The decision of the Democrats in New York to forgo a runoff and nominate Fernando Ferrer as their candidate in November removes any reason to wait on an endorsement. The New York Sun endorses Mayor Bloomberg for a second term. We have no personal quarrel with Mr. Ferrer, with whom we’ve had several meals in the past year or so. He’s a wonderful person, smart and earnest. But we differ with Mr. Ferrer on the issues and, for all our quarrels with Mr. Bloomberg on taxes and borrowing and the regulation of smoking, he has more than earned a second term, particularly when the Democrats are running a tax-raiser against him.

Mr. Bloomberg took office in a city hit hard by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the recession that followed, and he has led our city to a resurgence that can make us all proud. He won a big political victory in Albany and took on a big risk by taking control of the public schools. He has taken a hard line with the teachers union, and his passionately committed schools chancellor, Joel Klein, has been an advocate for expanding the number of charter schools. He has chosen, in Raymond Kelly, the finest police commissioner since Theodore Roosevelt and has brought the crime rates down to levels that make us all feel safer. His 311 telephone hotline has made city government more accessible.

One of the things we’ve discovered about Mayor Bloomberg is that he actually has an extraordinarily likable and gracious personality. This wasn’t apparent to us at the start. But we began to see it when his popularity plummeted and he was defeated in his campaign for nonpartisan elections. He has emerged as an amiable and enthusiastic cheerleader for New York as a city of immigrants and artists and great cultural institutions and parks. He was a warm host to the Republican National Convention. He’s kept the welfare rolls declining and begun to enforce stricter rules in the city’s homeless shelters.

We haven’t always agreed with Mr. Bloomberg. He was too quick to raise taxes and too quick to offer special tax breaks to powerful developers or businesses instead of offering across the board tax cuts to all taxpayers in an overtaxed city. And if the Democrats had put Rep. Anthony Weiner into a runoff, we’d have delayed this endorsement, nursing the admittedly slim hope that Mr. Weiner would emerge as a genuine tax-cutter to challenge the mayor, though there is little in Mr. Weiner’s record as a congressman to support that. But the Democrats instead have handed their nomination to a candidate who has campaigned calling for $2 billion in tax increases.

Mr. Ferrer wants to increase taxes on property and on the transfer of stock, while Mr. Bloomberg, for his part, has begun to steer a course as a tax cutter by implementing a property tax rebate. There will be more to say about this campaign in the weeks ahead. Our hope is that eventually the Republican Party in New York will take a more free-market-oriented, tax-cutting, pro-growth course than even the one taken by Mr. Bloomberg. It needs leaders who can articulate the ideas that have lofted the Republicans to the robust leadership of all branches of the federal government. But for now the candidates have been chosen, and there is no question at all in our minds that our city would be better off in the next four years with Mayor Bloomberg than with a Mayor Ferrer.