Nearly everyone at a recent lunchtime symposium at the Council on Foreign Relations showed up punctually. That gave the guests ample time to tuck into poached salmon and baked asparagus and chat with one another, mainly about the council – oft-used opening: “Are you new to the council?” – before the program started. Well after the doors had been fastened shut and an expert on nuclear terrorism, Graham Allison, had started sharing his thoughts from the podium, the door creaked open to let in a shaggy-haired, goateed latecomer. He found a seat near the door and, with crossed arms and a slight slouch, watched the proceedings with a rapt, sometimes bemused expression, exactly as expected of the naughty kid in the back of the class.

Ever since speaking on opening night at the Republican National Convention, the actor Ron Silver has been focused on the election campaign, doing everything he can to absorb as much information as possible and engage whoever will listen. When he’s not attending an event like the one at the council’s building on East 68th Street, chances are he’s in his Park Avenue apartment reading books and newspapers to bone up on current events. Some days, he says, he spends 10 hours reading.

He’s also become the one of the Republican administration’s few champions in the Hollywood community, appearing on talk shows and drafting op-ed pieces promoting President Bush’s international policies. While he still espouses liberal beliefs when it comes to social issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research, and health care, Mr. Silver couldn’t be keener on Mr. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq.

“This issue to me trumps everything. I don’t care about health care right now. I don’t mean I don’t care – I’d like to fight that war later.”

When the luncheon adjourned, a former executive editor of the New York Times, A.M. Rosenthal, approached the actor and clapped him on the back. “You’re doing a fantastic job,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Silver said, beaming.

Early the following morning, Mr. Silver was at the restaurant at the Regency Hotel, wearing a dark suit, his tortoise-shell Ray-Bans tucked into the pocket. Most of the gentlemen working on their $30 plates of eggs seemed to know one another, and Mr. Silver was no exception. Several early risers approached his table, shaking his hand warmly, some coming over to confirm that he would be flying out to Los Angeles that weekend for a party.

A trim, dark-haired man, also in a dark suit, approached the table. It was Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois.

Mr. Silver perked up. “Congressman,” he said. “How are you? You were very good the other morning.”

“What were you doing there?” Mr. Emanuel said, presumably talking about the convention. “F– you, f– you. Don’t ever do that again. Happy, healthy New Year to you and the family.”

“Nice!” Mr. Silver turned to the reporter. “Do you believe that? You’re supposed to say ‘Happy new year’ before.”

Over a pricey breakfast of coffee with Lactaid; soft-boiled eggs carefully removed from their shells; a plate of lox, capers, and minced onions, and a toasted poppy-seed bagel, Mr. Silver spoke for hours, primarily defending his post-9/11 political conversion. He was passionate and hyper-verbal, sometimes giving off the air of a student who’d stayed up for three nights cramming for his defense of a thesis. His monologues hop scotched from Truman and the Ottoman Empire to the Wahabi sect of Islam and the sexual freedoms that pervade the Western world. His peroration had an air of the fanatical, but he knew his stuff.

His speech earned Mr. Silver more than a handful of peeved friends – including Senator Kerry, with whom he palled around a year ago at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association. At the dinner, the Massachusetts Democrat approached Mr. Silver, put him in a playful headlock, and asked if the actor had a problem with him. “It was embarrassing,” said Mr. Silver. “I’m 5’9″ and he’s 6’4″.” Mr. Kerry invited him over for a post-dinner drink. Mr. Silver said they had an amusing time and haven’t spoken since.

He doesn’t know Mr. Bush as well as he knows the Texan’s opponent. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like him,” Mr. Silver said of the president. “He did go to Yale. Even if he got in because he was privileged, he was still exposed to a lot of smart people in a smart environment.”

He went on to say Mr. Bush is “tremendously emotionally behaviorally smart.” Does that mean the president would make a good actor? “No.”

Like President Reagan, Mr. Silver, who is in his 50s, once was a Democrat – he attended the Democratic National Convention more than once. Like Reagan, he also was a union leader – he served as president of Actors Equity for the better part of the 1990s. Mr. Silver also founded Creative Coalition, a group that defends First Amendment rights.

Mr. Silver said, though, that his conservative leanings didn’t come from nowhere. When he was a student, during the Vietnam War, he was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and starting in the early 1980s he was a staunch supporter of Rudolph Giuliani.

Mr. Silver said he hasn’t entirely become a social pariah in New York, but it’s been a little more difficult in Los Angeles. In his speech at the convention, he alluded to Hollywood types who won’t actually do anything about any of the world’s problems. “They catalog and bring to light certain problems, but they go nowhere near certain resolutions,” he said, between gulps of egg. “Particularly if the resolution requires force, particularly if the force requires Americans,” he said.

The makeup of the Democratic Party, too, has been particularly disappointing to Mr. Silver, who says he’s watched it shift from moderate Clintonism to “the party of Michael Moore, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich.”

“If they dominate and it’s not the party of Joe Biden and Lieberman,” Mr. Silver said, “then I have a problem with the Party.”

A special batch of vitriol is reserved for Mr. Moore, whose mere name causes Mr. Silver to shudder. The actor even worked on a documentary called “Fahrenhype 9/11,” released on DVD the same day the “Fahrenheit 9/11” DVD came out. He said Mr. Moore’s film left him “horrified,” and his rebuttal, in which he serves as narrator and makes an onscreen appearance, offers a point-for-point response to the blockbuster. He has not heard from Mr. Moore.

As engaged as Mr. Silver continues to be in the battle for the presidency, he doesn’t think his role is to sway people. “Have you actually met any undecideds?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “I sure haven’t.” His children, Alexandra, 21, a comparative-literature major at Princeton, and Adam, 25, a writer, are Kerry supporters. So are his girlfriend, Catherine de Castelbajac, a former model, and his parents.

Even if Mr. Silver doesn’t think he’ll win people over, though, he enjoys defending his views on television. “Yeah, it’s fun,” he said. “Look, have you said more than five words? I enjoy talking. I pay a lot of attention to this.”

Mr. Silver first came to celebrity when he played a geeky neighbor on the television show “Rhoda.” His more notable roles since included playing Alan Dershowitz in “Reversal of Fortune” and Angelo Dundee in “Ali.” He won a Tony for his performance in “Speed the Plow” in 1988. The acting has simmered down for the past year or so, but once the election is over, he said, his focus will tilt back toward his primary career.

Asked about campaign-season gossip that he is hoping to run for the Senate, Mr. Silver told The New York Sun: “I don’t know where you heard that rumor, but I have no plans at the moment. We have two senators in New York State and they’re okay.”

Actually, it is in California that Mr. Silver dropped his Democratic voter enrollment recently, registering instead as an independent.

In the foreseeable future, however, he does plan to spend most of his time in New York, where he’s looking to get a one-character play about the rock impresario Bill Graham produced. Also, Mr. Silver, who appeared on “Law and Order” last month as an attorney defending an Iraqi murderer, hopes to get more TV work based in the city.

Leaving the Regency restaurant, Mr. Silver stopped by the maitre d’station.

“They took my papers when we switched tables,” he told the manager, and he helped himself to copies of the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Sun. “There goes another day wasted!” Ron Silver said cheerfully.