By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

The long knives are out for Steve Murphy.

It's two months until the preliminary election, and 10 weeks until the general, and already doubters not too far in the shadows of Boston politics are talking about the affable at-large city councillor from Hyde Park as if he were a pleasant memory from the last century. Murphy's been on the ballot too many times, his brand of earnest constituent service delivery won't resonate with new voters citywide, and he won't be able to stave off the young talent that's in the field this year, the skeptics say.

Murphy laughs. Not the carefree laugh of an incumbent skipping and twirling to an assured re-election, but the laugh of a veteran pol who's seen his name finish out of the money, a lot, and who knows he's got a pitched battle ahead of him.

"I think Steve Murphy really has a challenge on his hands," says Mukiya Baker-Gomez, a Murphy foe from last year's sheriff's race, when she helped steer Andrea Cabral to victory. "I think he has to work really hard to be able to keep his seat. I think if he's really able to get a message out there that resonates with the voters, there might be a possibility of him getting re-elected."

Murphy laughs because he's been doubted before - Patricia White supporters marked him for dead in 2003 - and because what he's counting on this year is a crop of voters who rely on him as an able city councillor, who know him as a nice guy, and who aren't worn out by the one, two, three, four, five consecutive years his name's been on the ballot for various offices.

Newly hired press secretary Seth Andrea McCoy says his bids for various offices - state representative, treasurer, sheriff - are an outgrowth of Murphy's desire to serve an ever-widening population, and that the Sheriff's seat would have "brought him to a larger constituency."

Skeptics see naked ambition.

In part of because of that habitual balloteering, Murphy says he's let his political organization take an easy summer, not wanting to "bother them."

"I've touched base with the people I consider my people," Murphy says over coffee at Dottie's in Hyde Park one morning last week, a watchful McCoy taking notes. "Everybody is just waiting for the green light to get going."

In Dorchester, though, some Murphy people have been green-lit for other candidates. State Rep. Martin Walsh, City Councillor Maureen Feeney, Cedar Grove Civic Association President John O'Toole, and Pope's Hill Neighborhood Association President Phil Carver are all on the John Connolly bandwagon this year - not all of them forsaking Murphy (Feeney sharing a stage and a proclamation reading with him at a St. Mark's neighborhood block party last Saturday), but at least diluting some of the support Murphy has enjoyed in Wards 13 and 16 in the past.

As if anticipating that the old formulas might not serve him this year,

Murphy has been trying out new ones. In May, he marched for the first time in Boston's gay pride parade, to which he says he's still never been invited, and sported a pink shirt. He's pushing two new issues - reform of the system in which employers can check criminal backgrounds, and increased attention to groundwater levels - and returning to another one, how kegs are tracked by police and liquor stores, that he's been flogging since at least 1998.

Murphy has worked to shed the conservative label that has followed him since his election in 1997 elevated him from failed candidate and Dapper O'Neil's driver, and at times that's seemed smart politics. Few of the touters of the "New Boston" imagine a place for Murphy in it, and for proof they can point to the lopsided sheriff's election the councillor says blindsided him last year. A recent Boston Phoenix article was accompanied by a drawing of Murphy as an off-balance dinosaur.

If the rules seem to be changing on him, to the point that he lost the usually reliable Ward 13 Precinct 10 (over-the-bridge Savin Hill) to Cabral, Murphy's instincts have not deserted. He deftly pivots small talk about sunscreen application to a mention of his appearance at the reopening of Hemenway Park. He delves into detail about the Rev. Bruce Wall's hopes for a ministry center in Codman Square. And the twitches that have injured him in the past he is trying gamely to suppress. With McCoy looking on warily, he refuses to prognosticate the election's outcome, or evaluate the field.

"I get in trouble every time I'm a pundit," Murphy says.

Asked whether he'd still like to be sheriff, and about the federal investigation probing whether Cabral lied to a grand jury abut firing an employee because she was an informant for the FBI, Murphy allows only: "I made a case last year as to what I would do to improve that department, and my arguments were not accepted." Any speculation about Cabral's fate is, he says, "extraneous to me."

Murphy's own fate is the subject of considerable conjecture among local political junkies, who see him alternately as doomed by the energetic insurgencies of younger contenders, or destined for salvage by faithful voters undeterred by "Murphy fatigue." Content for now to let his campaign organization cool its engines, Murphy insists he'll put it to the voters to judge his record - and the hard-working persona he's cultivated.

"Here is what I do, here is what I stand on, here are the efforts I'm making. This is all I do. This is what I do in life."

And, walking away from the St. Mark's party Saturday night, he makes his case again.

"I told you," Murphy says. "It's all about who shows up. And I'm showing up. Here I am."