OCHESTER, Dec. 21 — The furor over racially insensitive remarks by Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi is reverberating here in upstate New York. The Monroe County executive, Jack Doyle, is under fire for his comments in an interview with a local reporter.

While discussing the strained relations between himself and the Rochester mayor and the two governments they head, Mr. Doyle said, "If there was a mayor that looked like me, it would be a whole different landscape." Mayor William A. Johnson Jr., a Democrat, is black. Mr. Doyle, a Republican, is white.

When asked to elaborate in the interview, Mr. Doyle said his comments only concerned political affiliation. "Do you know what this city needs?" he added. "It needs a Republican mayor to go in there and clean the bureaucrats out and straighten this city out."

The mayor and other critics have interpreted Mr. Doyle's statement as an allusion to race. "There is no other conclusion that I can draw," Mayor Johnson said later in the week. "What does a Republican look like?"

He added that he was considering running against Mr. Doyle for county executive, partly because of the comments, which were printed Monday in The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

People on both sides said the remark struck a nerve primarily because of the controversy surrounding Mr. Lott's statement that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond, who ran on a segregationist ticket in 1948, had been elected president. The resulting outcry led Mr. Lott to withdraw Friday as Senate Republican leader.
"If this had happened at any other time, people would have raised eyebrows, but we would have moved on very quickly," Dr. Gerald Gamm, chairman of the political science department at the University of Rochester, said in an interview.

The mayor said Mr. Doyle's statement reflected a general disdain for city residents. The city is in Monroe County and receives funds from the county for some city programs that have recently been cut back by Mr. Doyle. "He treats us as though we were wards of the county," Mr. Johnson said.
Rochester is primarily Democratic and has a large black population: about 40 percent of the city residents are black. Three-fourths of the registered Monroe County voters live in the suburbs, which are predominantly white and Republican.

Mr. Doyle and his supporters have accused Democrats of taking unfair advantage of the Lott situation for political gain. "Any crass political effort to twist these comments into a racially charged statement is entirely inaccurate and can only be explained as partisan politics at their very worst," Mr. Doyle said Wednesday in a prepared statement.

Mr. Doyle declined to answer reporters' questions after issuing the statement, and a spokesman said Friday that he was out of town for the weekend and not available for comment.

If Mr. Johnson does challenge Mr. Doyle in 2003, it would be their first head-to-head race.

Mr. Doyle has not said whether he will seek re-election, however, and on Friday, the president of the Rochester Chamber of Commerce, Thomas T. Mooney, a Republican and a longtime friend of Mr. Doyle, told The Democrat and Chronicle that Mr. Doyle should not run again.

Mr. Mooney said, "I don't think under the existing setup of personalities that this conversation can have a happy ending."