ACKSONVILLE, Fla., Feb. 7 - In the frantic final days before Super Bowl XXXIX, with schemes to study and history to clutch, the New England Patriots dispatched members of their personnel department to begin scrutinizing salary-cap numbers and college rosters for the draft in April.

Those are some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that have elevated the Patriots above the gravitational pull of parity. By preparing for every possibility - be it a coaching departure or the loss of a player - Coach Bill Belichick has rarely been caught unprepared.

"A lot of coaches in the N.F.L. work hard," Jimmy Johnson, the former coach of the Dallas Cowboys and the Miami Dolphins, said in praising Belichick last week. "But there is a difference between working hard and working smart."

The Patriots stamped themselves as a dynasty Sunday with their 24-21 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles at Alltel Stadium for their third Super Bowl title in four seasons. But New England's bid to claim a fourth Super Bowl crown next season - and a third straight, which would be a first - will face its most challenging test since the run began.

Romeo Crennel, the Patriots' defensive coordinator since 2001, has accepted the Cleveland Browns' coaching job. Charlie Weis is expected to report Thursday to South Bend, Ind., leaving the Patriots' offensive coordinator post for the Irish coaching job he accepted in December.

Although most of New England's starters will return, the Patriots could enter the free-agent period with some key unsigned players, including receiver David Givens, guard Joe Andruzzi and place-kicker Adam Vinatieri, whose contracts expire March 1.

The Patriots must also decide whether to keep the injured cornerback Ty Law, who is set to count roughly $12 million against the 2005 salary cap.

On Monday, just hours after he thanked Weis and Crennel for their contributions to New England, Belichick said of the vacancies, "We'll deal with that in due course."

The Patriots are probably dealing with it already.

Belichick refused to name candidates, but he has assistants with strong ties to the team. For the defensive coordinator job, the 34-year-old secondary coach, Eric Mangini, is thought to be the lead candidate. Mangini, like Belichick, is a graduate of Wesleyan in Middletown, Conn. He was later an assistant under Belichick in Cleveland in 1995 and worked under Bill Parcells and Belichick with the Jets from 1997 to 1999 before moving to New England with Belichick in 2000.

But he is also a rising star on the radar of several teams.

One potential replacement for Weis is Dante Scarnecchia, Belichick's assistant head coach and offensive line coach.

Scarnecchia, who will turn 57 on Feb. 15, has been a Patriots assistant for 21 seasons. In 35 years coaching in college and the N.F.L., Scarnecchia has also taught tight ends, special teams, linebackers and defensive backs. With a surprisingly low profile given his longevity and success, he has coached three different right tackles in three Super Bowls.

The tight ends coach Jeff Davidson and the running backs coach Ivan Fears have also been talked about as replacements for Weis.

How crucial is losing Crennel and Weis?

"They are two outstanding coaches, but the thing is, they have Belichick," the Eagles' defensive coordinator, Jim Johnson, said last week. "That's the key. They still have the head man, and I'm sure Bill has a plan. He probably already has someone else in mind."

Different forces have brought down the league's dynasties through the years, including age and the defection of talented assistants. New England must cope with both.

The Pittsburgh Steelers - who won four titles in six years through the 1979 season - and the San Francisco 49ers - who won five titles between the 1981 and 1994 seasons - remained strong until their Hall of Fame talent base, among other things, eroded.

The Dallas Cowboys, the only team besides the Patriots to win three titles in four seasons, sustained significant free-agent losses toward the end of their championship run in the 1995 season, one year after the start of the salary-cap era.

"The difference now is that you don't see other dynasties functioning at the same time," Bill Walsh, who won three titles with San Francisco, said in a telephone interview Monday. "When we were at our best, so were the Giants and Redskins and many other teams in the N.F.C. and A.F.C. We had to deal with other dynasties that were dominant. I don't think you see the caliber of teams now that you saw then because of free agency, but New England is an outstanding team, and their accomplishment is magnificent."

Walsh, who cited the quarterback position as the key to sustained success, said different factors could crack the foundation of a dynasty.

"Sometimes it's the combination of the players changing," he said. "Some age and don't perform as well. A loss of focus can occur. Coaching staffs change because men become head coaches out of the staff. We lost a series of guys that we had to replace, and I'm sure the Patriots will, too."

Only New England has won three titles in the cap era, which was intended to spur competition, not create dynasties. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, however, said the cap was not designed to be so rigid that a team could not enjoy years of prosperity.

