EW YORK - It started out as a battle of titans, but shuts down tomorrow with the appearances of just another messy squabble.
History was supposed to be made in this Senate race when it got underway 16 months ago - Hillary Rodham Clinton, the only first lady ever to run for national office, vs. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor who tamed New York City. Both were larger-than-life figures, with distinct and lofty philosophies.
Then midway through, Giuliani - ailing and frankly indifferent - passed the baton to an obscure back-bencher named Rick Lazio. And now the passions of the campaign have come down, in its final week, to a brawl over whether Clinton took ''blood money'' from a ''terrorist organization'' and whether Lazio should apologize for saying so.
Tomorrow's ballots will read Clinton vs. Lazio, but the real contest is what it has always been, at least since the mayor left the race - Clinton vs. Clinton.
This state has long been split between those who like the first lady and those who shudder at the sight or sound of her. And much of this campaign has been a struggle to energize, convert, or neutralize both camps.
Lazio has been most open about this. A four-term congressman with an appealing background and a substantial record, he has nonetheless comported himself through much of this campaign as if he had no identity other than that of an Anti-Hillary.
''It won't take me six pages to convince you to send me an urgently needed contribution... It will only take six words,'' he wrote in one fund-raising letter. ''I'm running against Hillary Rodham Clinton.''
As recently as 10 days ago, his media adviser, Mike Murphy, said some of the state's voters were undecided because ''they don't know too much about Rick Lazio'' - a stark admission of how weakly he has sold his client's story.
If Lazio loses this election - and the latest polls show him trailing slightly - this will be one of the reasons. ''He's never gone out there and told the people who he is,'' one frustrated Republican leader said last week.
Lazio's attacks on Clinton have been at times so venomous that, in the absence of any other distinguishing features, he winds up this race with something nobody would have imagined possible - an image as negative as hers.
Then again, if Lazio wins, it will be due precisely to the suspicions he has created or reinforced about Clinton, especially in the minds of the undecideds.
''Lazio's guys feel that nearly all the undecideds are going to go with him, so that's where they're aiming their efforts in the final days,'' the Republican said. ''If they're right, he'll win.''
What must have seemed a big break in this regard came two weeks ago, when the Daily News revealed Clinton had received campaign money from a Muslim group whose leader had advocated violence against Israel.
Though Clinton says she returned the money, the Republican state committee started a massive ''push-polling'' effort, phoning Jewish voters and asking if they knew that she had taken money from a group that supports the sort of terrorist attack that killed the American sailors onboard the USS Cole.
Clinton and several prominent Democrats expressed outrage over the insinuation, and demanded that Lazio apologize. He refused to do so several times.
The Republicans' calls may have inspired more backlash than anything else - enough so that Governor George Pataki felt compelled to step in to stem the tide. He denounced the calls as wrong, and claimed he and Lazio had told the GOP committee to stop. This contradicted Republican spokesman Dan Allan's remark, a few days earlier, that the calls were stopped only after they had all been made.
Meanwhile, Clinton, when she isn't responding to Lazio's attacks and launching a few of her own, is sticking to a strategy that has governed her campaign all along - diverting the focus away from her personally, and emphasizing a bundle of social issues on which most New Yorkers agree with her positions.
It's an ironic twist. She came into this race with such stature, as the Democrats' only hope against the mighty Giuliani. However, once the mayor dropped out and she found herself facing a mere mortal who lacked his strengths and vulnerabilities, she altered course and acted as if the contest were a conventional contest between a Democrat and a Republican.
However, in recent weeks, she has changed direction again, especially before audiences of African-American voters, who view her marriage and loyalty to President Clinton - their favorite president in decades - as an unalloyed plus.
President Clinton is still popular here. In the past two weeks and especially this past weekend, he has campaigned vigorously for his wife, urging her bedrock supporters to get out and vote.
At least as tellingly, she has begun to trumpet her association with her husband and his administration ever more loudly and widely.
''My opponent is saying eight years is enough,'' she scoffed at a labor rally in Manhattan last week. ''I don't know what planet he's on, but I think that eight years has not been enough!'' The crowd cheered.
In short, at the last minute, Clinton has decided to seek out victory, in part, by billing what had become just another nasty, brutish Senate race into a referendum on the entire Clinton era.
This may explain, in part, the peculiar ferocity of Lazio's last-minute attacks. He knows he needs the support of many New Yorkers who will vote for Gore tomorrow and who still greatly admire President Clinton. So he is working very hard to keep Hillary Clinton off balance, on the defensive - in short, to put the focus back on her.
