The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, is counting on the annual State of the City speech he delivers today to show that he, and not the former Bronx borough president, Fernando Ferrer, has the best chance of ousting Mayor Bloomberg from office in November.

Political analysts say Mr. Miller has to woo Democratic voters with a sound bite that will define his candidacy and introduce himself to New Yorkers who may see him on the nightly news denouncing the mayor, but don’t know exactly what he does.

“I’m looking for the theme,” a Baruch College political-science professor, Douglas Muzzio, said. “I’m looking for that two-to-four-word phrase that in a sense synopsizes and symbolizes what this campaign is going to be about.”

The challenge for Mr. Miller is twofold. He needs to speak to colleagues and government types whose backing he is courting, and he needs to break through the clubby world of City Hall to make an impression on voters who generally don’t pay much attention to council happenings.

By all accounts, Mr. Miller has a lot riding on this solo. It is the last of his annual State of the City addresses as speaker – during an election year in which he is trying to defy expectations both to win the Democratic nomination and to beat an incumbent with whom most New Yorkers seem generally satisfied.

Mr. Miller’s office released the two page education portion of the speech yesterday, in which he hammers the mayor for “focusing on bureaucratic reshuffling and not enough on the fundamentals” and rips Mr. Bloomberg for cutting the capital budget for education by $1.3 billion. Officials in the Bloomberg administration have repeatedly said the money was not cut, but rather deferred because expected state money did not materialize this year.

Miller aides have been tight-lipped about the rest of the speech, but the speaker will unquestionably hit on the issues he has been crying foul about during his daily news conferences. And like the other three Democrats – the front-runner Mr. Ferrer; a member of Congress from a Brooklyn-Queens district, Anthony Weiner, and the borough president of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields – he will again characterize Mr. Bloomberg’s approach to getting money from Albany and Washington as gentle and ineffective.

The speech, which will be delivered in council chambers, comes as Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican, and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff wrap up their whirlwind presentation to the International Olympic Committee for the 2012 bid and as budget negotiations between the Bloomberg administration and the City Council are approaching. The budget will be especially tricky this year with the mayor and the speaker, the two individuals heading negotiations, both wanting to score points with voters.

Today’s speech highlights Mr. Miller’s status as the only Democratic mayoral contender with a high-profile position at City Hall, but the 35-year-old speaker is not leading the Democratic pack.

Part of his strategy, analysts said, is to turn the primary into a two-person race between himself and Mr. Ferrer, who has high name recognition and popularity after running for mayor in the 2001 election. The goal is to hold Mr. Ferrer under 40% of the vote in the primary, which would force a runoff – as happened in 2001, when the public advocate, Mark Green, finished second in the primary but won the nomination.

Mr. Weiner – who, like Mr. Miller, is white – will be going after many of the same votes. Just this week, the congressman blasted the speaker for opposing the Jets stadium while approving a sweeping rezoning around the site. Mr. Miller is also counting on Ms. Fields, who is black, to siphon votes away from Mr. Ferrer, who is Latino.

Mr. Miller’s campaign manager, Brian Hardwick, said the other day: “Clearly, Freddy has built-in advantages and at this point is considered to be the front-runner. We know that it’s an uphill battle, but we feel confident that the campaign we are going to put together and the vision we are going to put together for New York will be appealing to voters.”

Today’s speech – whether it’s a home run, a strikeout, or something in between – will also be the first glimpse of Mr. Miller’s newly formed campaign team. Though it is not technically a campaign speech it is an election year, and the speaker’s council staff, including some who probably will move over to his campaign in the coming months, has been buzzing about it for weeks.

The city’s municipal unions, from which all the candidates are seeking endorsements, will also be paying attention. The United Federation of Teachers, the police unions, and District Council 37, which is the union that represents the largest number of municipal workers, will be listening, as they have to all of the candidates during private meetings and on the campaign trail.

“We will be listening, both because it’s the political season and because we have bills that are very important to our members that are before the City Council,” a spokeswoman for District Council 37, Donna Silberberg, said.

Leaders of the other unions, whose contract negotiations with the Bloomberg administration have stalled, may be listening even more closely.

The president of the UFT, Randi Weingarten, said yesterday that either she or someone else from the teachers union would attend today’s speech.

“We always pay attention to what the City Council speaker says, regardless. But we pay a lot of attention to what candidates for mayor say as well, because what they say gives you a sense of both their belief system as well as what they would do if they were mayor,” she said during a phone interview.

When some of Mr. Miller’s supporters were asked how he would distinguish himself from the other Democrats, they said he will simply outline his “vision.” They also said he has a unique platform in his role and that this speech gives him a forum to remind voters of his accomplishments.

“If you present a compelling vision of where you want to go and tell them how you take them there, that alone should separate you,” Council Member Eric Gioia of Queens, whose wife, Lisa, is Mr. Miller’s chief fund-raiser, said. “How did Bill Clinton beat George Bush in 1992? That’s what he did.”

Council Member Charles Barron, who dropped out of the mayoral race a few weeks ago, was more critical of Mr. Miller. When asked what the speaker needed to do to reach voters, Mr. Barron said Mr. Miller needed to be concerned more with things like fighting institutional racism and protecting residents from developers than with making political inroads. Mr. Barron has endorsed Ms. Fields.

Mr. Miller’s speeches have gotten progressively more critical of the mayor in the past three years – and some have been more effective than others. His 2003 speech, for example, generated buzz when he harshly criticized Governor Pataki and President Bush for shortchanging the city.

The council’s Republican minority leader, James Oddo, who has often found the Democratic speaker easier to work with than the Republican mayor, put today’s speech in perspective.

“I don’t think the general public is tuning into the council speaker’s State of the City,” Mr. Oddo said of Mr. Miller, “but certainly the political establishment is, and whatever the venue you want to hit the ball out of the park.”