It looks suspiciously like a campaign ad sweeping through a video medley of New York State Senator John B. Daly's greatest hits. First the camera captures Daly on the Senate floor delivering an impassioned defense of his party's agenda. The scene then shifts to an Albany news conference, where the seven term Republican from the village of Lewiston thumps the podium while angrily demanding control over state welfare and Medicaid spending.

 The short clip does Daly proud. But in case anybody missed the point, and authoritative baritone spells it out as the pictures fade: "In Albany fighting for you, State Senator John Daly."

 What makes Daly's self promotional tape extraordinary is that it is not, in fact, a campaign commercial but a simple perk of Daly's incumbency, paid for entirely by the taxpayers of New York.

 Every week that the Legislature is in session, Daly uses the footage to open his legislative report, a 15 minute television show produced in one of the legislature's state-of-the-art studios in Albany and then shipped to the public access station in his home district. Many of New York's 211 state lawmakers now have similar show of their own, and the Legislature's television-and-radio operation, with three studios and a taxpayer-financed budget of more than $700,000, also sends daily sound bites to local stations for the evening news.

 It is but one cog in what many experts believe is the most sophisticated incumbency protection machine in the country, a machine that hums as smoothly and efficiently as the state owned luxury cars that ferry legislative leaders to Albany.

 Over the years, the State Legislature has skillfully used its license to make its own laws and set its own budget to patch together a virtually impenetrable quilt of self entrenchment. In a year when incumbency is supposed to be a political curse, there may be no place where it continues to provide more of an advantage than the New York State Legislature.

 Statistics show that few things in New York are as safe as a legislative seat. In 1990, 98.9 percent of the incumbent legislators running won re-election, a higher proportion than even the 96.1 percent of incumbents who sought re-election that year to the House of Representatives. It is not a recent phenomenon. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly has had a re-election rate of less than 98 percent in the last three elections. And from 1979 to 1989, New York's legislature had the lowest rate of turnover in the country, according to a study by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

 "Since 1986, state legislators have been more likely to be indicted than to lose a general election," says Julian Palmer, the executive director of New York State Common Cause.

 In New York and elsewhere, post Watergate reforms have made it illegal for lawmakers to profit from their positions and to influence legislation that poses a conflict of interest. But legislators have been far more reluctant to restrict their use of state resources to win re-election.

 And yet, in both theory and practice, incumbency protection is every bit as corrupting of American democracy as a cash stuffed raincoat. By undermining the very notion of free elections, it contributes to widespread voter apathy and makes government unaccountable and unresponsive to the people. 

"In order to have confidence in a democratic system, you have to have competitive election," says Gerald Benjamin, a political scientist at the State University of New York at New Paltz and the Republican chairman of the Ulster County Legislature. "You have to have some semblance of insecurity in order to have accountability."

 Many legislators and even some academics, argue that the tools of incumbency protection level a playing field that requires incumbents, but not their challengers, to run on a record. They maintain that the ethical dividing line between good government and good politics is often difficult to draw. Some even argue that incumbency advantage is good for government because it produces the tenure needed for legislators to best serve their constituents.

 But statistics show that the playing field is far from level in most states, especially New York. "There is no question," says Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, "that our whole system is rigged to keep the incumbents in office."

 The seeming permanence of the legislative class, whether in Albany or Sacramento or Washington, is at the root of the throw-the-bums-out sentiment sweeping the country. Congressional incumbents already have been handed their heads this year in primaries from Georgia to Michigan. In 1990, voters in three states -- California, Colorado and Oklahoma -- enacted term limitations, and 15 other states may follow suit in November.

 Voters in Now York have already signaled their simmering discontent. Although 147 of the 190 legislators seeking re-election this year had no opposition in the Sept. 15 primaries, 5 of the 38 who ran against nonincumbent challengers lost their primary elections. But the ultimate test will come in the November general election, when insurgents will, as always, have to scale the walls of an immense and long established citadel of incumbency advantage.

 The fortress is protected by a discriminatory system of election laws that has made getting on the ballot a Sysyphean task. Even after modes reforms enacted recently, the system gives a significant advantage to incumbents who already have the political organizations needed to collect thousands of signatures and who have mastered a mind numbing code of arcane petition rules.

