Mayor Bloomberg stopped by the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton dinner last night. He sketched the outlines of what we, at least, interpreted as the beginnings of his case for re-election to the right-of-center business and intellectual leaders in town. Mr. Bloomberg mentioned that he had recently asked Henry Kissinger, on the ex-secretary of state’s 30th anniversary, the secret of a good marriage, “and the answer was diplomacy.”

It’s an answer that could apply just as well to the relationship between the mayor and the think tank. Manhattan Institute scholars have been witheringly critical of the mayor’s tax increases. But Mr. Bloomberg was most gracious. The mayor noted that one of Hamilton’s legacies was the deal that removed the federal capital from New York. Government, the mayor suggested, tends to crowd out private enterprise, so the decamping of the federal government to Washington may be one reason that New York became the financial, fashion, arts, and press capital of the new nation, while Washington became, well, Washington. The mayor spoke of his efforts to end social promotion in the public schools, of building on Mayor Giuliani’s legacy so that crime is down to historic lows and so that New York has fewer people on public assistance today than it has had at any time since 1965.

ABC News’s John Stossel remarked that no matter how much Mr. Bloomberg improves public schools, they are still a government monopoly. Students need to be “lifted out of the government school prisons” by offering genuine choice, Mr. Stossel said. Still, we don’t doubt that the mayor helped himself with his appearance at an event that was a tribute to our celebrated columnist William F. Buckley Jr., to a pioneering philanthropist in the field of education, Peter Flanigan, who is the founder of Student Sponsor Partners, and, posthumously, to the great editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley. It was a tribute, as well, to the Manhattan Institute itself — well deserved and warmly given by all present.