Sure, it was touching, but I realized that because he was a campaign worker, this "mosaic" bit might have been just another campaign-endorsed talking point. I wanted to believe in unity, though it sounded naive in the midst of a tense campaign.

AFTER an evening of hearing impassioned speeches and winning cheers, I faced a two-hour wait before the rumbling comfort of an Amtrak train could rush me back to South Station. That meant a typically uncomfortable stay in and around New York's unpleasant Penn Station.

I went to a newsstand on the street to check out those infamous tabloids, which somehow managed to put the Dinkins victory on its front page only minutes after the winner was declared. Waiting at the newsstand were two bedraggled and apparently intoxicated men who were Black.

"Too, bad. Your guy lost--he's outta there," one of them said with a certain degree of mocking joy as I reached for a Post.

"Actually," I said while pulling a Dinkins poster out of my portfolio, "I was just at the Dinkins party."

The man seemed shocked--he grabbed and held my hand. "We're gonna do it this year," he shouted. "You and me. You and me. This is it."

It was uncanny, the similarity between this scene and the earlier one at the party--but this was the real world. He and I, perfect strangers, could just as easily have been shouting racial epithets at each other in Bensonhurst or in the next Spike Lee movie--but, no. This was the real New York.

IN a city so plagued by very real troubles and very real pain, city government has a tremendous job ahead in attempting to right the wrongs of discrimination and injustice. But although the city can arrest violent racists, it can't make them want to turn their hate into love.

The problems of racism are deeprooted, and maybe nothing short of the passage of time can heal the wounds of hate. We certainly can't expect one mayor to compensate for hundreds of years of injustice.

But the mayor is the one symbol that can inspire people to change their attitudes and return a city from hysteria to harmonious sanity. I can't be sure--but that encounter outside Penn Station might not have happened if New York had voted for another four years of Ed Koch.

Even before he takes office or is even elected, the symbol of Dinkins and the hope he represents has the real potential to make a positive change in New Yorkers' attitudes about race--and that is what David Dinkins really offers New York.