 New York courts have rejected candidates in recent years because of picayune flaws like petition pages that were collated with a paper clip rather than a staple. In 1990, the Board of Elections and the courts disqualified 35 legislative challengers from the ballot in Now York City alone, many of them for technical violations.

 In August, a State Supreme Court judge kicked Christos N. Apostle off the State Senate ballot in an Albany district, not because Apostle failed to collect enough signatures, but because he neglected to list the number of his Assembly district on his petition witnessing statement. "If you don't know case law, you're out," says Apostle, who spent $5,000 in legal fees on his unsuccessful effort. "There are so many roadblocks that almost anyone would be disheartened by it."

 Once challengers manage to get on the ballot, they face a difficult financial reality: incumbent legislators raise, on average, between two and three times as much as their challengers. It has become standard procedure for lobbyists and political action committees to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign committees run by the majority parties in each house, even though that means giving to the Democrats who control the Assembly and to the Republicans who run the Senate. In the 1990 elections, the campaign committees for the majority in each chamber out spent the two minority committees by more than 2 to 1.

 When the Senate majority leader, Ralph J. Marino, was asked during a 1989 hearing why PAC's gave so heavily to incumbents, he answered bluntly: "Because the incumbents generally win 99 percent of the time and why give to a loser?…Why not be friendly with the winner?"

 Legislative candidates and campaign committees spent well over $26 million in the 1990 elections, a remarkable sum given that few candidates bought television advertising. In one record breaking race for an open Senate seat in Rockland County, just north of New York City, the two candidates combined to spend $951,000 -- or $11.59 for every vote cast.

 Once in office, New York's legislators enjoy higher salaries, larger staffs and bigger budgets than those in any other state, including California, which has almost 12 million more citizens. Lawmakers receive salaries of $57,500, per diems of $89 a day when in Albany on state business and leadership stipends -- known as "lulus" -- of between $6,500 and $30,000. Lulus are paid to every member of the Senate at to 114 of the 150 members of the Assembly, including Assemblyman H. Robert Nortz, who receives $13,000 as the ranking minority member of the Committee on Standing Committees. Not suprisingly, 147 of the 211 lawmakers now consider themselves full-time legislators, although they meet in session for only half a year.

 For the legislative leaders, who have sole authority to hand out committee assignments and other leadership positions, lulus provide an effective means of enforcing party discipline. When three Republican Assemblymen broke ranks with the Assembly minority leader, Clarence D. Rappleyea Jr., to vote for a redistricting bill last March, Rappleyea quickly stripped them of their lulus.

 The notion of the citizen legislature is not yet extinct in America, particularly in small states. In New Hampshire, the 424 members of the Legislature receive $100 a year, making their total legislative payroll less than the salary for a single New York legislator. The Wyoming Legislature, which meets for 60 days over a two-year period, has the help of 19 full-time staff members, including secretaries. In Georgia, the Legislature meets for a maximum of 40 working days a year.

 But it is in large states with highly professional legislatures and freewheeling budgets that incumbency protection has become the most cynical of political sciences. A recent study by the National Conference of State Legislatures concluded that turnover in the most professional legislatures -- those of New York, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin -- was 20 percentage points lower than in the least professional legislatures -- New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wyoming.

 Because New York's Legislature is not requited to itemize its spending, which grew from $94 million in 1982-83 to $168 million in this fiscal year, it is impossible to know precisely where all the money goes. Much of it pays for the approximately 4,400 staff members in the Legislature, many of whom provide the kind of constituent services that are remembered on Election Day. By contrast, California's Legislature, which has 120 members to New York's 211, gets by with a staff of about 1,800.

 But it also is clear that the Legislature spends huge sums each year to subsidize what are essentially campaign activities. For instance, legislators spend millions of taxpayer dollars on direct mail that is often indistinguishable from campaign propaganda. Just as they do with campaign literature, the incumbents use computers to target newsletters and brochures to specific constituents, enabling them to write to elderly citizens about a vote to cap Medicare fees while writing to hunters about a vote against gun control.

 Almost always, legislators mail the newsletters exclusively to registered voters, shattering any illusion that they are motivated more by good government than by good politics. "They presumably work for everyone, not just enrolled voters," says Tom W. Carroll, the president of Change-N.Y., a conservative lobbying group.

 Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn, a Queens Democrat, illustrated her four page summer 1992 newsletter with 11 smiling photographs of herself at meetings, presentations and ground-breakings. She filled the back page with "nice letters" from constituents thanking her for her work on behalf of Public School 219, the Flushing Heights Civic Association and the St. Mary's Nativity Golden Age Club. "I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to you for having that horrible truck taken away from my property just three days after I wrote to you," wrote Angela Winters of Flushing.

 Few state legislatures have a communications apparatus as sophisticated as New York's. During debates on important issues, Assembly Democrats file out of their chamber and into a green carpeted lobby, where producers on the Assembly payroll stand with Assembly owned television cameras and radio microphones, ready to lob soft, down-the-middle questions at the lawmakers. The "interviews" are then offered at no charge to local stations in home districts.

 One day last June, Assemblyman Samuel Colman, a Rockland County Democrat, stood before the cameras with his arms folded across his double-breasted suit as he boasted of the Assembly's efforts to limit teenager's access to cigarettes. "People do see it, " Colman said after the lights blinked off. "They remember that I spoke and that I was willing to be accessible. They don't remember what I was talking about."

 The Legislature's efforts to use public money for political self-promotion are limit only by the creativity of the lawmakers and their aides. Last year, the Assembly introduced a state financed "800" number that played taped messages from Democratic members on issues of the day. Labeled "Dial-a-Pol" by the Assembly Republicans, It was suspended only after a barrage of unfavorable press reports.

 New York State is far from rich these days. To fill recurring budget gaps, Governor Cuomo and the Legislature have laid off thousands of state workers and trimmed welfare and Medicaid benefits for the poor. The Legislature even made modest cuts in its own budget. But none of that has kept the Legislature from indulging its appetite for pork, one of the most effective means of incumbency protection.

 This fiscal year, according to state officials, the Legislature appropriated $111.6 million for pork-barrel projects, including $100,000 for Long Island seafood promotion $50,000 for the Queens County Farm Museum and $50,000 for a grape entomologist in Fredonia, N.Y. Typically, the state-financed newsletters that trumpet a lawmaker's skill at bringing home this bacon are followed apace by others blasting the opposition party or the Governor for excessive spending.

 The groups that benefit from these so-called "members' items" often become auxiliaries to a legislator's political organization. "They can be very, very important in terms of certain groups in a district," says Assemblyman John J. Faso, a Republican from the town of Kinderhook in the Hudson Valley. "Say with a senior citizens' center in New York City. Those centers become almost local political clubs for the member who got the money."

 So what did Faso choose to hype in his summer 1992 newsletter? Under the headline "Assemblyman Faso: He Listens and Leads" ran a picture of Faso presenting a state check for $22,500 to the Ravena Senior Center, a member's item that he was instrumental in securing." Faso failed to mention one point -- he voted against the budget bill that appropriated the grant. "Voting against the overall budget doesn't mean you opposed every single item in it," he explains.

While members of Congress are shedding privileges left and right, falling all over themselves to demonstrate their newfound humility, New York legislators have not followed suit. Twenty-five lawmakers, for instance, have kept a firm grip on the wheels of their state-owned cars. Marino, the Senate majority leader, gets two such cars, keeping one in Albany and one at home in Oyster Bay.

 And, in an illustration of how boldly the rules on perquisites can be stretched, Assemblyman Vincent J. Graber, the Speaker Pro Tem, has successfully filed for travel reimbursement for trips in his state car that he has not actually taken. Despite having the car, Graber, a Democrat, often flies from Albany back home to the Buffalo area, charging the on-way airfare ($211) and cab-fare ($15) to the state while enlisting an aide to take the car on the five-hour drive. But last year, he put in for and was granted automobile-mileage reimbursement for travel between the state capital and his home, when he was actually taking two weekend round trips from Albany to Daytona Beach, Fla. (where Graber and his wife owned a condo). On expense forms obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Graber forthrightly explained that he had flown to Florida at his own expense, but was requisition reimbursement for a total of 1,200 miles for car travel to and from Albany. The forms show that Graber received $312 in reimbursement.

 The rub is that Graber, because he has a state car that is fueled and maintained by the government, is not officially entitled to mileage reimbursement even when he does drive from Albany to Buffalo. But the legislature's accountants did not ask questions. "I thought it was justified and they agreed with me," Graber says.