"When we did this system in the early 90's, we thought there was enough flexibility in it so you could keep teams together and have repeat success," Tagliabue said. "New England's done it, Philadelphia's done it, the Rams did it, the Broncos did it. Other teams have done it. Green Bay has had a phenomenal era and a phenomenal quarterback through the salary-cap years. And I think that's one of the lessons.

"We thought the system would allow for great competition and allow for repeat winners, and that's what's turning out to be the case."

New England is in an ideal position to remain atop the league.

Quarterback Tom Brady is signed through 2006, linebacker Tedy Bruschi through 2007 and safety Rodney Harrison through 2008. Though linebackers Roman Phifer and Ted Johnson may retire, the Patriots should attract A-list free agents.

"It takes a lot of discipline," Scott Pioli, the Patriots' vice president for player personnel, said of playing for New England. "It's not about how long their hair is or how much jewelry they wear. We have certain expectations for guys being in the right place at the right time and doing their job a certain way. That's discipline to us."

Belichick was still not ready to judge his team's place in history. The 2005 season beckons.

"We'll start at the bottom of the heap like everybody else," he said.

RENT STEVENS did not sleep on that February weekend in 1990. A newly minted Wharton School M.B.A., Mr. Stevens had recently joined Drexel Burnham Lambert, the swashbuckling investment bank that dominated the market for financing risky companies. That Sunday, after working on a deal nonstop for 48 hours, he received an ominous telephone call from a managing director, telling him to go home. He was dumbfounded. Deals were over when they were over, he said, and no one at Drexel slept until they were.

The next morning, Mr. Stevens arrived at 5:30 at Drexel's office in Beverly Hills to find his boss, Robert Beyer, sitting in his chair. "You're going to hear some pretty difficult things today," he recalled Mr. Beyer telling him. "A lot of them will be true. Don't worry, you'll be fine."

Within the hour, Mr. Stevens learned that Drexel, once the most profitable and feared bank on Wall Street, had a liquidity crisis. By evening, the firm would be bankrupt. Later called the "St. Valentine's Day massacre," the bankruptcy left more than 5,700 people in Beverly Hills and New York unemployed and potentially tainted by their association with an institution considered by many people at the time to be defiant, greedy and criminal.

That perception, of course, did not come out of thin air. In December 1988, Drexel agreed to plead guilty to six felony counts and to pay a $650 million fine. Three months later, Michael R. Milken, the firm's legendary junk-bond trader, was indicted on 98 charges, including racketeering. He later pleaded guilty to six felony counts, paid $600 million in fines and restitution and served two years in prison.

But what became of Mr. Stevens and his co-workers? Today, almost exactly 15 years after the firm's demise, he and many other young employees swept up in the Drexel diaspora have risen to prominent positions on Wall Street. Mr. Stevens is the head of leveraged finance at the Jefferies Group, an investment bank known for lining up complex financing for high-risk companies. Not coincidentally, his boss - Richard B. Handler, the chief executive of Jefferies - was a 28-year-old trader at Drexel when the firm blew up.

Several other former Drexel employees are managing billions for pension funds, endowments, wealthy people and one another - often using junk bonds. Mark L. Attanasio, a senior vice president at Drexel when it collapsed, is a managing partner at Trust Company of the West, a $109.7 billion money management firm. Last month, he bought the Milwaukee Brewers for more than $220 million.

Interviews with more than two dozen former employees showed that, far from being embarrassed by their connection to Drexel, most retain an almost cultlike devotion to the firm and much of what it stood for. Few of them were crucial players in building Drexel's core franchise, junk bonds. And few of them were especially close to Mr. Milken, who has since survived cancer, established two major foundations devoted to cancer research and become a major investor in an education initiative, Knowledge Universe Inc.

But to a person, they all described their Drexel DNA as a crucial factor in their success today. "It showed you the sky was the limit," Mr. Handler said. "You realized you could make a difference in finance. The sheer volume of deals, the market share you could have, your ability to add value to clients, how you could drive your competition nuts, also how much wealth creation was possible."

A HANDFUL of Drexel's most senior managers also went on to make names for themselves. Perhaps the best known is former Drexel trader Gary Winnick, who founded Global Crossing, the onetime telecom giant that imploded under a mountain of debt in January 2002. Mr. Winnick cashed in more than $700 million in stock before the firm went belly up. Another veteran star is Leon D. Black, founder of Apollo Management, one of the most respected names in the buyout world. He made his fortune buying the bankrupt portfolio of Executive Life, the insurer. Apollo now manages more than $13 billion, registering compound annual returns of more than 40 percent since 1990 on the $12 billion it has invested.

