The City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, went head-to-head with a budget analyst from the Manhattan Institute on public radio yesterday, in what some viewed as a practice round for Mr. Miller, who plans to run for mayor next year.

As guests on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” which is featuring “30 issues in 30 days” leading up to next month’s national election, Mr. Miller and fiscal conservative E.J. McMahon took sides on issue number 12: Which presidential candidate would be better for New York City?

The men devoted most of the discussion to taxes and the economy, with each man hitting his political cue. They also touched on education funds in connection with the No Child Left Behind Act.

True, no pollsters scrambled to capture listener response, as many did after last week’s debate between President Bush and Senator Kerry. But as Mr. Miller, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side, gears up for a race next year against Mayor Bloomberg, he could scarcely pass up a 15-minute radio appearance. Political observers also say that going up against a conservative like Mr. McMahon, who has a strong handle on policy, will help Mr. Miller sharpen his message.

“There is the text and there is the subtext,” a political science professor at Baruch College, Douglas Muzzio, said. Coincidentally, Mr. Muzzio was a guest on the second segment of Mr. Lehrer’s show yesterday.

“It puts Giff out front among the Democratic opponents to the mayor and it paints the mayor as ‘the Republican,'” Mr. Muzzio said.

“As debaters and boxers both know, it is better to keep sparring to keep yourself sharp,” Mr. Muzzio said.

One of the few pundits known to have listened to yesterday’s radio debate, he said the council speaker did a good job, considering his opponent’s command of the issues.

Though Mr. Miller has been on Mr. Lehrer’s show before and has been mentioned in thousands of news stories in the past few years, he has little name recognition beyond government circles.

“Mayors are not seen as City Council speakers or councilmen,” a political consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, said. “Mayors are seen as larger figures. This helps him do that. It allows him to establish himself as an ideological Democrat in a city where the Democratic registration is overwhelming.”

Though some observers of city politics privately mused that it is difficult to produce an honest debate between a policy specialist and a politician, regardless of party affiliation, Mr. Lehrer did not let either guest coast.

When Mr. Miller said the city was sending $11.5 billion more to Washington than it was getting in return, up from $6.5 billion a year when Mr. Bush took office, Mr. Lehrer needled him to find out where the speaker was drawing his numbers from.

The same happened when Mr. McMahon argued that the Bush tax cuts had pumped $14 billion into the city’s economy, which he said was nearly $6 billion in savings to New York City residents and “more than the total amount of federal aid in the city budget.”

In urging the election of Mr. Kerry, Mr. Miller said: “The tax cuts President Bush enacted went to a very small sliver of New Yorkers. The vast majority went to about 11,000 millionaires out of 2.5 million households in the city of New York.”

Mr. McMahon rebutted, saying the speaker was “just wrong,” and arguing that a typical family of four got a 35% tax savings under the plan. And, he said, the tax breaks had the effect of pumping money into the stock market, helping Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Miller balance the city budget.

Mr. Miller said the federal tax cuts were precisely the reason the city had to raise taxes. The heavy local tax burden was paying for security, education, and other government services because the federal government was fail ing to support the city, he said.

When the federal government released intelligence suggesting that corporations, such as Citigroup, could be terrorist targets, Mr. Miller said, the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, called the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, to give him a “heads up,” but the administration did not give any money to the city to pay for security.

“Look, bottom line, Brian, New Yorkers are not better off than they were four years ago,” Mr. Miller said, repeating a mantra he has trotted out during news conferences at City Hall. “We are less safe, we are less secure, and we are less prosperous.”

The mayor’s press secretary, Edward Skyler, said the inequity in federal funds, for which Mr. Miller blamed the Bush administration, existed under the Clinton administration. And Mr. Bloomberg – a Republican – has himself made funds for security a major platform of his administration, flying to Washington on a number of occasions for meetings with the administration.

Mr. McMahon said Mr. Miller was playing a “political game” by complaining about the deficit and demanding more services. He said a Kerry presidency would suppress New York’s economy.

As the segment wrapped up, there was no indication that the guests were any closer to agreement or that any sentiments were swayed in the Bush-Kerry race. The two callers to Mr. Lehrer came down on opposite sites of the election.