was lured to McCain for his hawkish views.
He met Lazio a year ago. One of Murphy's staffers was friends with one of Lazio's aides. Lazio was thinking about challenging Giuliani in a primary for the Senate race, and Murphy thought he would make the stronger candidate.
''I thought Rick played better upstate, and I thought the problem Rudy would have is running for Senate and running New York City at the same time,'' he recalled.
Murphy boasts of running 20 general-election campaigns and winning 18. The winners include New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham. One loser was Iran-Contra schemer Oliver North in his Senate run from Virginia. He has also worked for some losing presidential candidates - McCain, Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander.
Early this year, while immersed in the McCain campaign, he sold his consulting company - Murphy Pintak Gautier Hudome, based on Falls Church, Va. - for, as he put it, ''millions of dollars.'' Murphy still runs the company, which is split roughly 60-40 between corporate and political clients.
Lazio seems to be giving Murphy more control than McCain did. Murphy is writing all of Lazio's commercials, but did only one for McCain and it was widely considered a disaster - an ad during the South Carolina primary that likened Bush to President Clinton. It was McCain's first negative ad and, though the candidate pulled it quickly, it went against his above-the-board image and, some say, gave Bush an opening to fight back.
John Weaver, McCain's campaign manager, conceded the ad was a ''mistake,'' but defends Murphy. ''There was a unanimous decision to put that ad up,'' he said. ''It wasn't just Mike.''
Murphy's defense of that ad is more revealing. ''The problem was we didn't run it enough,'' he said. ''Did I make a lot of dumb mistakes in the McCain campaign? Sure. That wasn't one of them.''