But it is only recently that the younger members of the firm - associates and executive vice presidents, vice presidents and young managing directors - have made their mark. They include Peter J. Nolan, Jonathan D. Sokoloff and John G. Danhakl - all 20-something associates when the firm went bust - who now run Leonard Green & Partners, a private equity shop in Los Angeles that manages $3.7 billion and has posted stellar returns, almost 40 percent a year over the past 16 years. Another is Ken Moelis, who had more seniority at Drexel - though still in his 20's when the firm collapsed - and now is joint global head of investment banking at UBS. The list goes on.

The money being made in the credit markets by former Drexel employees is vindication to some former managers, who said they felt that the firm was destroyed unnecessarily. "One prosecutor said to me in 1990, 'With compensation levels like this, this has to be a den of thieves. You couldn't make this much money,' " recalled a former manager who asked not to be identified. "I said, 'Compensation levels are lower than what they will be doing 10 years from now.' "

He was right, of course: he and his fellow alumni are making more money today than they ever dreamed during their Drexel days. Mr. Handler's stock and options in Jefferies alone are worth almost $200 million, and Jefferies is one of the best-performing financial stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. The Leonard Green group has returned more than $1.4 billion to investors over the past two years, with each of the three managing partners taking home somewhere in the range of $100 million each.

One former government official who was involved in the Drexel case said he was not surprised that many of the alumni had prospered. "The sad thing about Drexel was that a lot of their business was untainted by this, but when it blew up it all blew up," said Gary Lynch, now the general counsel at Credit Suisse First Boston.

The legacy of Drexel, gray to the outside world, is as white as snow to the group: It was an institution where hard work and good ideas were rewarded, hierarchies were absent, talent abounded and the potential to be very, very, rich was palatable, former employees said. They recall exactly where they were the morning the firm went bankrupt - as well as the details from the steamy party later that week at the Sugar Shack, a Los Angeles bar, now defunct, where mai tais flowed generously and sex was rampant, several employees recalled.

Some still remember their Drexel seniority rank precisely and offer that information voluntarily: 15th to be hired in corporate finance in New York, said one; 10th in trading in Beverly Hills, said another. Almost everyone in the group owns some Drexel memorabilia: a chair, a desk, a computer, all bought or taken during the bankruptcy. And while many were reluctant to be interviewed for this article, once seated, they could not stop talking.

To be sure, nostalgia about Drexel's rise and fall is not universal, especially among senior managers. One senior trader who worked with Mr. Milken on his famous X-shaped trading desk and asked not to be identified said: "There were those who sat on the X and those who didn't. There were those who were hired by Mike and those who were not." As for the fond memories of others, he said: "They did not appear before a grand jury. They did not lose millions in stock."

No matter what they think of Drexel, however, former employees and other Wall Street watchers seem to agree on this much: there may never be another firm quite like it. "Drexel had a certain chutzpah that hasn't been seen since," said Charles R. Geisst, a Wall Street historian at Manhattan College. "People seem to forget it was the only major financial firm to be shut down by regulators. That's a strong message that chutzpah shouldn't continue." And by most accounts, it hasn't.

By the mid-1980's, Drexel was the nexus of the nation's high-yield bond boom and takeover frenzy. Corporate raiders and entrepreneurs like T. Boone Pickens and Ted Turner and Ronald O. Perelman were making plays for companies far bigger than their own. They financed these takeovers with junk bonds, for which Mr. Milken had created a market. The firm - many would say Mr. Milken alone - helped build the cellular, video game and cable industries, including companies like CNN, MCI and McCaw Communications.

In 1980, Drexel underwrote 48 high-yield deals that brought in $1.6 billion. In 1989, the firm did 100 deals worth $23.2 billion. Drexel's share of the junk bond market was 40 to 60 percent throughout the decade, according to Thomson Financial. It was not until 1987 that a rival, Credit Suisse First Boston, posted a market share in the double digits.

Not surprisingly, Drexel attracted top Ivy League talent. "It was the hot place to go, especially the Beverly Hills office," said Mark Lanigan, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1986 and now runs an investment fund seeded by another hedge fund group run by former Drexel employees. "They were shaking up the world. Every other day you opened The Wall Street Journal and Drexel was helping to launch a hostile takeover or helping an established company defend itself."

