The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, wakes up early a few mornings each week to stand outside schools and hand out fliers calling for reduced class sizes. On one such occasion last month, on a crisp and sunny Tuesday, the actress Cynthia Nixon joined him by the playground of the Upper West Side’s P.S. 87. Parents, eager to get to their cubicles or their spinning classes on time, brushed past Mr. Miller. A few less harried individuals gravitated toward Ms. Nixon, who played Miranda on television’s “Sex and the City.” As the morning dragged on, the speaker’s posture faltered and he started to tap his toes nervously, calling to mind a businessman waiting for a commuter train. “He should take advantage of the celebrity there,” a photographer from a tabloid newspaper groused, gesturing at the acres of space between the two special guests. “He’s not too good at photos.”

At 35, Mr. Miller is a full five years younger than the second-youngest candidate for mayor, Rep. Anthony Weiner. Mr. Miller likes to say his youth is an asset, stressing that his energy and idealism have not been quashed by decades of disappointing reality, but – unlike Mr. Weiner – he doesn’t campaign with the pluck and abandon of somebody who feels entirely proud to be the baby of the bunch. Although he has made a name for himself within city government circles for his quick wit and political astuteness, in his quest to become mayor, he presents himself as a buttoned-up grown-up, parting his hair neatly on the side and wearing on his sleeve his affection for the musical stylings of Neil Diamond.

“The thing people don’t understand about him is his regular-guyness,” one of Mr. Miller’s friends and political allies, Eric Gioia, a council member from Queens, said last month. “He loves his wife, he loves his kids, he loves New York, he likes to give a barbecue and grab a beer on the weekends.”

There seems always to be a disconnect between a political candidate’s public and private faces, and Mr. Miller seldom shows voters his drollness and playfulness. In public settings, such as campaign forums and visits to community groups, he sticks to the straight stuff: statistics, the issues, his record. He’s so wary of straying from the message that, after each of two recent community Q &A events, a member of the audience asked Mr. Miller: “Can you tell us something about yourself?” Each time he seemed slightly embarrassed.

“I like the Yankees. I like to cook. I like to read,” the Upper East Sider answered. “I’m kind of boring.”

“All the other candidates are older and more seasoned. They have a veneer of glibness, and they’re constantly performing,” a political consultant, Martin Begun, said. A member of the Lenox Democratic Club, which is Mr. Miller’s old stomping ground, Mr. Begun said: “Is Giff comfortable with it? I don’t think so. And that’s to the good. He’s not putting on any airs.”

And Mr. Miller has charm. He thrives in familiar company, and when he’s not angling for strangers’ affections, he deploys his skill for repartee. At the council he can work a room, squeezing colleagues’ shoulders and elbows as he whispers mysterious messages into their ears. He’s good at being the insider – he’s raised more campaign money, $7 million, and received more endorsements than his competitors. Yet when it comes to the voting public, he’s last in show: Polls asking registered Democrats about their party’s four contenders showed only about 11% in his corner.

Mr. Miller travels around with two bodyguards, one of whom is never at a loss for words, while the other is virtually silent. The other night, as Mr. Miller was driven to seven events in three boroughs, a baseball game played at low volume on the radio. There was little talk of politics. When he wasn’t calling his wife and kids – “It’s not Daddy,” he said in a cartoon voice, “it’s Elmo calling!” – he was rhapsodizing about the wonderful food he’s tasted on the campaign trail.

“I will hear from Gifford on the phone 11 times a day,” his wife, Pamela, told The New York Sun. “Every time he’s in the car and he has a minute to spare, he calls. Or if he’s nearby he’ll run over and read a book to the kids.”

In his campaign car the conversation resembled one that you might find in, say, a coffee shop on a sitcom: Everything was upbeat and tame, and the in-jokes kept coming.

“I could really go for a plate of radeech,” Mr. Miller said, and the entourage laughed. “Do you like radeech?” he asked the Sun, and waited a beat before explaining that “radeech” is one of the crowd’s jokes. It originated another night on the campaign trail, when Mr. Miller announced that he was hungry and he wanted a plate of radeech. “It just sounds so good. Radeech. Doesn’t it sound delicious?” Mr. Miller said. From the back of the vehicle, an aide named Matt – whom Mr. Miller jokingly calls “Bob” – said radeech is better grilled than fried, and everybody laughed some more.