 Unlike congress, where an epidemic of check overdrafts has crystallized public discontent, legislative scandals have not generated comparable outrage in New York. The 1987 indictment of the Senate minority leader, Manfred Ohrenstein, for putting campaign workers on the state payroll did not even dent the Legislature's 98 percent re-election rate. In the next year's elections, Ohrenstein and a co-indictee, Senator Howard E. Babbush of Brooklyn, both of whom were still under indictment at the time, won handily. Prosecutors later dropped the remaining charges against Ohrenstein after the state's highest court ruled that the practice of using state workers for purely political tasks, while questionable, did not violate existing state law.

 The foundation of incumbency protection in the Legislature is a strong leadership system that give the Assembly Speaker and the Senate majority leader supreme powers to protect their most vulnerable members. The leaders have the sole authority to make appointments to committees and chairmanships, to allocate resources and staff assistance and to determine which bills are killed and which ones will pass. On some bills, they even decide which of their members will vote yea and which will vote nay. Their primary objective is to provide political protection to their own majorities and, in the process, to strengthen the coalitions that elected them as leaders.

 "Everything that's done here is done for the purpose of re-electing the majority -- everything," says Senator Anthony M. Masiello, a Buffalo Democrat who says he is tired of being in the largely powerless minority.

 Protection the majority means providing all possible assistance to members who are considered marginal, like freshmen or those who represent districts normally controlled by the other party. So much help is bestowed on "marginals" that even the most comfortable members clamor for the designation.

 Former Assembly Speaker Mel Miller, who lost his job last December after being convicted of fraud, says that even while he was on trial in Federal court, some of his Democratic members came to him begging to be placed on the marginal list. "They'd come to me and shine about how they were going to lose their seats," Miller says. "They'd come in and lie, telling me how good their opponents were, that the issues were against them, that times were bad, that I made them vote for taxes."

 Despite the lip service paid to the notion to voting one's conscience, the biggest benefit for marginal members is the privilege of voting against their own party's position on unpopular bills. When approving tax increases, for instance, aides to the leaders determine how many votes they can spare and then compile a ranking of marginal members based on their margin of victory in recent elections, the political landscape in their districts, their fundraising capacity, their latest poll numbers and the presumed strength of their opponents. Shortly before the vote, the aides wander through the chamber and its anterooms to inform the lucky few that they have been let off the hook.

 "Once you make a decision to a controversial bill," says one top legislative aide, "you think about how to deal with marginals -- whether to let them vote no or sponsor a hostile amendment or be out front at a press conference opposing the bill. All of this gets orchestrated. Once we decide who gets to vote no,' I'll go to them and say, 'Okay, you're a "no" on this,' and they'll say, 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.'"

 The legislative leaders and their aides keep a close watch on marginal members to make sure they do not take positions or sponsor bills that might later be used against them. Aides to Speaker Saul Weprin, for instance, sought out one marginal member of the Assembly on several occasions this year to warn against sponsorship of a gay right bill. "They said" 'You're a co-sponsor of this bill. Don't you think that's a bad idea?'" says the member, who requested anonymity. "I said, 'No, I don't think it's a bad idea.' They said, 'Well, it's really controversial and we just think you should think about it.' I said I had thought about it and I wasn't coming off the bill."

 The gay rights bill never came to a vote this year because Weprin, who supports the legislation, did not want to expose his marginal members to attack by forcing them to vote for it in an election year. He has promised to put it up for a vote next year.

 Of all the majority-protection powers at the disposal of the legislative leaders, two stand out. One is constant -- the ability to raise money. The other presents itself only once a decade -- redistricting.

 In the last two decades the Democratic Assembly Speaker and the Republican Senate majority leader have had a gentlemen's agreement to draw new lines for their own members' districts without interference from the other house. In exchange for the autonomy to control their own redistricting, the Assembly Democrats have been more than willing to sacrifice the interests of the Democratic minority in the Senate, and the Senate Republican have done the same to the Republican minority in the Assembly.

 Since taking power in 1975, the Assembly Democrats have used redistricting to help increase their majority from 88 members to 95. The Senate Republicans, who have been out of power for only one year in the last 53, have kept their numbers steady in the last two decades while beating back a number of vigorous challenges by the Democrats. This year, however, the Senate Republicans demonstrated the most skill at exploiting the power of redistricting. All incumbent Republicans were protected while incumbent Democrats were paired against each other in four separate districts.

