Hillary Rodham Clinton sometimes can't help herself. At various moments this week, she promises that the door to her Capitol Hill office will always be open. She talks about putting her connections to work once she is in Washington. She even muses about future lunch dates in the Senate dining room.
Even as she scrabbles for every vote in the tight Senate race here, and even as her lead in some polls narrows to nearly a dead heat in the final days, she always describes a political future with her in it. Many others do, too. If the First Lady manages to energise enough of her supporters to vote - and dampens the enthusiasm of her critics - she could achieve a victory that would make her one of the highest-profile Democratic politicians in the United States by next week.
"She has reinvented herself," says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York Democratic strategist. "She will be an icon for Democrats as long as she wants to be."
The race, however, has turned increasingly nasty, with Ms Clinton and her opponent, Rick Lazio, trading barbs from the stump, through surrogates over the phone and in television ads.
One contretemps is consuming the last week more than any other: Republican Party phone calls to mostly Jewish voters - a segment of the electorate Hillary Clinton has at times stumbled over - have been accusing her of accepting campaign donations from two Muslim groups.
The party phone calls, which Mr Lazio has refused to repudiate, charge that Ms Clinton accepted campaign donations from a group that "openly brags about its support for a Mid-east terrorism group - the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the USS Cole".
Ms Clinton has returned the money but not dropped the matter. This week she accused Mr Lazio, who has refused to apologise for the calls, of exploiting the Cole tragedy for political gain in an ad featuring footage of the damaged ship.
To rouse Jewish voters, Ms Clinton campaigned in New York City with former mayor Ed Koch this week as he led about 100 Jewish pensioners in an oath to run, not walk, to the polls.
Ms Clinton (whom Mr Koch inadvertently introduced as the slightly more ethnic Hillary Rodman Clinton) went one better, urging them to get to the polls before they even open.
Ms Clinton's celebrity is complicated. She is the only Senate candidate with a bomb-sniffing dog. She is also the only one generating almost unparalleled ill-will.
But if the Democrats show up at the polls, Ms Clinton is expected to win. Mr Lazio is counting on lower levels of enthusiasm: with Al Gore expected to defeat George W. Bush easily in New York, many Democrats in the state may not feel the need to turn out.