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The topmost issues Gifford Miller brings up are improving education, ensuring the city a fair share of state spending, and making progress toward economic parity among the city’s residents. To most Democrats, there’s nothing wacky, or even distinctive, about his ideas. By his own estimation, he’s “middle of the road – for New York.” When Mr. Miller draws fire from critics in his party, it’s usually for playing it safe and trying to please everybody. Last April he told a contingent of businessmen he was “not reflexively opposed to a stadium for that site,” and it wasn’t until October that he came down against the West Side stadium.

As council speaker he’s built up trust and relationships with all the communities of the city, by promoting legislation, meeting with community leaders, and showing up at events, some smaller than others. An African-American council member from Brooklyn, Charles Barron, who dropped out of the 2005 mayoral contest and who often takes contrary positions, said of his party’s leader in the council: “He has a tendency to hold his finger in air and wet it and see which way the wind is blowing. He tries to appease bankers, the real estate community, black and Latinos, and he ends up all over the place.”

Mr. Miller is pitching himself as an alternative to Mayor Bloomberg, as somebody who can turn the city around and start it moving in “the right direction.” He points to his firsthand knowledge of the ins and outs of city government, promising to draw on the knowledge he’s amassed in his career in city politics.

“I will have passed four budgets. I’ve served on eight committees. What I love about city government is it’s practical. When I say we should take the tax surcharge on people earning over $500,000 a year and put it toward reducing class size, it’s easily quantifiable. You know where the money is going to go. And when I walk into classes you can actually walk in and see the difference. The successes are more immediate, and the failures are more immediate. Idealism in a sense is a great thing – but it’s the practical things that change lives.”

As speaker, Mr. Miller’s job is essentially to make the council run as smoothly and productively as possible. He largely controls who sits on what committee and which legislation makes it to the floor. He is supposed to build consensus among the 51 council members – 48 of them Democrats – and he is supposed to drive issues, but he must take care not to be overbearing. On Mr. Miller’s watch, the council has passed laws on lead paint, alternative fuel, and pesticides. A law on environmental building construction is due to pass in the next few months.

“He is a person who is in charge of herding all the cats,” a political consultant and former Koch aide and reporter, George Arzt, said. “There are 51 different voices and they all get so easily distracted and they all want to get their names on pieces of legislation. It’s very tough to round up all the votes.”

“When term limits were approaching, everyone was saying, ‘It’s going to be impossible to manage, it’s going to be utter chaos,'” the other council member from the Upper East Side, Eva Moskowitz, said. “There has been a level of democracy and order, and the order is important in political negotiations when you’re challenging the mayor, the 800-pound gorilla.”

Mr. Miller’s City Hall office is so neat it looks hardly ever used. The sternness of the cherry-colored leather furniture is offset by huge glossy photographs of Mr. Miller’s saucer-eyed sons, Marshall and Addison. There are also several pictures of President Clinton. And then, right on the windowsill, is a photograph of Mr. Miller posing with a certain 800-pound gorilla.

“He’s the mayor, I’m the speaker,” he said. “We have to find a way to work together.”

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Gifford Miller’s younger brother by less than two years, Marshall Miller, described him as a good, run-of-the mill kid who liked sports and books.

“He wasn’t the Alex P. Keaton type,” Marshall Miller said, alluding to the Michael J. Fox character in a popular television show of yesteryear, “Family Ties.” “He was a pretty normal kid. If you asked him when he was 14 what he was interested in, it would be the Yankees. … It wasn’t like he was 12 and thought he was going to be president of the United States.”

The brothers grew up in privileged circumstances, in a household on Fifth Avenue near 98th Street where civic participation was emphasized. Their father, Leigh, had been a State Department official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and went on to work for American Express’s international banking division. Their mother, Lynden, is a prominent designer of public gardens, including Bryant Park and parts of the New York Botanical Garden. The kids were exposed to civic participation early on: Both parents served on Community Board 11 of East Harlem. Gifford went to St. Bernard’s School on the Upper East Side and for high school to the Middlesex boarding school.

