A new epithet seems to be in use on the left in respect of Mayor Giuliani – namely that he has been “fostering a climate of ethnic paranoia,” as it was put in a piece published on the Web by the Atlantic Monthly. The writer, Matthew Yglesias, discloses that one thing he’s been “wrestling with is finding a way to convey how terrified I am at the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy.” He reckons that the “Bush administration has been so bad, and characters like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson so absurd, that I think it’s hard for a lot of people to seriously credit the notion that Giuliani would represent a quantum leap of lunacy.” He quotes Joshua Marshall as saying of Mr. Giuliani that “the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn’t the same as running a national foreign policy.”

What are New Yorkers to make of this idea of “ethnic paranoia”? To what — or to whom — are Messrs. Marshall and Yglesias referring? Ethnic New Yorkers? Ethnic Americans? Well, go figure . . .

* * *

Meantime, our favorite analysis of the election fetched up on the Web yesterday in a post by the American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta. She writes that as she’s watched Mayor Giuliani’s presidential campaign build a foreign policy team, it’s occurred to her “that the easiest way to understand the entire Giuliani phenomenon is that he is the candidate of The New York Sun; culturally moderate, reasonably sophisticated, socially tolerant, and a far-right Zionist hawk on matters Middle Eastern.” Quoth she: “If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nod and Giuliani the G.O.P. one, contest 2008 is going to be a fight to the death between the political philosophies exemplified by The New York Times editorial board versus the ones held by The New York Sun.” Then Ms. Franke-Ruta says: “One would hope that would go about as well as the New York newspaper war between those two papers . . .”

As it happens, we hope the same thing. When the Sun was launched five and a half years ago, we estimated the New York Times circulation in Manhattan at something like 210,000. We calculated that its circulation in New York City had dropped something like 14% in the decade that ended in 2000. The Times numbers on New York City circulation are no longer broken out, but we hear estimates that the newspaper’s Manhattan circulation has dropped to below 160,000 and maybe further. In percentage terms, it’s quite a retreat on their home territory in a city that voted overwhelmingly for the party Ms. Franke-Ruta, Messrs. Marshall and Yglesias, and the Times seem to favor. The Sun certainly has a way to go to catch up on circulation, though we are getting a total of 100,000 copies of the Sun to a magnificent group of readers, and advertising revenues so far this year are up more than 50% from the year earlier period on top of similar gains in the year earlier.

As for which paper wants which candidates, the Sun hasn’t endorsed in any of the primaries, at least not yet. What we have said is that our dream contest in November 2008 would be a race in which Senator Clinton is the Democratic nominee, Mayor Giuliani is the Republican nominee, and Mayor Bloomberg runs as an independent. We call this “The New York Central.” It’s by no means a lead pipe cinch, but neither is it an impossibility. Our attraction to the New York Central, we’ve written, is motivated not only by our delight at the prospect of an all-New York field. It’s also on the issues that each of the candidates frame. As an entryway for immigration, as Ground Zero in the world war, as an engine of economic growth and trade, as a venue of school reform, and as a capital of commerce, culture, and religion, New York has more than its share to offer in the coming election year. Ethnic paranoia, indeed.