Thomas Ognibene drives himself everywhere in his big, white Land Rover. Of all the differences between his campaign and those of the more prominent mayoral candidates, that might not be the most glaring, but its effects are deeply felt. “You find it hard to park, and you can never get there,” the former City Council member from Middle Village, Queens, said. “The mayor, the speaker, the borough president, the congressman – they all get a driver and a car, so it’s easier for them. You pull up, you get out, you do your thing, and somebody waits in the car. I ain’t got that. I got to park 10 blocks away, and then I got to get there.”

Driving to a Saturday night fundraising event that the America Bangladesh Friendship Society was holding for him this month, the 62-year-old Republican took the scenic route, pointing out neighborhood highlights for the benefit of a passenger, such as the Juniper Valley Park baseball fields and the sycamore trees that line his block. His seat had been pushed back as far as it would go, but he still looked cramped behind the wheel, ducking his head down every time he needed to get a good look out the window. Mr. Ognibene’s wife, Margaret, 61, sat in the back, in a sea of campaign forms and leaflets.

The candidate acted as if he had all the time in the world, braking to point out any little thing. When he passed a street of local shops, he was inspired to expound on his fondness for mom-and-pop stores. “This is why I’ve never been very happy with these big retail outlets,” Mr. Ognibene said. “You might pay a few more pennies, but it’s convenient to walk there, plus if they go out of business, what are you going to get in there? You get in sometimes these …”

“Ninety-nine-cent stores,” Mrs. Ognibene offered from the back of the car.

“I call them schlock, that’s the word I’m looking for,” her husband said.

“The schlocky stores, you know, you get everything under 99 cents,” he said. “They put up stands out in the front, and they just throw some stuff in there, and people go in there and they grab-bag. It just – it makes the neighborhood look pretty grungy.”

***

Thomas Ognibene, a polar bear of a man at 6 feet 3 inches and 260 pounds, looks the part of the elder statesman. He has startlingly white hair and a ruddy, kind-looking face. He’s a gentleman of the old school, opening doors for others, deferring to old ladies.

The Bangladesh event, held in the basement of a church in Jackson Heights, was very low-key and very lightly attended.

“Mimi,” Mr. Ognibene asked one of his volunteers, “where are all the Bangladeshi people?”

“A few are coming,” she replied.

Seeming satisfied, he resumed his conversation with a couple of reporters.

“This is what I do,” the mayor’s leading challenger for the Republican nomination said, and he smiled. “If you can raise me a couple of thousand dollars, I’m pleased as punch.”

The Queens lawyer says he’s running for mayor because it’s “the right thing to do,” given the declining state of the Republican Party. The long odds make it difficult to ascribe any other motive to Mr. Ognibene’s quest. Since announcing his mayoral run in January, he’s been visiting Republican and Conservative political clubs, mainly in the outer boroughs, trying to shore up the party activists’ sense of disenfranchisement.

Four years ago, Mr. Ognibene helped the neophyte Republican candidate, Michael Bloomberg, but now he feels the mayor has distanced himself from the party. The challenger’s main objections to the Bloomberg mayoralty are the tax increases, the smoking ban, and what he sees as a liberal social agenda.

It is only when speaking about Mr. Bloomberg that Mr. Ognibene edges toward orneriness. His voice booms majestically, and he can’t stop himself from pointing his finger in the air and banging his knuckles against tabletops.

Say what you will about Mr. Ognibene, but you can’t say he owes anything to polling or market testing. The views he puts forward may not be popular in a largely Democratic city: He wants tougher law enforcement, stricter laws concerning immigration, and a school system that encourages unmotivated students to drop out.

“When you are such an overwhelming underdog, when you’re licking stamps at your dining-room table, that speaks to something,” his successor as leader of the tiny Republican delegation to the City Council, James Oddo of Staten Island, said. “There’s a truth that Tom wants to give voice to. You’re going to get 100% unadulterated Tom Ognibene.”

Mr. Ognibene’s supporters contend that the mayor, who lives in an Upper East Side brownstone, never reached out to Republicans beyond Manhattan until the mayoral race began.

“Many outer-borough Republicans feel alienated, and Ognibene is taking up their cause,” a political consultant, George Arzt, said. “He is running to be a martyr for the conservative Republicans.”

And if he loses? “Well, what happens if I lose?” Mr. Ognibene asked, and he shrugged his shoulders. “I’m 62 years old. If I get another 20, I’ll be happy. I have at this point accomplished 75% of my goal. The mayor has met with Republicans and admitted his allegiance. I made him do the thing he didn’t want to do.”

“He was always a bull in a china closet,” the chairman of the Brooklyn Conservative Party, Gerard Kassar, said of Mr. Ognibene. “Has he become more outspoken? Yes. When Giuliani was the mayor, the atmosphere was different, and the Democrats were the combatants. Now, to tell you the truth, he’s fighting against everybody.”

