The former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, is now a New Yorker. Large and prosperous, ruddy-faced and golden-maned, he is a partner in a private equity firm a block from Central Park. In his small office, the walls are painted green and are almost bare, tables are stacked with papers, and a lone stuffed armadillo sits on the windowsill spying out on the pedestrians of Madison Avenue. It seems a wry homage to Jim Hightower’s line that “the only thing that belongs in the middle of the road is a yellow line and a dead armadillo.”

Mr. Weld may feel at times that his political career has gone the way of that armadillo, but there is ample evidence that his influence is alive and kicking. When he was first elected governor in 1990, there were virtually no Republican governors in the Northeast. Now they are the rule rather than the exception. Not coincidentally, all follow the political trail blazed by the fair-haired former U.S. attorney: fiscal conservatives who are tough on crime, but moderate on many social issues. The rising stars who were chosen to highlight this year’s Republican convention – Mayor Giuliani, Senator McCain, and Governor Schwarzenegger – also represent this wing of the party and are widely popular as a result.

There were many people who believed that Mr. Weld would be heading a presidential ticket by now. But in 1996, the irresistible force who had recently won re-election as governor with more than 70% of the vote ran into an immovable object named John Kerry.

It was a senate race dubbed the Battle of the Brahmins. They held eight debates across the state, in a high-minded attempt to approximate the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Governor Weld and the voters of Massachusetts were treated to an up-close seminar in Senator Kerry’s vaunted debating style, which President Bush will face tomorrow night in Florida. Because of this front-line experience, Mr. Weld has been enjoying something of a personal renaissance in Republican establishment circles, summoned to Arlington, Va., to offer his perspective to key Bush team members Ken Mehlman, Karen Hughes, and Karl Rove. The admiration Mr. Weld expresses for the talents of his former opponent is real, as is his desire to see him defeated in November.

“It’s been a good year for the political consumer,” Mr. Weld says, leaning back in his red leather chair – “good theater, good combat.” He describes John Kerry as “probably the most articulate person on the national scene today – he really is a wordsmith, probably more than some of his staff would like…The stuff of policy debate is the stuff that makes his heart go pitter-pat. He’s not someone who’s going to be nervous about these debates…this is the ice cream as far as he’s concerned.”

Lest this description bring to mind the drone-like attention to detail of a northeastern Al Gore, Mr. Weld reminds that Mr. Kerry enjoys the thrust and parry of debate, combining a flair for the comparatively dramatic with a will to win that Mr. Bush might recognize. “One of Senator Kerry’s strengths is his ability to pivot,” Mr. Weld recalls. “You have to watch out for the response suddenly being 135 degrees different from the question asked…I remember once saying to him [in a debate], ‘Senator Kerry, you’ve been taking a lot of free housing from people who might have had business before your committees, that really raises an ethics question.’ His answer was ‘Ethics? I’ll tell you what raises an ethics question – children in this state go to bed hungry, they can’t get health insurance, etc.’ It sounded good. But it was not what we would call responsive.”

So what would the governor recommend to the president? “My advice would be to not try to twist the tiger’s tail; not try to out-debate the guy. If you get in some hair-splitting Jesuitical argument, you’re gone.”

Mr. Weld says he considers the presidential race far from over, despite Mr. Bush’s rise in the polls and Mr. Kerry’s stumbles into defensive Dukakis territory. “I don’t think a phrase is ever fatal unless it reinforces negative feelings that people already had about you,” Mr. Weld reflects with a steady eye aimed toward objectivity. “It’s a long race and a big country – anyone can get over a couple of stumbles if they rear up on their hind legs and tell the truth in the way that Harry Truman did in ’48.”

Mr. Kerry’s reputation as a strong closer – increasingly the thin reed that the Democrat’s supporters hang their hopes on – comes from his pulling away from the pack in the last days of the 1996 election. Messrs. Weld and Kerry had been neck and neck in the polls for months, but with 10 days to go in the campaign Mr. Kerry and his chief consultant Bob Shrum released a television ad tying the Republican governor to Newt Gingrinch, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Al D’Amato. “Those names are all fighting words in Massachusetts,” Mr. Weld says, and with that nationalization of the race in a state with a three-to-one Democratic advantage, Republicans lost their best chance to send one of their own to the Senate from the Bay State. Soon after, Senator Helms torpedoed Mr. Weld’s nomination to serve as ambassador to Mexico, and the rising giant was left politically homeless.

It is a long way from visions of Pennsylvania Avenue to a perch above Madison Avenue, but from this vantage point Mr. Weld can take some satisfaction in both his material success and the emerging direction of the GOP. “I’ve always said about the Republican Party that the North will rise again…maybe as early as ’08….It could be very interesting if you had two or three candidates, like Giuliani, Romney. and Pataki all running,” he says.

He sees himself as now being representative of the center of his party: “I was so conservative on tax policies, on the crime issue, and the welfare issue…in a way except for abortion and gay rights, I look like a real conservative.” As for other labels, there is one he clearly doesn’t mind – “Call me a libertarian – throw me in that briar patch.” And while the former governor disavows any further aims on public office, the deep-freeze he was put in is clearly thawing. Private ruminations on the fate of his stuffed armadillo can even be soothed with this retort from President Eisenhower, another Republican derided by conservative critics as liberal: “The middle of the road is all of the useable surface; the extremes of left and right are in the gutters.”