Lieberman insists that it doesn’t bother him if his supporters contribute to his rivals. “I don’t discourage it,” he says. “My first choice is that they only write checks to me. But people will say to me, ‘I hope you’ll understand that I’ve given to another candidate. A friend asked me.’ People have a lot of friends involved in this race.” He is telling me this at—what else?—a Veuve Clicquot–and–dessert fund-raiser in his honor at the spectacular Central Park South aerie of money manager Boykin Curry, held after the recent Thursday-night Manhattan Democratic debate. Although Lieberman has stellar name recognition, he’s largely ignored by the media since he lacks the buzz of Dean or Clark. After Lieberman’s campaign manager Craig Smith spelled out the election strategy—to de-emphasize the January Iowa and New Hampshire slug-outs and concentrate on the seven primaries and caucuses below the Mason-Dixon line that will held on February 3—the Connecticut senator then quipped to the 85 guests, “You’re all invited to the Lincoln Bedroom.” He paused, then added with a grin, “Probably not together.”

Thanks to the McCain-Feingold campaign-reform legislation, candidates can now rake in double the pleasure, double the fun, from such 90-minute festivities, since the maximum legal individual contribution has been raised from $1,000 to $2,000. But the ban on so-called soft-money contributions means that moguls can no longer curry favor from the eventual Democratic nominee by writing $100,000 checks to the Democratic Party for use in the general election against the Republican nominee. Anyone who wants to be important to a candidate these days has to do some heavy lifting—pick up the phone and arm-twist friends and business acquaintances to cough it up now.

Just as wealthy New Yorkers swap favors on the charity circuit—I’ll buy a ticket to your cancer benefit if you’ll buy a table at my New York City Ballet fund-raiser—many people are writing checks to candidates whom they do not necessarily support, at the behest of friends. Lisa Kent, a Westport, Connecticut, lawyer who supports Edwards, said she recently sent a check to Lieberman, explaining, “My girlfriend called and asked me for a donation.” When Lynn Forester de Rothschild co-hosted a Gephardt fund-raiser at her palatial River House apartment in June, she called on her social circle, including Harvey Weinstein, who didn’t attend but sent a check for $1,000. “Harvey hasn’t chosen a candidate,” insists his spokesman Matthew Hiltzik, saying that Weinstein had agreed to write the check as a favor. “Harvey supports his friends.”

All the top-tier candidates have been traipsing through New York for more than a year, wooing those masters of the universe and Upper East Side activists with a fund-raising track record. “New Yorkers like southern accents,” insists North Carolina’s Edwards, at a Madison Avenue fund-raiser last Wednesday night, just four hours before the end of the third quarter. “Bill Clinton did make it easier; people got used to the accent.” Moments later, my cell phone rang; it was John Kerry, responding to an interview request—he was startled to hear he’d caught me at an Edwards event. Twelve days earlier, I had watched Kerry, at a late-night $75 event on the Intrepid where he whipped off his Hermès tie and accompanied Moby on guitar. “I want to reach out to a cross-section of people,” he said. “I’m not going to leave any stone unturned.”

The Kerry campaign is now housed in office space on Park Avenue South that may not have the best karmic vibe; the previous tenant was the ill-fated Carl McCall gubernatorial campaign. Decorated in campaign posters and cartoons of Kerry on a surfboard, the place is bustling with paid staffers and volunteers. Jamie Whitehead, a handsome 31-year-old in jeans and a T-shirt, has fine-tuned his pitch after a year of meeting Manhattan’s movers and shakers. “People have different motivations for getting involved in politics,” he says. “They want to make a difference and care about the issues, or they like the sexiness of the events and like seeing their name in lights, or it’s about business. Part of my job as a salesperson is finding out what the motivation is.”

Landing the big donors is a time-consuming and emotionally fraught task. “The relationship between the candidates and the donors is psychopathic,” says one jaded fund-raiser. “Some donors make the candidates jump through hoops. They insist on dragging the candidates to meet their friends, they want a private lunch or a dinner. Other donors really want to be loved, and they think if they raise enough money, the candidates will love them. What they don’t realize when they get a call from a candidate is that it’s like a boiler room, the guy has a dozen staffers in a room dialing numbers, and he’s just going from call to call.”

“Everyone wants you to sign on to their team. A day doesn’t go by when one of the candidates doesn’t call.”

Early loyalty is much prized. As the once obscure and now sizzling-hot Howard Dean says, “I know who was there.” Prep-school classmate Jim Torrey was an important early backer, as was moneyman Roy Furman. Arriving at a VIP reception in late August at an Irving Plaza fund-raiser, Dean made a beeline for Diane Straus Tucker, the well-connected publisher of Manhattan Media and a fellow Yale alum who took him around a year ago to meet pals like George Soros. “How’s the bat?” Dean asked her, referring to his Internet fund-raising symbol. Tucker beamed, replying, “You’re going to hit a million tonight,” and he hugged her in response.

