We mean that headline only in the figurative sense, animated by news that Mayor Bloomberg is planning to open his home for a fund-raiser for the Reagan Library. Our Grace Rauh has the particulars at page one. The news comes as Mayor Giuliani is showing some sudden weakness in the polls and is sure to set tongues wagging. The idea seems to be not only that Mr. Bloomberg is aiming to help Mrs. Reagan, with whom he shares an interest in medical research, including work on embryonic stem cells. It is also that as the mayor seeks to position himself for the possibility of a presidential campaign, he’s tapping into the Reagan legacy.

That would be a stretch, no doubt. Mr. Reagan was a supply-sider who had a deep, abiding commitment to tax cuts, and stood athwart the tendency to nanny-statism that Mr. Bloomberg embodies; he, in sharp contradistinction to the mayor, opposed abortion. But Reagan was also a big-tent conservative, who understood the immigration issue and whose presidency saw and welcomed a great surge in immigration into America. Part of Mr. Reagan’s genius was his ability to attract “Reagan Democrats” who crossed party lines to vote for him.

Mr. Bloomberg managed to do the same to get himself elected as a Republican in predominantly Democratic New York City, as Mr. Giuliani did before him. Reagan’s line on immigration was more akin to that of Mr. Bloomberg and Senator McCain than the protectionist positions of Governor Romney and, recently, Mr. Giuliani. Reagan was an ardent free-trader, approving agreements with Canada and Israel, while Mr. Giuliani opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement. The trade issue came through in Jon Meacham’s cover story on Mr. Bloomberg in Newsweek.

One of the political achievements of Reagan’s 1984 landslide was that he carried New York State, a state that even in the 1980s tilted so far Democratic that Governor Dukakis carried it in 1988. It is an irony that the third New Yorker in the presidential hunt this year, Senator Clinton, earlier this week accepted the endorsement of the man Reagan beat in 1984, Walter Mondale. While Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg compete for the Reagan legacy, the Democratic candidate seems determined to repudiate it. If the pattern holds, maybe Mrs. Clinton will wind up as ambassador to Japan in a Spitzer administration.