Most of the junior bankers chose Drexel over other top-flight banks. They picked it because they thought they could learn more, advance faster, make more money and - corny as it sounds, even on Wall Street - become part of history.

"Drexel was tied to a rocket," said Leon Wagner, chairman of GoldenTree Asset Management, a $6.5 billion money management firm, who joined Drexel's high-yield trading desk in 1986 from Lehman Brothers. "Just to be able to sit on the desk and see the calls start at 4:15 in the morning, Boesky and Perelman and Diller and Murdoch," he said referring to Ivan Boesky, the arbitrageur; Mr. Perelman, of Revlon; Barry Diller, now chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation.

Because the firm controlled the market, young associates were thrown on big deals and told to execute them. "I learned more in five years than I have in the subsequent 15," was a typical observation among the former Drexel employees interviewed. Mr. Attanasio, who made his fortune selling his fund, Crescent Capital, to Trust Company of the West, said, "We were the market, so you learned the market."

Frederick H. Joseph, Drexel's former chief executive, who is now managing director and co-head of investment banking at Morgan Joseph & Company, the boutique investment bank, likened the experience to being at a top-notch university. "Harvard is as good as it is because of the people there," he said in an interview. "It's a favorable vicious cycle."

There was the money, too - lots of it. The parking lots at the Beverly Hills office were filled with red and yellow Porsches, Ferraris and BMW's. And Drexel knew how to have a party. At the firm's famous Predators' Ball, where it entertained corporate titans, members of the younger generation said they ran around taking notes, gawking at the crowd. Frank Sinatra performed in 1984, Diana Ross in 1985. Star power at credit conferences was rare at the time; the employees thought it was cool.

Despite the controversy engulfing the firm in 1990, few employees saw the end coming. Mr. Moelis was skiing with clients in Colorado. Mr. Wagner found out on the Friday before the implosion from his wife. Mr. Attanasio had been in Germany the previous week doing due diligence on a deal.

It was by no means immediately apparent that Drexel's young associates and vice presidents were employable. "You had been in Chernobyl," Mr. Nolan said. Many of them kept working on Drexel business: Chris Kanoff, now head of corporate finance at Jefferies, promised to finish a deal for a client and, using the law offices of Latham & Watkins, finished it in eight weeks.

Others scrambled to find jobs elsewhere after the bankruptcy. One group went to Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Another went to Jefferies, and a third started Canyon Capital Advisors, now a successful $7 billion hedge fund. Mr. Sokoloff joined Leonard Green, and two others would do so later. Some regrouped back East, including Ted Virtue, now the chief executive of MidOcean Partners, a $3 billion private equity fund, and Mr. Wagner of GoldenTree. Others who worked on the East Coast started over, including Jay R. Bloom, Dean C. Kehler and Andrew R. Heyer, who run the highly successful Trimaran Capital Partners.

FIFTEEN years later, they are bonded by more than history. One just raised $1.5 million for a charity related to a family illness; a substantial amount came from Drexel people. "What do you say to that?" he said, asking not to be identified. Chris Andersen, a senior banker in the New York office when Drexel collapsed, has a Christmas party every year in the Versailles Room at the St. Regis. Of the 250 people who came last year, more than half had been at Drexel. "The culture, at its core, was almost a religious fervor for what we were doing and the power to transform things," said Mr. Andersen, who founded G. C. Andersen Partners, a merchant banking firm.

And few jumped as the ship was sinking. "It was us against everyone else," said Mr. Heyer of Trimaran. "You couldn't have infighting if you were taking on the world."

Mr. Virtue, who ran the high-yield business, and then banking, at Bankers Trust, now part of Deutsche Bank, before starting MidOcean, said: "There was a sense that we were abandoned orphans. We kept tabs on each other."

The alumni work together on deals and say that their close ties allow them to execute tough transactions in less time. For example, when Jonathan Coslet, a partner at Texas Pacific Group and a former Drexel financial analyst, bought J. Crew in a highly leveraged deal in 1997, the banker working on the deal was Mr. Lanigan, then at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. The company received complex financing for the deal from Trust Company of the West, where Mr. Attanasio and two other former Drexel employees - Jean Marc Chapus and Mr. Beyer (Mr. Stevens's former boss) - were involved. Mr. Chapus is managing partner at TCW, where Mr. Beyer is the president.