At that stage, politics wasn’t something he gave much thought to, though he did run, unsuccessfully, for class president – on the platform of delivering cold-water fountains. He also started a group called Students Supporting Participation in Government, which, he concedes, was basically a sham extracurricular activity to put on a college application.

He studied political science at Princeton, where he says he didn’t stand out and wasn’t “much of a joiner.” He belonged to the Cottage Club, one of the dining clubs. “You had to eat,” he said. His senior year he started dating Pamela Addison of San Francisco, who would become his wife seven years later.

After he graduated in 1992, he wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. With a buddy from high school he took the grand tour of Europe, which seems not to have left a big impression on him. “We did the usual,” Mr. Miller said. “Go to the museums, see cathedrals, go to eat, go to bars – the usual thing that everybody does.”

When he returned, his mother helped him get a job at the Parks Department. Everything came into focus that November, when Bill Clinton was elected president. Mr. Miller said he was so inspired he decided to head down to Washington to get a job in the new administration. Somehow, he ended up working for a family acquaintance, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a City Council member from the Upper East Side who won a seat in Congress in that same election. At first Mr. Miller was answering phones, but within three years he had risen to chief of staff.

“He was so hardworking,” Congresswoman Maloney said. “I remember he would interview the interns, and the kids he’d interview would be interviewing at several offices, and trying to figure out where they wanted to work. By the end of a meeting with Gifford, everybody always wanted to work in my office.”

Martin Begun, who knows Mr. Miller from the Lenox Democratic Club, recalled: “He was bright, energetic, affable. I think he’s more of a straight arrow than he wants to be. When I first met him, would I think he was going to become the speaker of City Council? It never would have entered my mind.”

Mr. Miller’s first foray into life as a politician came about when a council member from the Upper East Side, Charles Millard, was rumored to be quitting to work for the Giuliani administration. Even before it was announced the seat was up for grabs, Ms. Maloney’s chief of staff was raising money to run. He met with district leaders and visited political clubs to drum up support. The day after Mr. Millard resigned, Mr. Miller was on the street getting signatures on a nominating petition. “Nobody else was ready,” he said. He won. He was 26.

In 2001, just after his first child, Addison, was born, Mr. Miller set up a political action committee to help 35 council candidates across the city win their elections. It was a part of a strategy to be elected speaker the following year: Spending a year campaigning on the behalf of others would not only win him allies, it would also deepen his knowledge of the city. He still credits that year’s activities for making him more familiar with the five boroughs.

“The summer of 2001 was the first time he disappeared on the campaign trail,” Pamela Miller recalled. “Every morning and every Saturday and Sunday he was working a subway stop. Addison had just been born. That was a tough summer.”

“He was like my therapist for 10 months,” his council colleague Eric Gioia said. “I’d call him every night at 10 o’clock and tell him how my day had gone. He’d say, ‘You did a good job, and get some sleep.'”

Only 18 of the 35 candidates Mr. Miller endorsed ended up winning, but when it came time to vote for a speaker early the next year, Mr. Miller got the post. Those colleagues whom he hadn’t supported still came around to him. “They may not have appreciated it, but they respected it,” Mr. Gioia said.

This year, Mr. Miller has been trying to set aside one day a weekend to hang out with his family, but so far that hasn’t really panned out. He likes to play with the boys, to barbecue, to read. He’s keen on historical novels and science fiction, and though he’s read Robert Caro’s epic biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” three times, he avoids reading books “that have anything to do with my work.” Time for such pleasures, in any event, is scant.

“Every morning he wakes up and he’s ready to go,” Pamela Miller said. “He has a metabolic energy.”

Mr. Miller said the polls don’t mean much to him and there’s still a long way to go between now and the primary in September. It wouldn’t hurt, though, if he figured out a way to get people to stop asking him to tell them a little bit about who he is.

“I don’t focus on being serious,” he said. “I think a lot of situations require seriousness, so I’m serious in them. But there is some truth there are some jokes I can’t make because I’m 35 that might be interpreted the wrong way. I might be able to make them when I’m older.”