Gregg Hymowitz, the founder of EnTrust Capital, said he went searching for a candidate to back last year, meeting with Edwards and Kerry and talking by phone to Dean before deciding to sign on with Dick Gephardt as national co-chair. “If you want to have any kind of impact on a campaign, you’ve got to get involved early,” says Hymowitz, who is running the congressman’s New York fund-raising. “A lot of people don’t want to do anything. The risk is, you bet wrong. But if you do bet wrong, come April, when the primaries are over, you can always do fund-raising for the nominee.” At Gephardt’s fund-raiser last Monday night, at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, comedian Colin Quinn couldn’t resist teasing the Missouri congressman about his straight-arrow image, urging him to get a tattoo on his neck and joking, “You’ve got to get a sex scandal. Clinton was more popular afterward. You go out there, you’ve got lipstick on your collar.” Gephardt, laughing through it all, took the microphone next and replied, “You did very well. You can be my secretary of State.”

Celebrity-wrangling is a vital element in every campaign. “Celebrities are a draw,” says Dean fund-raiser Emily Wurgaft. “In the beginning, when no one knew who Howard was, they’d come to an event because it was given by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Now people come because they want to meet Howard.”

Clark has been a stealth candidate for a year, meeting all the major players but coyly refusing to reveal his intentions until last month. For those New Yorkers who remained uncommitted, joining the Clark bandwagon offers a late-breaking opportunity to be at the center of the action. “He is catching on like wildfire,” says Jill Iscol, whose husband Kenneth is an entrepreneur. “This is getting in on the ground floor of a campaign.”

It was relatively easy for Clark to sweep through New York and pick up cash because he’s a fresh face (and because he’s picked what fund-raisers call the low-hanging fruit), but his problem in the weeks ahead is that most people want to see him if they’re going to write a check. With a mere four months until voters go to the polls, it will be hard for Clark to show face at fund-raisers and simultaneously sweet-talk the skeptics in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But that time-travel problem is hardly daunting for his new recruits. “I know he’s starting late, but I hope he can be Seabiscuit,” says Susan Patricof. Gail Furman is amazed at the hordes who descended on her townhouse, noting that 200 were turned away at the door. “I haven’t seen anything like this excitement since the sixties.”

Playing hard-to-get can make you very popular, as Paul Beirne has learned. “Everyone wants you to sign on to their team,” says Beirne, who hasn’t taken the plunge yet. “A day doesn’t go by when one of the candidates doesn’t call.” Suffice it to say there’s a high suck-up quotient to these calls. “It’s just awful, this frenzy to raise money,” laments Felix Rohatyn, the longtime chair of Lazard Frères and ambassador to France during the Clinton administration, who is also getting personal calls from the presidential wannabes. “They have to go through this ritual. People call you and pretend they want your view on taxes, when all they want to know is how much money you can send.”

Rohatyn is playing the field; he’s co-hosted fund-raisers for Gephardt and Kerry, and has donated $2,000 to Dean. “I’ll probably help Wesley Clark too,” he says. “I would like a Democrat to win, and they’re all acceptable to me.” In this goodwill-toward-all mood, will he also help Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley-Braun, or Dennis Kucinich? “Now that you’ve mentioned it, you’ve inspired me,” he says, chuckling. “I think I will give money to Al Sharpton. I think he’s handled himself quite well.”

While Sharpton’s rivals have been invading his home turf on a money quest, the Rev has spent very little time cold-calling for cash, raising a mere $130,000 in the first six months of this year. “Our plan was always that I was going to do people-raising through September,” said Sharpton in a phone call, referring to his campaign-speaking travels and voter-registration drive, “and then raise money in October and November.” His goal is to bring in $750,000 by the end of the year—pocket change to Dean and Kerry—so that with matching federal funds, he’ll have $1.5 million to pay for cable-TV and campaign ads. Def Jam Recordings founder Russell Simmons is giving Sharpton a $500-a-person birthday bash and fund-raiser on October 14, with co-hosts P. Diddy and Jay-Z. “I’ve received donations from a Who’s Who of black business leaders,” Sharpton says. “Earl Graves of Black Enterprise, Bob Johnson of BET, Kathy Hughes of Radio One, Percy Sutton. You’d be surprised by some of the people who contribute—Barbra Streisand sent me $1,000.”

As Sharpton watches the other candidates try to take Manhattan, he professes skepticism that money will buy them love. “I’ve been in favor of public funding of elections because fund-raising takes too much time from connecting with people,” he says. “I’m No. 3 in the Marist poll, and I haven’t spent a lot of money. If I were one of these other candidates, I’d be asking for a refund.”