A recent campaign mailing sent by Friends of Eva makes an audacious promise, saying that if elected president of Manhattan, Eva Moskowitz will “continue to solve all problems, no matter how big or small.”

For an office with limited powers, that may be an especially difficult task. But Ms. Moskowitz, one of nine Democrats vying for the job, said the answer to the office’s limitations is electing a self-starter.

“The powers are, truth be told, limited,” the Upper East Side Democrat, who garnered citywide attention for taking on the teachers union as chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, said yesterday at the forum sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters.

“I think I’ve shown myself to be a self-starter,” Ms. Moskowitz said. “I’ve taken the chair of the education committee from a place where no one ever heard of the chair, no one ever came to the committee meetings, and I’ve taken it to a place where it is taken seriously. I will do the same with the office of borough president.”

Assemblyman Scott Stringer, who represents the West Side and has a slew of endorsements from elected officials and unions, including one from the United Federation of Teachers, had a similar take.

“I agree that this office has limited power, you’re not the mayor, you’re not even the council speaker, so you can’t go it alone,” he said. “You have to be independent … but you also have to be effective and you have to work with very different elected officials.”

With a crowded field of Democrats vying to win the September 13 primary, many political observers wonder who will manage to drum up the necessary support from the candidate’s ethnic and geographic bases.

The contenders at yesterday’s forum on the environment, which was held in a third-floor conference room at Baruch College, touted their records as the “greenest” candidates. Besides Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. Stringer, they included another assemblyman, Adriano Espaillat, two other current council members, Bill Perkins and Margarita Lopez, and a former council member, Stanley Michels.

Ms. Lopez called Manhattan’s parks the “lungs of the city” Mr. Michels said they were “jewels,” and Ms. Moskowitz referred to them as “urban oases.”

When the conversation turned to increasing the number of buildings that use environmentally sound materials, such as solar paneling and recycled glass, Mr. Stringer said: “This is not just about an issue of having vegetables on the roof.”

Though in this race the issues are likely to take a backseat to the politics, the candidates spent the morning talking about their positions on a ban of cars in Central Park, on tax incentives for encouraging “green” development, and on the mayor’s recent plan for revamping the way trash is carted out of the city.

Since the Board of Estimate was disbanded as a result of City Charter revision in 1989, the borough presidents’ offices have been viewed as hamstrung. Yet with term limits now forcing candidates out of the council, it has also become a launching pad for higher office.

The current borough president, C. Virginia Fields, is herself running for mayor, though her campaign has been called lackluster and she has not been able to raise as much money as her opponents have. Her predecessor, Ruth Messinger, was the 1997 Democratic candidate for mayor. And the current Democratic mayoral front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, was Bronx borough president until four years ago.

The Democratic candidates who did not attend yesterday’s forum are an assemblyman, Keith Wright; a former city administrator, Carlos Manzano, and a lawyer, Brian Ellner. Also seeking the office are a Republican, Barry Popik, and an Independence Party candidate, Jesse Fields.

Though the mayoral candidates are getting ready – and in some cases have already started – to flood the airwaves with commercials, the candidates for borough president are running local operations and getting minimal public attention.

With a spending cap of $1.2 million, no run-off election, and a little-known Republican challenger, the candidate with the highest percentage of the primary vote is expected to sail into office.

Some candidates have already started sending direct mail. The Moskowitz mailing, which has the theme “Don’t get mad, get Eva,” is just one example.

Political observers said that with three Hispanic, two black, and two white Democrats from all over the borough, the results are anyone’s guess.

“You might as well throw up a coin and see what happens,” the director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, Maurice Carroll, said. “It’s one of those elections where you’re going to be watching for the raw returns not knowing how it’s going to turn out.”

“Is it an important job? Not really. But is it something that puts you in the running for the big prize?” he said, referring to the mayoralty. “Yeah, it is.”