***

The Ognibene campaign consists, for the most part, of Thomas and Margaret Ognibene. The couple lives with their two greyhounds and their 36-year-old son, Guy, who’s interviewing for a job as a plane mechanic. Despite recent health troubles – Mr. Ognibene has had three heart attacks in the past half dozen years, and Mrs. Ognibene recently underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer – the two fight tirelessly. The dining-room table in their brick row house has been converted into a repository for campaign-related clipboards, envelopes, and maps. A few friends volunteer by stuffing envelopes, which they do out of their homes so they can watch television at the same time. There have been five fund-raising events so far, with varying success.

“I had one in the Rockaways with six people,” Mr. Ognibene said, “and I had another one with 140 people.”

So far the campaign is said to have raised $52,000 – one-fifth of the $250,000 needed to qualify for public matching funds. The playing field is about as uneven as it gets: Mr. Bloomberg spent $74 million on his campaign four years ago.

The average Ognibene donor contributes about $60, although a real estate honcho and Bloomberg foe, Leonard Litwin, wrote a check for $4,950. Raising money in a city where everyone wants to support the winning horse is hard, but at the moment an even greater concern is collecting the 1,000 signatures of enrolled Republicans needed to get on the ballot for the September primary. That is proving difficult: Mr. Ognibene has one person collecting signatures, and he said the Bloomberg campaign has mounted so large an operation that just Mr. Ognibene’s neighborhood in Queens has been flooded with 40 signature-seekers.

The other day, a member of the Bloomberg team rang Mr. Ognibene’s doorbell, asking for his signature. To prevent the volunteer from going on to collect more signatures, Mr. Ognibene engaged the man in conversation and kept him on the doorstep for half an hour.

“You’re not going to get any more signatures, you’re going to stand and talk to me – that’s how you stop people from ringing your doorbell,” Mr. Ognibene said. “I think they wanted me to become angry.”

His war with Mr. Bloomberg may be ideological, but there’s a personal element as well. Four years ago, Mr. Ognibene helped spearhead Mr. Bloomberg’s petitioning drive in Queens, which produced 15,000 signatures. When Mr. Bloomberg was elected and term limits forced Mr. Ognibene to leave the City Council, Mr. Ognibene expected to receive an appointment in the new administration. None materialized.

“I think he was hurt, and I think he’s right to be hurt,” a former chairman of the Queens Republican Party, Robert Bishop, said. Mr. Bishop is now a Bloomberg supporter.

Mr. Ognibene said that since the last election, the mayor has said hello to him on only two occasions. He also contended that earlier this year, the day after he announced his intention to run for mayor at the Rockaway Republican Club, a representative of the Bloomberg campaign met with him at a Starbucks and offered him a $145,000-a-year job in the re-election campaign. The Bloomberg forces have said they did not know he was running.

“They wanted me out of the race,” he said. “I’m responsible now for him hiring more Republicans in the last two months than he’s hired in three and a half years. He never gave Republicans judgeships or high-level policy positions before that. All the people working at City Hall are David Dinkins or Ed Koch retreads. Most of the people that are working against me now were the people who came to me and said, ‘Tom, you’ve got to run and go against Bloomberg.’ And then they all sold out and left me out there by myself to represent the Republican Party. It’s very depressing.”

***

Mr. Ognibene was raised on 139th Street in the Bronx. His father, Morris, a Sicilian immigrant, was a housepainter. He describes his mother, Josephine, as a “zaftig woman” who wasn’t a fan of smiles or hugs. “She browbeat me pretty good,” he said.

As a boy, he played opera music on the piano and was made fun of by the neighborhood kids, an experience he believes sparked his tough-guy routine in college. The family started out fairly comfortably, but when Morris had a heart attack in 1962, they struggled – his mother went back to work, first as a teacher, then as a high school principal. Tom skipped a grade in high school and enrolled at New York University’s Bronx campus at age 16. The shy boy suddenly blossomed into a large, hard-partying fraternity brother nicknamed “the Og,” or “Odd Og Son of Fire.” He liked everything about school – except school.

“I think he was sowing wild oats,” his wife said. “He wasn’t putting the effort in.”

He was kicked out, and he waited a year before enrolling at C.W. Post. “I went from godlike status on campus to being a nobody,” he said. At that point, though, he’d grown up some, and he called up Margaret, a nice girl from Queens he’d gone on a blind date with in his NYU days. The two met up outside Saks Fifth Avenue, went to see “Zorba the Greek,” and then had drinks at a fancy hotel bar. Mr. Ognibene nervously told his date he didn’t have enough money to pay for the drinks, but she ordered another one anyway. “That’s when I knew I was in love with her,” he said. They’ve been married 38 years.

“He’s not the flower type, but he’s the guy who says, ‘Did I tell you I love you today?’ ” Mrs. Ognibene said. “It’s a partnership. We work together.”

