Today Paxon professes to have no hurt feelings, but his wife, Susan Molinari, is still a little sore. "Why would I want to be part of a profile of Rick Lazio?" she snaps, then suggests calling back after she's had time to think it over. Two weeks later, Molinari says, "I'm just not comfortable talking about Rick as a candidate. If I wanted to tell you why, I'd do the interview." Still later, after overhearing Paxon praise Lazio, Molinari comes to the phone. "I'm supporting Rick," she says. "He wants this very badly and will do what needs to be done to win."

The first time I saw Lazio in person was in mid-May, at a Conservative Party dinner in Manhattan. Lazio and everyone else were still waiting for Rudy Giuliani to jump in or out. Lazio was in black tie, and as the cocktail hour ended, Alfonse D'Amato wrapped him in a hug that seemed as much death grip as warm embrace. As Lazio smiled and squirmed, an image leapt to mind: Fredo. Not to suggest any Mafia-related slur, of course, but Lazio looked for all the world like the hapless Godfather character played by John Cazale to D'Amato's ruthless Al Pacino.

This afternoon, in Washington, seeing Lazio sparks a different association: soccer dad. In his office, political mementos are mostly hidden; a framed photo of a shaggier-haired Lazio shaking hands with President George Bush is stuck on a wall behind the bathroom door. Pictures of Lazio's 6- and 8-year-old daughters -- giggling in face paint, snuggling with Dad on the beach -- clutter all the desks, and brightly colored construction-paper artwork hangs everywhere. Two Lazio press aides perch on a couch, a level of staffing that seems overprotective.

On TV and on the stump, Lazio's features can look unformed, his skin unlined by the cares visited upon most married men with a mortgage and a couple of kids. Up close, the gray in Lazio's hair is easily visible. He laughs deeply and frequently, tilting his head back and guffawing at the ceiling so hard he shakes. Speaking quietly, his a's are flattened and stretched in a Kennedyish way that doesn't show up in Lazio's glycemic public-speaking style.

When his suit jacket is off, Lazio's shoulders are narrow and slightly hunched. For a professional pol, he's strikingly uninterested in stagecraft or even salesmanship: There are no invitations to tag along on the campaign plane, and his mother, wife, and three sisters won't get on the phone to sing Lazio's praises. Interview time, already brief, is interrupted so Lazio can pose for pictures with insurance-industry reps.

"They're pushing Rick too hard," a friend says about his staff. "He has to find a way to say no, and that's hard for him."

The day before, Hillary Clinton had ripped Lazio's abortion votes: in favor of legal abortion but against Medicaid funding. I frame a question using Clinton's rhetoric, to give Lazio maximum room to swat away her argument: "So," I say, "are you really for abortions for rich people only?"

The two press handlers, silent to this point, jump in faster than Bobby Knight disputing a referee's call. "No policy questions!" one shouts. "We'll do issues next week! Just biography today!"

Lazio recognizes the awkwardness of the moment, his eyes darting darkly at the aides. "Let me just take this if I can," he says. "Because I think it's, you know, it's, when I was talking about trying to remain myself, um, what that also means to me is not to get baited into a conflict that doesn't represent what I want for this race, for this campaign. And um, I think it, I understood and understand that, um, the other camp is going to turn negative on me. I understand intellectually -- when they can't move in the polls, the only way to do that is just to try to sling mud at the other person. Try and bring the other guy down, I guess. And, um, in my heart I hope it's, they'll get off it, and they'll go -- we'll have a good debate on the issues." Lazio goes on like this for a while, without ever addressing abortion, until his handlers declare time is up, with a guarantee of substance next week.

Same place, seven days later, I toss Lazio a pop-culture personality quiz: Starbucks or Greek-diner coffee? "I don't drink coffee," Lazio says with a laugh. "Very, very rarely. My wife drinks it; I love smelling it."

Mac or IBM? "IBM," he says. "I didn't get into it when the Macs were really hot, and I have a Dell now."

