A look at Democratic nominee John F. Street in the final days of the mayoral campaign.

John F. Street has endorsements from President Clinton and Mayor Rendell on down. By Election Day he will have raised close to $10 million - enough to do everything but buy the entire electorate a large cheese pizza, an aide says. He is the Democratic mayoral nominee in a Democratic town, a former City Council president anointed by Rendell as a full partner in the city's revival.

Despite enough advantages to qualify him as a political colossus, Street is running no better than even with Republican candidate Sam Katz, polls show. That the race is as close as it is deeply offends the Street camp.

Manwell Glenn, deputy field director for the campaign, complained the other day that Street deserves not a contest but a "coronation."

But a contest he has, and after a summer in which his campaign wheezed and sputtered, he finally appears on track. He is embracing the issues and his Democratic Party roots. He is crisscrossing the city, greeting morning commuters in the subway and popping into neighborhood bars at night to greet the shot-and-a-beer set.

Street, 56, knows he is in the race of his life, and he is pumped up.

His message is crystallizing. Everywhere he goes, he is hammering the point that as a 19-year veteran of City Council, he has experience that Katz can't hope to match. Using homespun analogies, he is trying to persuade voters that Katz - a businessman who served on the school board for three years in the early 1980s - is a risky experiment the city can ill afford.

Visiting a group of elderly people in West Philadelphia - part of his base - Street was talking about macaroni.

Shouting, really.

In a rhetorical burst that seemed more Sunday preacher than politician, he made the point that no matter how many recipes you've studied, no matter how much advice you've gotten from the best chefs, the only sure way to produce a mouth-watering macaroni is if you've done it before in a kitchen that you know.

"Running the government is just that way," he told the group this week. "There are some things you can't find in a book. You have to know a little bit about these agencies. Just like mom knows about baking that macaroni. You get someone who has no experience whatsoever and drop them into the kitchen and give them the ingredients and there's no telling what you're going to get."

Street was Julia Child in this analogy, Katz the guy fumbling with the cheddar.

Lest voters need more prodding, Street, of late, has been pounding another theme. He is the Democrat. His election means the preservation of Democratic rule in Philadelphia. As the campaign winds down, the Street camp is increasingly casting the race in these partisan terms - and bringing in powerful surrogates to help. Clinton and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) are to campaign here tomorrow.

"Don't let this wonderful city fall into the hands of the likes of [Republicans] Rick Santorum, Katz and Jesse Helms and this whole crowd," said political consultant James Carville at a recent fund-raising event for Street on Rittenhouse Square.

In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 4-1, the strategy has an obvious logic. The question for Street is, will it be enough? Is loyalty to Philadelphia's Democratic Party enough to trump race? Street is black, Katz is white in a city with about 50,000 more registered white voters than black. Are party ties sufficient to ease lingering concerns about Street's temperament and the uneven campaign he has run.

The Street campaign sagged over the summer - a development that, by his staff's admission, created an opening that Katz seized.

"We let Katz back in the race," said Ken Snyder, Street's spokesman. "I will concede . . . that Street lost the first 100 days of this campaign from the primary until Labor Day. . . . He thought he could run a traditional Democratic campaign that started after Labor Day, underestimating what he had to do over the summer."

Since then, Street has fought hard to rebound.

The formula for victory is simple enough. Street can expect upward of 90 percent of the black vote, his base. And with strong endorsements from area labor leaders, he has every reason to hope for a share of white, pro-union families in rowhouse neighborhoods. Roll in a portion of white, liberal swing voters in the Northwest, and Street would appear unbeatable.

But his personality has emerged as something of a wild card.

"He has allowed this campaign to become a referendum on his personality and his ability to interact with people," said local NAACP president J. Whyatt Mondesire.

As Council president for most of the last seven years, Street could be a bit imperious, a power-broker who operated behind the scenes. Even Rendell played the supplicant. It was the mayor who would walk up the two flights of stairs for their regular Tuesday morning meetings.

Though Street can be refreshingly candid in one-on-one settings, he is not nearly as accessible - with his time, or with his emotions - as the schmoozer he is striving to succeed.

Street is aware that some find him cold. And he doesn't give the complaints much weight.

A mayor, he says, needs to be judged by more than a winning personality.

"We have a new qualification to be mayor of this city," he told the crowd of senior citizens in West Philly. "I never heard it before. Now you have to be warm and fuzzy.

"I have a prickly personality. Someone said the other day if you were getting ready to have an operation and on the one hand you had somebody with 19 years of experience and on the other you had someone with no experience whatsoever, and this person with 19 years experience had a prickly personality and the person with no experience was waaaarrrrm and fuzzzzyyyy, who would you want to be operating on you?"

The audience cheered and clapped.

The next morning found him outside the subway station at 15th and Market Streets, greeting rush-hour commuters.

Street was in the euphoric state that athletes call "the zone." He got cheek-to-cheek with the women; put his arm around the men; hoisted children into the air; jumped up and down. He even grabbed a beauty student's mannequin head (nose ring included) as an aide took a picture.

Street's "Polaroid Posse" snapped the candidate with hundreds of commuters, and presented the photos as gifts. Hardly anyone refused to stand with Street. Everyone seemed to walk away pleased.

"You feel you really get to know him personally. I'll have this picture to take to work," said Mike Brenner, 51, of the Northeast, who said he plans to vote for Street.

Street has run a largely issue-based campaign. His TV ad attacking Katz' absenteeism on the school board is as nasty as he has gotten.

He is positioning himself as the heir to Rendell. He wants more of Rendell's modest cuts in the wage tax. He is calling for a $250 million bond issue to clear trash-strewn vacant lots, tow abandoned cars and eliminate neighborhood blight. And he demands "full funding" for the city's public schools. On that point, he has not said exactly how he would force more money out of a state legislature that has confounded even that master dealmaker, Rendell.

Should Street win, he would face the challenge of smoothing relations with some of those same Republicans whom his camp has demonized.

For now, though, Street's focus is Election Day.

"We are Democrats and we are going to have a great Democratic victory," he is telling the crowd in West Philadelphia. "We're going to let the other guys know they are going to continue to be in the minority!"

A chant wells up in the audience: "Street '99!"

They've sampled the macaroni and found it good.

TOMORROW: The Katz campaign