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"I've been impressed by the depth of at least their understanding of the issues," Jones says of the sit-downs with Clinton and Edwards. "The question of whether that will translate into being a principal part of their platform remains to be seen."

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Jarrett Murphy
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Political strategy and media agenda-setting will, of course, determine the answer to that question, and in those calculations cities might get a boost from the blurring of lines between the worries of urban America and everybody else. "Increasingly, suburbanites and urbanites care about the same things," says Dreier. "There's a lot more poverty in the suburbs. There's growing recognition that poverty is not just an urban issue."

Fred Siegel, a Cooper Union professor and biographer of Giuliani, agrees. "The division between urban affairs and national affairs is not as sharp as it might once have been, especially since welfare reform was introduced on a local level," he says.

That blurring process, however, faces a significant obstacle: the historical anti-urban bias in U.S. politics that dates back to Thomas Jefferson, which casts rural America as the "heartland" and urban areas as centers of crime and corruption. "There's been kind of a suspicion and dread" of cities, says historian Paul Boller, author of "Presidential Campaigns" and other books about races for the White House, "and I honestly think some of that continues."

- Jarrett Murphy