Advice for Mayor Bloomberg: Drop all the plans for glossy brochures and phone calls and any other campaign spending. Divert all remaining campaign funds to mailing every voter a videotape of last night’s debate between the Democrats, and to buying television airtime to rebroadcast it.

You couldn’t have found a better explanation of why the Democratic Party in this city is a disaster. The candidates sounded like Chicken Little, proclaiming crisis after crisis. The former president of the Bronx, Fernando Ferrer, spoke of “a dropout crisis.” The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, spoke of affordable housing as “a terrible crisis” and as “a serious crisis that’s growing worse.” Mr. Miller also spoke of the conditions of the subways as “a serious crisis.” Mr. Miller said that immigrant day laborers on the streets of New York are “a serious crisis,” too. With so many serious crises on hand, it’s hard to credit Mr. Miller’s claim that he’s had “a proven record of results.”

For every crisis, the Democrats had a big-government solution. Mr. Miller and the president of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields, said they want to raise taxes on commuters. Mr. Ferrer said he wants to raise taxes on people who buy stocks.

Mr. Miller defended the price controls that have contributed to the failure of the housing supply in New York to rise in response to the increased demand. “I fought to protect rent control and rent stabilization,” he said with pride, defending policies that even the liberal New York Times, in a 1996 editorial, abandoned, writing, “Rent regulation has not served New York City well. It has discouraged investment in the upkeep of old properties and the construction of new ones. The laws hurt the entire city by reducing the tax base. An expensive and extremely cumbersome state bureaucracy is required to implement them. Especially galling, the laws create an irrational system in which some well-to-do tenants pay very little rent for large apartments while less-prosperous newcomers are forced to pay rates that are artificially inflated by the shortage of market-rate housing.”

Ms. Fields’s solution to affordable housing, which she called the no. 1 problem facing the city? “We are going to have to subsidize it,” she said. Even Rep. Anthony Weiner, who styles himself the tax-cutting Giuliani-style Democrat among the field, reverted to anti-business rhetoric when it comes to housing. “We now worship, it seems, at the altar of every big developer who comes to town,” he said derisively, calling for 40% of all new housing to be set aside at nonmarket rates, split equally between housing for the poor and the middle class. Mr. Weiner also came out essentially in favor of welfare fraud, denouncing the mayor for fingerprinting food stamp applicants.

A rare moment at which we found ourselves agreeing with one of the Democrats last night was when Mr. Ferrer said, “Let’s not sell the intelligence of the voters short.” Surely the voters of New York are intelligent enough that they have realized that attacking developers and regulating rents isn’t an effective way to bring more apartments to the city. Surely the voters are intelligent enough to know that without taking precautions, the welfare system is open to fraud and abuse and breeds dependency. Surely the voters are intelligent enough to know that raising taxes kills jobs, and that every problem in the city doesn’t rise to the level of a “crisis” that demands a big government solution. The voters of New York were intelligent enough on all these points to elect Mayor Giuliani twice and Mayor Bloomberg once; there’s no reason to believe that, once the voters are fully aware of the rhetoric of the Democrats, they’ll again form a majority for another party’s candidate in November’s election.