Still a student at Post, the young Mr. Ognibene was disgusted by the Vietnam-era anti-war protesters, he said, and enlisted in the Army. He married his sweetheart and then spent three years in the armored division at Fort Knox, in Kentucky.

“You could hear them shooting the guns,” Mrs. Ognibene said. “It actually sounded like you were in the middle of a war.”

When the couple returned to New York in 1970, they settled in the Glendale section of Queens, moving to Middle Village in 1986. Initially Mr. Ognibene worked in sales for the New York Telephone Company by day and attended Brooklyn Law School at night. He set up a real estate practice in Ridgewood, which he said was “tedious,” and in 1976, after attending a speech of the Conservative Party leader Serphin Maltese, he wrote a letter asking how he could become involved. Mr. Maltese invited his fan to the party office, and before long Mr. Ognibene was Mr. Maltese’s right-hand man, helping him out with election law and marshaling Queens support for Alfonse D’Amato and George Pataki’s campaigns.

“It was an automatic click. I liked him and he liked me, and I probably identified with him to some extent,” Mr. Maltese, a state senator, said. “He was the same guy he is today. He was brash, he was articulate, he was knowledgeable. He was the way he is now, but a little less self-assured. He was not one of these know-it-alls right out of college. He had some maturity, and that’s why it was easy for him to get along with the old guys in the party.”

In the 1980s, Mr. Ognibene ran for Congress and a judgeship, but none of his campaigns proved successful. In the early 1990s, Mr. Maltese switched to the Republican Party, and his acolyte followed suit.

“I would have preferred they not change,” the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, Michael Long, said. “Tom really knows city government very well, he knows the issues, he’s intelligent, he’s articulate. It’s a shame the Republican Party has shut him down. Lots of donations change people’s minds.”

Mr. Ognibene is expected to lock up the Conservative Party endorsement and run for mayor on its line in November, even if he loses the Republican primary to Mr. Bloomberg or, for that matter, to the mayor’s other challenger, Steven Shaw.

***

In 1993, Thomas Ognibene was sworn in as a member of the City Council, and four years later he became minority leader. He made his mark as an entertaining and powerful debater, always injecting flair and humor into his speeches.

“He was quick-witted, intelligent, fun to debate, and right on point,” a former council speaker, Peter Vallone Sr., recalled. “There was nothing ever personal, which is the mark of the gentleman.”

Mr. Ognibene was regarded as the council member who did Mayor Giuliani’s bidding. He spoke out on behalf of the Republican Party, sometimes causing a stir, as when he wanted to respond to a photograph at the Brooklyn Museum of a nude, dreadlocked woman posing as Christ. He proposed hanging a picture of Aunt Jemima as Christ and Ku Klux Klan members as the disciples. He was talked out of it.

“Tom is a very unique combo of incredible intelligence and zaniness,” the City Council minority leader, James Oddo, who used to work as counsel to Mr. Ognibene, said. “He has the ability to see issues in a way that other people don’t. He’s very much a conservative who gave a voice to a lot of blue-collar and middle-class people. He’s not prepackaged, and sometimes we wish, as his friends and his colleagues, that he were more packaged and reserved.”

In 2002, after Mr. Ognibene left the council, he was told by the Pataki administration that he would be appointed judge of the state Court of Claims. The day of his supposed confirmation, his name came up in an investigation concerning the Department of Buildings. A one-time friend of Mr. Ognibene’s, Ronald Lattanzio, a consultant, testified that he gave gifts and put together fund-raising events for Mr. Ognibene in exchange for favors. Mr. Ognibene acknowledges he took a hotel upgrade and a fishing pole, but said they were gifts from a friend, not bribes. “You don’t take a fishing pole as a bribe, that’s silly,” Mrs. Ognibene said. Mr. Ognibene was never charged, but he didn’t receive the appointment, and only his most loyal friends have supported his mayoral bid. “He felt sold out by everybody,” his wife said.

Mr. Ognibene said he doesn’t regret having helped out people who would end up walking away from him.

“The only thing I worry about is maybe I didn’t do enough for my family,” he said. “If I’d been more selfish, maybe that would have been good.”

After his departure from the council, Mr. Ognibene fell into a funk. He didn’t feel like himself again until he started following the presidential race last year. His wife told him she hadn’t seen him so invigorated in ages. He had to run for mayor.

Mrs. Ognibene likens her husband to Luca Brasi, the character in “The Godfather”: “Everyone called on you, but nobody wanted you at their wedding. It’s depressing,” Mr. Ognibene said as he circled around the parking lot at the Sizzler steakhouse in Forest Hills, where a monthly meeting of a Republican club is held. The lot appeared to be full, but on his way out, he spotted an empty spot in the corner. He nosed his way into it and muttered, “You’ve just got to keep the faith.”