When she set out to topple a popular nine-term congressional incumbent, Reshma Saujani reveled in her background in the world of high finance, emerging as a national voice for an industry that felt besieged, blamed and battered after the banking collapse. 'I'm running on my Wall Street record, not from it,' she said in January. Saujani drew high-profile backers, who gave generously to her campaign and urged her to stand up against any scapegoating of Wall Street. But even in the financial capital that is New York, where the industry helps drive the economy and provides a sizable portion of the tax revenues, that strategy appears to be misfiring. By Tuesday, in her debate against Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, Saujani had not only muted her defense of Wall Street, but also called for tougher regulation of the industry. And she sounded downright stung as she described the demonizing of financial executives. 'Thousands of people who work in the financial services industry live in our district,' Saujani, 34, a former lawyer for several hedge funds, said during the debate with Maloney, 64, the veteran congresswoman for the East Side of Manhattan and parts of Queens. 'Are we all bad people? Do none of us have a right to run for office?' As unpopular as Washington incumbents and Albany, N.Y., insiders have been this political season, nothing is so radioactive in the precincts of New York as the taint of Wall Street ties. Rick A. Lazio, the leading Republican candidate for governor, has been taunted for weeks by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and his allies over his post-congressional career as a lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase, where he received a $1.3 million bonus in 2008, during the federal bailout. 'Rick Lazio made a killing as a Wall Street lobbyist while the rest of the economy burned,' said Charlie King, director of the state Democratic Party, after Lazio released financial disclosure forms in June. Little had changed by Aug. 25, when Lazio put out his first television advertisement, deriding Cuomo as a creature of Albany. 'It's no surprise that Lazio's ad doesn't say one word about himself or his record because the only thing he could say is he's a Wall Street lobbyist who got a $1.3 million dollar taxpayer-funded bonus,' said the state Democratic committee chairman, Jay Jacobs. 'Right now it's probably one of the most difficult periods to run with the embrace of Wall Street,' said David S. Birdsell, dean of Baruch College's School of Public Affairs. Even in Manhattan, Birdsell said: 'It's far too hard of an argument to sell. You're going against the narrative of deals done without proper scrutiny, derivatives that were undersecured, homes that were lost -- all the story lines that have become so familiar.' Indeed, in the Democratic primary contest for state attorney general, five contenders are vying to be seen as the toughest watchdog for a banking industry whose out-of-control avarice, they suggest, drove ordinary people to the brink of disaster. 'Retirements at risk, huge undeserved bonuses, greedy bankers -- that I'll stop,' Assemblyman Richard Brodsky promises in one television advertisement. The actor John Leguizamo assures viewers that Eric R. Dinallo, a former state insurance superintendent, 'led the fight to hold Wall Street accountable -- before it was cool.' And Sean Coffey, a wealthy trial lawyer, is running advertisements proclaiming that he 'fought for thousands of investors devastated by Wall Street greed.' In his most recent advertisement, he boasts, 'I took on Wall Street giants they said couldn't be beaten, and made them pay back billions to the people they hurt.' Not so many months ago, Saujani's hometown boosterism for Wall Street at least seemed to put her in good company, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Gov. David A. Paterson and former Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. 'You can assume, as she undoubtedly did,' said Birdsell, 'that expressing sympathy with an industry that employs a large number of people in her district would be a winner.' But Bloomberg, Paterson and Ford are not running for office. 