When it came time for a second financing, Texas Pacific Group turned to Black Canyon Capital L.L.C., an investment fund run by Mr. Lanigan and backed by the principals at Canyon Capital Advisors. It financed the full $275 million.

Mr. Milken, of course, has also remained in the spotlight. After serving his prison term, he received a diagnosis of prostate cancer. He successfully battled cancer and has been active in the research arena, gracing the cover of Fortune magazine last month alongside Lance Armstrong.

Many former Drexel employees speak glowingly of Mr. Milken. "He's so brilliant, it's like getting near the sun," Mr. Wagner said.

Mr. Virtue added: "He was the best visionary Wall Street every had."

But in an odd way, some former Drexel young guns are equally grateful that the firm collapsed when it did. "When you were part of the Drexel franchise, you weren't sure if it was Drexel" or you, Mr. Coslet said. "Now they have made a name for themselves and it's nice for them to say: 'It was my innovation and my talent. I did it on my own.' "

Of course, they all took from the experience a powerful lesson, one that might have served them as well as any expertise they absorbed during their Drexel days. "There's a difference between being very competitive and can-do, and winning at all costs," Mr. Wagner said. "All costs is costly."

OS ANGELES

ON Day 1 he looked angelic in his white three-piece suit with a rope of jeweled baubles at the waist and a gold armband. On Day 2 he chose a black suit and a red shirt accented with a choker pendant, a brocade vest and a royal crest.

As his trial on charges of molesting a 13-year-old boy began last week, Michael Jackson did not play the part of the criminal defendant ordered by his lawyers to buy a respectable suit and tie. Instead he was his flamboyant pop-star self. With the trial expected to last as long as six months, court-watchers seemed to be in for a long parade of Mr. Jackson's music-videoworthy outfits.

But some criminal defense lawyers, including some who have represented celebrities, question this not-so-incidental aspect of the defense strategy. Wardrobes do not make or break cases, they said, but Mr. Jackson's choices are an important piece of the image projected to the judge and jury who will decide his fate.

"Particularly in a case of this type," said William B. Moffitt, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, "what you don't want the jury thinking is, 'This guy is weird, and he's so weird he might have done this.' Would style play a role in that perception? Sure it can."

Mary Fulginiti Jenow, a former federal prosecutor who is now a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles and a legal analyst for several cable television channels, shares his opinion. "Juries dissect every aspect, including what you wear," she said. "Why give one juror or five jurors ammunition in any way to think less of you as a defendant?"

"That's the problem with Michael Jackson," Ms. Fulginiti Jenow said. "He looks like he's ready to break out into the moonwalk."

Celebrity defendants have a history of cleaning up for court. Winona Ryder, usually seen in blue jeans and tight tops, was buttoned into ladylike outfits by Marc Jacobs for her trial on shoplifting charges in Los Angeles in 2002. Robert Blake, on trial in Los Angeles for the murder of his wife, appears before the jury with his hair neatly cut wearing fade-into-the-wall suits.

There are also limits to dressing well: appear too rich and a jury might be resentful. Martha Stewart was mocked in the media and apparently offended some jurors during her trial last year when she carried a Herm¨¨s handbag that has a starting price of $6,000.

When Mr. Moffitt defended a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers rock band in a sexual battery case in 1990, he put him into jackets. (The cleaned-up Pepper was convicted and fined.) If he were defending Mr. Jackson - who has pleaded not guilty to lewd acts with a minor, attempted child molesting and giving the boy alcohol - Mr. Moffitt said he would again recommend the suit route. "You'd probably see Michael Jackson for the first time in an Armani suit," he said. "He'd look like a human or an age-appropriate person instead of a pop star."

There is a gag order in the Jackson case, and the legal teams on both sides were not available for comment. According to published reports, prosecutors have complained to the judge about Mr. Jackson's sunglasses and armband and asked that he be stopped from wearing them in the courtroom.

But some experts caution that well-known defendants who undergo a radical makeover risk sending the wrong signal to jurors: that they are pretending to be something they are not. "In this case you have to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to let him be his flamboyant self," said Bradley A. Pistotnik, a civil lawyer in Wichita, Kan.

"If he tones down his dress too much, it's likely that the jury would perceive that he's not been honest," said Mr. Pistotnik, who is the author of "Divorce War!," a book about strategies for women to win their divorce cases.