Springsteen or Billy Joel? "Springsteen," Lazio answers without hesitation. Then, quietly, with a bit of embarrassment but undeniable enthusiasm, his voice thinner and higher than the Boss's, Lazio sings, "The screen door slams . . ."

Any congressman who loves "Thunder Road" can't be all bad. But then Lazio adds, "I'm not crazy about the Diallo stuff, though" -- a reference to Springsteen's new song about the police shooting of the unarmed peddler, and a reminder of the primary criticism of Lazio, that he's indecisive and tries to straddle every issue, no matter how big or small.

How is it consistent, I ask Lazio, to work to save the National Endowment for the Arts and then censure the Brooklyn Museum for hanging dung-flecked paintings of the Virgin Mary?

"Oh, they're totally consistent," he says. "I think they're totally consistent. I believe in, uh, a sense of public dollars supporting the arts. I am totally comfortable with the idea of public support for the arts. But I think you can also say, 'This stuff is garbage,' you know, 'and if you want to, if you want to exhibit it, that's your business, no one can stop you from exhibiting it, but use your own dollars for that.' Frankly, it makes my life as an advocate for the arts, for public funding for the arts, very, very difficult. So it was poor judgment, I think, on the part of the folks over at the Brooklyn Museum."

So you want to fund the arts but attach more strings? "There are things I support in every program," Lazio says. "I support the military and the national defense; I'm not too happy about $600 toilet-seat covers or hammers. So you have to make reasonable distinctions and speak out when you think it's wrong."

On gun control, Lazio is even more opaque. His home county of Suffolk has some of the state's most stringent gun-registration laws. Does Lazio, who has opposed similar measures, believe Suffolk is wrong? "No," he says. "I think the question is whether the federal government does it. The other more important question is, in an era in which we have such technological advance possible -- smart guns, DNA for bullets and for guns -- that's the direction I think we ought to be looking at."

Lazio has cast thousands of votes in Congress on everything from impeachment to prescription-drug benefits, but when asked to name one principled stand he's taken that's cost him politically, he has to reach all the way back to the eighteen-member Suffolk County legislature and a 1992 plan to raise sales taxes by half a cent that had been crafted by the Republican county executive, Bob Gaffney. "He felt it was necessary to raise the sales tax and to deficit-borrow for operating costs," Lazio says. "And I felt, for me philosophically, that was totally abhorrent to do that. And I voted no on that. And for a while the Republican Establishment walked away from me. And this was in the middle of a congressional campaign, we were being badly outspent, and we were fairly far behind in the polls."

Yet if his vote alienated the local Republican organization (briefly), it helped Lazio as much, if not more, in the eyes of voters he was courting in his race against Tom Downey. Lazio also mentions the hundreds of calls he got opposing nafta and the assault-weapons ban. In the end, Lazio voted in favor of both. "But," he allows, "I never felt like it really cost me."

Lazio is right about one thing: He is what a moderate looks like in the modern American political age. Any politician who isn't a crazy winger or naïvely idealistic, who has a desire to stay in office -- and after enduring the first brutal, soul-killing electoral ordeal and winning, who wouldn't want to stick around and accumulate some seniority? -- ends up appearing a mass of contradictions. And if he's lucky, he gets to do a few good things along the way.

Mr. Nice Guy is yelling at an aide. "Let's go!" Lazio barks. "I should have been out of here 40 minutes ago!" It's 4:30, and Lazio is dashing to National Airport for a private-plane flight to Greenwich, for an early-evening fund-raiser. Already today Lazio has missed his own press conference decrying the rise in gasoline prices, and he knows that if he misses any congressional votes tonight, the Clinton campaign will fry him in the papers again. So after gripping and grinning in Greenwich, Lazio will fly back to Washington, where he'll vote on House bills until nearly midnight, then fly to New York so he can speak at the Association for a Better New York breakfast. When his phone rings the next morning, Lazio is disoriented, asking, "What day is it? Where am I?"