 As each majority grow, so does its ability to raise money. During the last two decades, the leader of both houses have established campaign committees that have supplanted the role of the state's once mighty political parties. Because the legislative leaders wield such absolute control over legislation, the campaign committees they run have become the charities of firs resort for lobbyists and political action committees seeking to peddle influence.

 The partisan division between the two houses has meant that virtually any interest group can find a champion in one chamber or the other. Political action committees representing real estate and medical interests, for instance, generally give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Senate's Republican majority while dropping only a few thousand on the Assembly's Democratic majority. But other interest groups, particularly unions of state workers and teachers, feel the wisest strategy is to give heavily to both majorities.

 "The major players in the money area don't play philosophical politics," says Robert Haggerty, who ran the Senate Republican Campaign Committee in 1990. "They play majority politics."

 Lawrence R. Scanlon, the director of legislative and political action for the Civil Service Employees Association, says his union typically distributes its $400,000 in annual contributions by giving the Assembly Democrats and the Senate Republicans two to three times as much as the minority parties in each house.

 "To best protect the interest of our membership, we have to play by the rules of the system," says Scanlon, who controls one of the riches PAC's in the state. "If we want to get bills through or kill bills, we have to deal with the leadership, and both the Speaker and the majority leader are very powerful."

 That truism serves as the guiding principle of legislative politics in most of the strong leadership states and leaders in those states have established a variety of ways to take advantage of it. For Vernal G. Riffe Jr., the longtime Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, It is an annual birthday party, where lobbyists come bearing checks of tribute. For the California Assembly Speaker, Willie L. Brown Jr., probably the champion of all legislative fund-raisers, it is an "end of session bash," an event so large it was once held in an arena. Like New York's leaders, both men divvy up their booty among their colleagues in order to preserve their majorities and to engender loyalty.

 In New York this year, the Legislature placed new restrictions on the state's campaign finance laws. But the new limit of $62,500 on donations to the legislative campaign committees will stifle only the very largest contributions, and the Senate headed off an Assembly measure that would have capped campaign spending.

 The disparity in campaign spending between incumbents and their opponents has sustained a political system in which few elections are even remotely competitive. In 1990, only 13 percent of the incumbents who ran for re-election won with less than 60 percent of the vote. Excluding the 18 races in which incumbents ran unopposed, incumbents won with an average of 73 percent of the vote and an average 54 percent margin of victory over their nearest opponents. In 1972, the average margin of victory was 20 percentage points lower, according to research by Jeffrey M. Stonecash, a political scientist at Syracuse University and a professor-in-residence in the New York State Assembly.

 Stonecash has found that there is not a direct correlation between New York's low rate of legislative turnover and the vast increases in resources that the Legislature has given itself. His studies show that the percentage of incumbents seeking and winning re-election approached the 90 percent threshold at the turn of the century, long before legislative budgets began to balloon.

 But regardless of cause and effect, incumbency protection raises questions of fairness that demand reform. Because the problem has been so extreme in New York, the proposed remedies are often equally extreme.

 Governor Cuomo, who benefits from significant incumbency advantages of his own, suggested in an interview that the ban on legislative mailings before an election should be increased from 30 days to six months and that new laws should allow challengers to spend more on a campaign than incumbents. After the Senate this year rejected a Cuomo reform package that called for public campaign financing and spending limits, the Governor signed a watered down reform bill, saying that half a loaf was better than none. Now he says he may become a convert to the term limits movement, a cause he has been reluctant to embrace. "Although I can make a very strong intellectual argument against them, I every day can make a stronger practical argument for them because it's obvious that the Legislature of the state will not give people a fair chance to challenge them," Cuomo says.

 For the immediate future, such proposals are of less concern than what will happen on Election Day on Nov. 3. New York's legislators recognize that they will have to campaign particularly hard to overcome this year's epidemic of anti-incumbency fever. But as always, they are more confident than lawmakers in other states that they will prevail.

 "People always rush into the voting booth saying throw the rascals out," says Saul Weprin, the Assembly Speaker. "Then they see that the people on the ballot are their own local representatives and they say: 'Gee, this guy Weprin's not so bad. I hear from him all the time. He helped me in his district office. Maybe I don't want to throw him out.'"