“Mayor is what’s happening,” he said when I asked him how serious he really is about City Hall. “I’m a New Yorker. I want to go to the Yankee games as mayor. I want to go to the Knicks games as mayor. I want to be able to greet world personalities when they come to the city. I would like to see Harlem’s streets clean. I’d like to see police who are tough but civil. I’d like to use the opportunity to empower African-Americans so that they are respected, so that they have a piece of the pie, so that somebody finally delivers for them while not being unfair to others,” he said.

“Mayor?” he asked rhetorically in a high-pitched voice. “Mayor of the city of New York? Shucks. To be able to cut through traffic like a hot knife through butter. Mayor? Sure. Mayor is every New Yorker’s dream,” he said.

“To be able to help people, that’s primarily what you do as mayor. To be able to make this city shine. To provide real leadership, leadership that brings people together. Mayor Giuliani is mean-spirited, vindictive, and small-minded. He’s tough in ways you don’t even have to be. But people see him as at least getting something done, something that began to address some of the city’s problems. But what I’m suggesting,” Butts said as he fumbled to fish a bill out of his pocket to pay a toll on the thruway, “is that you’re still only settling for mediocre leadership.”

For almost a decade, Butts has toyed with the notion of entering politics. He’s put out feelers, he’s floated trial balloons, and he’s publicly threatened to challenge Koch, Dinkins, Rangel, and various other veteran office-holders. But mostly what he’s done is talk and spend a lot of time, Hamlet-like, stalking the ramparts.

What’s different now is that Butts knows the years are slipping away, and if he doesn’t act soon, political opportunity will pass him by forever. By most measures, he’s still a relatively young man -- but not in political years, not for a first-time campaigner. But even as all of the external factors line up and point him toward a run, ultimately his heart will have to truly be in it. So the question remains: Is this finally Calvin’s moment?

Does he really want to be the most powerful black man in New York? Is his hunger for wider influence and approval so deep (think Rudy Giuliani or Bill Clinton) that he’s willing to take the relentless pounding that’s become as much a part of political life as shaking hands? And is he willing to make the switch from someone people revere as a man of integrity, a man of God, to someone whose motives will most often be viewed as suspect?

Despite his burning ambition to have a deep and lasting impact on black politics in New York, part of him remains conflicted. He’s worried he’ll be sullied by a run for office. “Every time I get close,” he says, “I hear about some back-room deal or some terrible compromise and I start to reconsider. It just breaks my heart.”

Nevertheless, he’s insistent about his desire. “I wanted to be out in the political arena a long time ago,” Butts says, “but I had an obligation to the church and I kept that obligation. I served the church well. I was a good minister in terms of my priestly functions. I was a community activist. I mean, I’ve been doing this a long time: arguing cases, taking up unpopular causes, marching into the schools demanding to see the book closets, challenging principals, fighting police brutality, marching down Eighth Avenue and up 125th Street against drugs, organizing the campaign against tobacco, protesting rap-music lyrics. I’ve waited to go into politics because I’ve had other obligations.”

The personal dilemma Butts is struggling with actually reflects a wider conflict in the black community. For the first time in a long time, there is serious debate among blacks about what kind of leadership is needed and what kind of leadership will be most effective heading into the next century. As the years have passed and progress in the post-integration era has remained painfully slow for many segments of the black population, there is a growing belief that it is time to move beyond dependence on the combustible, charismatic, civil-rights-style agitator.

Some think it’s time to move beyond mass social movements or grand, sweeping legislation toward smaller, real-world victories like renovating one block of apartment buildings at a time, recapturing one school, or reopening abandoned retail space; steps that cumulatively, over time, turn whole neighborhoods around.

‘The African-American community is going through a major transition in terms of models of leadership,” says Deborah Wright, who, as president and CEO of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, is Harlem’s reigning economic czar. “And Reverend Butts is right in the middle of it.” Wright, whose brother, father, and grandfather are ministers, knows the difficulties Butts has to face intimately. “It’s very tough,” she says. “It’s a very, very fine line he’s walking. I’m sure there are a lot of people pushing Calvin: ‘Speak for us, run for us.’ Because everybody’s always searching for that one star that’s gonna lead us to the next place,” says Wright, whose aunt is activist Marian Wright Edelman.