Washington ? Freshman orientation in these parts is no trifling thing. All the factors that bring new senators to the chamber ambition, an ease at a microphone, a sense of the political timbre, above all an abiding impatience are ruthlessly repressed. The process is humorless, humbling, even humiliating. Mostly, new senators wait for their moment.

Mostly that moment is six years or more in coming.

Then there is Jon Corzine. Most new senators are experienced in government governors, for example, or House members, or first ladies. Corzine is a bond trader. Many new senators have difficulty articulating a coherent economic philosophy. Corzine has a crisp one at hand: Buy low, sell high. Most new senators, even those who once lived in the White House, stay in the background and try to fade in with the wallpaper. Corzine is at the center of the debate over one of the most important pieces of business legislation of the year.

As early as this week the Senate Banking Committee is to take up a measure to respond to the Enron collapse, likely by embracing large parts of a proposal crafted by Corzine and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. The legislation would create an independent regulatory organization for auditing standards, ban accounting firms from providing other services to the companies they examine and improve financial disclosures. The House passed substantially weaker legislation last week.

All of which puts Corzine, the lawmaker the lions of the Senate expected to humor, humble and humiliate in short, to hate in the position of being one of the most influential first-trimester Senate freshmen in decades. Indeed, his fellow Democrats no longer diss him by saying “he bought his seat” (a quality they do not mind before an election but often resent afterward) or dismiss him by saying “he’s Wall Street” (a description that gives the party credibility in public forums but makes the party uneasy in private caucuses).

In politics as in batting and business, timing is everything. There was, for example, nothing wrong with Corzine’s prospects as a candidate that an open seat (plus $60 million of his own money in campaign expenditures) couldn’t cure. There was, similarly, nothing wrong in his prospects as a senator that the collapse of the world’s sixth-biggest energy company couldn’t cure. The retirement of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and the Enron debacle transformed Corzine from a political afterthought to a political afterburner.

“I didn’t come down here looking to be the Democratic investment banker,” Corzine said in a conversation the other day. “But Enron created issues that needed addressing. They were important beforehand but much more clear now.”

So, too, is the classic irony of American politics the presence of plutocrats at the ramparts of reform. Indeed, some of the greatest progressives came from the posh side of the class barrier; just last year James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn wrote a triple biography of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, terming them “patrician leaders who transformed America.”

So now Corzine takes his place among the investment bankers in Democratic politics, alongside Averell Harriman and Robert Rubin. Like the others, he breaks the stereotypes. Before he joined the Senate, he was known as Goldman Sachs’ wiz in the fixed-income division, the part of the firm that owned billions in bonds, acquired in the simple but perilous hope that they could be sold for more than they cost. Now his horizon is a bit broader. He doesn’t think of himself as a day trader anymore.

He doesn’t think of himself as a special interest anymore either. Wall Street may never forgive him for supporting an amendment to re-regulate energy and metals derivatives. In response to the Enron collapse, Corzine came up with a proposal to cap at 20 percent the amount of company stock an employee could have in a 401(k) account. Swiftly and efficiently, the notion was crushed by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Benefits Council.

But his persona hasn’t been altered completely. In his first year in office, Corzine distributed almost $2.8 million to Democratic causes and candidates, including more than a half-million each in soft money to Democratic campaign committees and to New Jersey state candidates and party activities. Though no longer on Wall Street, Corzine is still making investments.