At first, we don’t mind saying, we were a bit annoyed when we were handed a wire yesterday saying that Mayor Bloomberg had turned to the New York Times to publish his piece about why he is standing down from running for president. These were the columns, after all, that had been plumping for the mayor to get into the race and run a campaign on a pro-growth, free-trade, pro-immigration platform. It would have been nice to deliver the news of the mayor’s decision. But when we read the reasons the mayor cited in his piece in the Times — the carping about what a mess we’re supposedly in, the handwringing about the special interests — it occurred to us that the Times was a good place for him to issue his l’envoi.

For our part, it’s not the rebuke of partisanship that was the attraction of a Bloomberg candidacy or any concerns over special interests. What we were hoping for was a campaign that bring a certain New York spirit to the national debate after years in which it has lain fallow as the nation handed up politicians from the South and the Sunbelt. When the mayor is good, and there are plenty of such times, he is really magnificent on immigration, on the economic contribution and possibilities of the great cities, on the damage that is being done by the tort lawyers, on the nature of international financial competition, and on certain, though not all, aspects of economic management and the public fisc. In the city budget, the mayor has just trimmed both taxes and spending. He is what might be called an “early adjuster.”

There are those who say the mayor’s real calculation in not running is that he reckoned he just wasn’t likely to win — and that to run on such a basis would be harmful. If it is true that it’s the mayor’s thinking, it’s a tragedy. Only hours before he issued his l’envoi in the Times, after all, the mayor had issued a wonderful statement in respect of the death of William F. Buckley Jr., in which the mayor said that Buckley’s “1965 bid for New York’s City Hall will live on as one of the defining mayoral campaigns in the city’s history.” Buckley, of course, lost — and no doubt understood he faced a likelihood of losing even when he went into the race. It didn’t stop him, because he had ideas that he wanted to get across and he understood that the right to press them in an election campaign is one of the great gifts America gives to all.