After Jeanine Pirro’s campaign for Senate began with a 32-second pause as a misplaced piece of paper denied her the ability to articulate a positive reason why she was running for the office, a cold wind swept through the soul of New York Republicans. They came face to face with their possible future: dead air and a defensive posture.

The last decade has been unusually good to Republicans in the Empire State. Not since the days of Theodore Roosevelt or Nelson Rockefeller have they enjoyed such influence. Beginning with the election of Mayor Giuliani in 1993, they have expanded their base of support by appealing to moderate suburbanites and identifying themselves as urban reformers.

But after 12 years of Governor Pataki’s increasingly lackluster leadership, 2006 is shaping up to be an all-Democratic year, with Senator Clinton apparently cruising toward re-election on the heels of Senator Schumer’s record-breaking near-sweep of the state in 2004. No clear successor to Governor Pataki has emerged, as higher-profile candidates shy away from the assumed uphill fight against Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

But into this bleak scenario suddenly appears a candidate who could change the dynamics of the race. He is a home-grown candidate: a native of Smithtown, Long Island; a veteran of the Reagan Justice Department; a rock ‘n’ roll-loving investment banker in Manhattan; an occasional novelist and hunter with a family home in the Adirondacks. He has a proven record of success in cutting taxes, reforming out-of-control bureaucratic entitlements such as Medicaid, while working constructively with both Democrats and Republicans. And he just happens to be the former governor of Massachusetts.

The rumors about William Weld running for governor of New York have taken on increased creditability in recent days – he is meeting with county leaders and taking the initial steps necessary to be a serious candidate. Many Republicans see Mr. Weld as their best hope to hold on to the governor’s mansion and offer a responsible balance to otherwise complete Democratic control of statewide offices.

On purely political terms, Mr. Weld matches up better against Mr. Spitzer than any other likely Republican candidate with the possible exception of Secretary of State Randy Daniels.

Mr. Weld’s credentials as a former U.S. attorney and associate attorney general under Reagan (he replaced his friend Rudolph Giuliani in that post) blunt Mr. Spitzer’s carefully cultivated law-and-order reformer profile.

Mr. Weld is a fiscally conservative but socially moderate Republican with libertarian values. He is pro-choice and pro-gay rights, pro-medical marijuana but also pro-death penalty. This decisively centrist blue-state Republican profile can reinvigorate the party while winning over the crucial suburban vote.

There is also the issue of temperament and experience. One of the great tests of pre-election analysis is whether voters can envision the person filling the office. With Mr. Weld, it is no great stretch to imagine him as governor – he would become the first American since Sam Houston to serve as governor of two states. More important, a governor needs to be a uniting figure across party lines to be successful. The profile of an activist attorney general is entirely different – it is a prosecutorial role that requires picking fights and sometimes ruthless tactics. Mr. Spitzer has filled that role as well as any state attorney general in the nation’s history, but he has developed a reputation as someone who does not play well with others. His relations even with fellow Democrats are notoriously frosty, especially with Senator Schumer.

In contrast, Mr. Weld is one of the most widely liked political figures in the nation. It is hard to come up with another American who can count both President Bushes, Rudolph Giuliani, and President Clinton and Senator Clinton as personal friends (indeed, it was rumored that Mr. Clinton wanted to appoint Mr. Weld the nation’s attorney general in the event of Janet Reno’s retirement). These broad if unlikely alliances may raise eyebrows in some conservative circles, but it is evidence of Mr. Weld’s healthy ability to reach across party lines in these harshly partisan times. The man has emotional intelligence – the key ingredient for successful political leaders.

There is a flip-side to his maverick persona, and critics point to a lack of focus and follow-through in his political career to date. But despite the fact that he walked away from the Massachusetts governorship mid-term, he walked into that office in a Democratic state dominated by Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis. Republicans have controlled the governor’s mansion ever since, winning four consecutive elections. That’s nothing less than a transformation of a political culture, and that’s precisely what he would be called on to do here.

Without Mr. Weld’s candidacy, the likelihood is that New York voters will wake up in November 2006 with Mr. Spitzer as governor, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer in the Senate and either Mark Green or Andrew Cuomo as attorney general. This political unanimity is unhelpful in dealing with a Republican-controlled White House and Congress, with implications on issues such as homeland-security funding. Working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, another Democrat, it is unlikely this crew will tackle needed reforms in areas such as Medicaid. Albany ossification is likely to get worse as our state teeters closer to bankruptcy.

Mr. Weld has the profile, experience, and political freedom to lead such a reform campaign. As Jeanine Pirro’s “complicated” marriage threatens to become an Empire State version of Massachusetts’s Whitey and Billy Bulger saga, Republicans could use a positive and unifying marquee figure to establish their identity in the post-Pataki era. William Weld could be that person.