Mr. Jackson, whose style has always been theatrical, sometimes outrageous, including signature elements like military garb and royal emblems befitting the king of pop, may be a poor candidate for Armani. As he has emerged from under umbrellas and from behind his trademark sunglasses last week to sit through jury selection in the courtroom in Santa Maria, Calif., he seemed to be sticking to his sartorial guns. The trial resumes with questioning of prospective jurors tomorrow.

"There's a symbolic level to Michael Jackson's dressing," said Ann Powers, a senior curator at Experience Music Project, a museum in Seattle that has on display the sequined white glove and jacket Mr. Jackson wore at the 25th anniversary of Motown Productions in 1983.

"The white outfit was a symbol his fans could pick up," Ms. Powers said. "Wearing white he projects the idea of his innocence. Wearing red he projects the idea of being targeted - red, the color of blood."

Mr. Jackson has put on a suit and tie in the past for court appearances, although always with some flourish - a red tie, the ubiquitous armband - and his fans say he is dressing in a businesslike way for his trial. But some of these fans, who believe the criminal case is a fabrication and who have gathered outside the courthouse to show their support, argued that what he wears should not matter.

"That really doesn't have anything to do with anything," said Vienna Wood, 15, a ninth grader from Scotts Valley, Calif., who runs a fan Web site and showed up in Santa Maria for the first day of jury selection. "I've always thought it's pretty cool because it accentuates how big of a superstar he really is."

Although his 12-member jury may end up including some fans, Mr. Jackson needs also to appeal to a pool of jurors from the conservative Santa Maria area of agricultural Santa Barbara County, lawyers and trial consultants said. These are people, the experts noted, who may not relate to his lifestyle and who may have read countless "Wacko Jacko" articles in the tabloids over the years, but who could still connect with the star on a human level.

"It's in his interest to try to persuade the jury that his looks and appearance are about entertainment and that in his real life he's closer to the mainstream," said Joseph A. Rice, president of Jury Research Institute, a trial consulting firm in Alamo, Calif. "He just has to put the entertainer in one box and the 46-year-old man in another box and persuade the jury that he understands the boundaries."

Mr. Rice, whose firm helped pick the jury in the successful civil case brought by the family of Nicole Brown Simpson against O. J. Simpson, said that with Mr. Jackson "the rules are out the window" because so much of the singer's celebrity is tied to the way he looks, not just his style but his plastic surgeries, his skin tone, his makeup, his Peter Pan persona.

But even if jurors already expect a certain image, Mr. Rice said, "at a certain point they'll be looking at the values of this man, and if he's all glitz, that opens him up to speculation about whether he engages in improper conduct."

Even Hollywood seems to find Mr. Jackson's style over the top. Phillip Bloch, a celebrity stylist, described the defendant as "a freak show, plastic surgery aside." He said Mr. Jackson's courtroom choices look like fashion for women that would seem "a little odd" even on the red carpet.

"This is a time when people use wardrobe to help and camouflage realities," Mr. Bloch said. "This is the time to be what they want you to be. He needs to put on a suit and tie and get a haircut."

But Ms. Powers, the curator at Experience Music Project, said that considering the absence of sequins, fedoras, gloves and other items of clothing associated with Mr. Jackson, his courtroom outfits are really quite conservative. They are even, she said, elegant and masculine.

"This, for him, is subdued," she said. "For him, this may be as far as he could go."

ARELY has a domestic policy proposal so monumental come down the pike with so little obvious reason for being.

Opinion polls show no public clamor to change the Social Security system; citizens are not yet marching on the Capitol demanding that they be allowed to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in the stock market. Nor does the program face an imminent threat that demands immediate action: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security trust fund won't run out until 2052, after which payroll tax receipts will still cover 81 percent of the benefits promised senior citizens. Even many Republicans seem cool to the idea.

Nevertheless, Mr. Bush embarked last week on a five-state Social Security tour, determined to get traction on the first major effort of his second term.

And if the past is any guide, he is unlikely to change direction. Time and again during his first term, President Bush ignored the informal rules that once delimited what was possible in political life, ushering in transformative changes to American political life whether or not the public demonstrated a strong appetite for them in advance. By comparison with ambitious presidents of the past, Mr. Bush has made a habit of creating his own momentum.

"Presidents tend to attempt big things at the peak of their powers, meaning recently being elected, re-elected or in mode of momentum," says Joel Johnson, a former senior adviser in the Clinton White House. "Bush has made a few big moves that were not necessarily destined to succeed, and has had success in grinding out victories on them."

