Last month, Mr. Corzine took on Joseph Ferriero, the Bergen County chairman, by opposing the county party's anointed candidate to fill a vacant state Senate seat.

When the primary voters in this district rebelled against the anointed candidate, they sent a strong message to the political bosses.

But that issue could easily be turned against the anointed candidate--"Hillary and the bosses want to keep poor candidate X off the ballot," etc.

As long as the media can hypnotize you into only voting for their anointed candidate, there can never be progress or change.

Mr. Carrión, 40, is running for Bronx borough president and is the anointed candidate of the Bronx County Democratic Committee, which Mr. Ramirez leads.

A political maverick who is well known statewide, Mr. Mattox says he may run regardless of whether there is an anointed Democratic candidate.

D. Bilal Beasley, the mayor's anointed candidate, echoed the sentiments, saying that Mr. Rice was aloof and at times hostile.

The party's anointed candidate, the multimillionaire businessman Tony Sanchez, had a seeming cakewalk, with only token opponents, including a lawyer named John WorldPeace.

And when Republican leaders recoiled from his radical and confrontational posture, Gingrich took them on, challenging and beating the anointed candidate for minority whip in 1989 and thus effectively taking control of the party.

Now he is the anointed candidate of the vice president in an administration whose policies, he has been suggesting for months, helped to turn many Dean supporters into nonvoters.