The question is whether Mr. Bush has the power to persuade Congress again. Most transformative presidents of the past have acted with the wind at their backs. When he set out to birth the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed high approval ratings and Congressional majorities that were gigantic by today's standards. Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the shock of President Kennedy's assassination to pass the Great Society legislation. And the public was already deeply disillusioned with d¨¦tente when Ronald Reagan set out to upend American policy toward the Soviet Union.

When presidents set out to move a recalcitrant public toward their point of view, they usually took care to lay the groundwork first. Woodrow Wilson won only a 42 percent plurality in 1912, in a three-way election. When it came time to push through large-scale tariff reform through Congress in 1913, he took the radical step of appearing personally before a joint session, which no president had done since John Adams.

When Roosevelt moved to bring the Unitd States into World War II, he started small, pitching his "lend-lease" program as a limited effort to let Great Britain borrow arms and mat¨¦riel. The comparison to Roosevelt is not lost on Mr. Bush's supporters, many of whom have cast his sweeping proposals for an "ownership society" as the conservative inverse of Roosevelt's New Deal. But Roosevelt also suffered humiliating setbacks when he confused high approval ratings with an unfettered mandate, and tried to pack the Supreme Court following his landslide victory in 1936.

A closer parallel to Mr. Bush's first four years might be those of James Polk, who won office narrowly in 1844 and applied himself to four well defined but ambitious goals: To restore the independent treasury; lower trade barriers; resolve the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain; and acquire southern California.

Polk accomplished all, but, exhausted, chose not to run for re-election. In his second term, Mr. Bush has only upped the ante considerably, with a domestic proposal that in some respects is more far-reaching than any he has ever proposed. "It seems like the riskiest of presidential politics that I can imagine or remember," says the presidential historian Robert Dallek. "It may speak volumes about the fact that he wants to be a transitional president who does big things. But if you take big risks, you can fail in big ways."

This time, it's unclear how much more political leverage he has. For each of Mr. Bush's battles against Beltway conventional wisdom - his push for large tax cuts despite ballooning federal deficits and for an invasion of Iraq despite widespread skepticism that the country was an imminent threat - he could muster reasonably high approval ratings, strong Republican support and a divided opposition. When there was no momentum for change, Mr. Bush relied on the bully pulpit and his party's control of Congress.

Mr. Bush seems convinced he can do the same with Social Security. But he may have to dig deep into his political piggy bank. There is little groundswell for Social Security privatization. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in mid-January, only 40 percent of adults thought it was a good idea "to allow workers to invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market," while 56 percent said that the president did not have a mandate for such a program. Other polls show the country no more than evenly divided on the issue.

Mr. Bush must also overcome approval ratings stuck near 50 percent, a united Democratic opposition and Congressional Republicans for whom the president's proposals have little upside.

There's no doubt that voters are more open than they were to privatizing Social Security. Michael Tanner, who leads the Project on Social Security Choice at the Cato Institute, gives Mr. Bush the credit. "Without a president willing to lead on this, you wouldn't be doing it this year," Mr. Tanner said.

But other conservatives are not so sure. Gathering support for an Iraq war may prove to be easier than the push to change Social Security. "9/11 was huge; it had to be responded to," says William Kristol, an occasional adviser to the White House and editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine.

It's not clear, Mr. Kristol says, whether Social Security's fiscal troubles rise to the same level. "It's more like Clinton's health care proposals. Was there a problem in the health care system? Sure. Was it a moment when American society thought, 'We have to come to grips with health care?' No."

When Mr. Clinton first took office, Democrats enjoyed majorities in the House and Senate larger than those Republican have today. But in 1994, Republicans won control of the House for the first time in 40 years, in part because of the health care debacle.

"The Republicans said, you've got all the reins of power, you pass health care," says Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Social Security might do the same for the Democrats."

There is, of course, yet another possibility: that Mr. Bush understands perfectly the risks to his own party, but nevertheless believes that fundamentally changing Social Security is in the country's best interest.

Here, too, there is precedent. Johnson used every ounce of his political skill and legislative know-how to ram the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress over the opposition of most Southern Democrats, convinced that America would become a better place for it. At the signing ceremony, Johnson is said to have remarked that he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come. His words proved prophetic.

"Bush is not only defying the tides of history, but he's also defying the advice of his own side and doing what he thinks is right," says Lou Cannon, a journalist and author of several books about Reagan. "There's something perversely admirable about it."