Mayor Bloomberg has been wasting no time in trying to exploit the latest indictments of New York politicians to revive his scheme for what he likes to call “non-partisan” elections. His Honor would have us believe that the problem is not the crooks but the party system. Yet it is the party system that allows people less wealthy than the mayor to aggregate their money to enter the political fray. Parties handed up such New Yorkers as, say, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Fiorello LaGuardia, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch.

Somehow these individuals, even though they came up through the party system, managed to avoid succumbing to the kind of temptation in to which State Senator Malcolm Smith allegedly gave. Mr. Smith, a Democrat, is charged in federal court with trying to purchase from GOP officials a spot on the Republican line on the next mayoral ballot. The accused in the latest case haven’t even entered a plea, and already Mr. Bloomberg started insisting that “all of this comes out of the fact that we have partisan elections when cities aren’t partisan.” This echoes a line that he’s been banging on since early in his first term.

What a combination of unconstitutional malarkey and entitlement chutzpah from a man who spent more than $100 million of his money to muscle aside political parties to win his third term. In the past 12 years, his own election outlays, spent in an effort to overwhelm what the party system could muster against him, have probably approached a quarter of a billion dollars. No one is suggesting that Mr. Bloomberg broke the law with all his own spending. But his spending is the background to his nagging about how candidates should run in a “non-partisan primary,” no matter what their party, with the top two vote getters going into the general election.

His Honor took his brainstorm to the voters in 2003, with a proposed charter amendment designed to block political parties from using primary elections to choose their nominees. It resulted in one of the most thorough drubbings ever delivered to a New York mayor. It seems that voters understood that the mayor’s agenda was a thinly disguised effort to attack the Democratic Party through changing the rules of the game, instead of working to make a successful argument on the merits. The mayor lacked credibility on the merits because, while he originally ran as a Republican, he broke his promises and implemented Democratic Party-type policies.

The question these columns asked at the time was this: “If the mayor was going to make raising taxes, imposing more regulations on restaurants and other businesses, and boosting spending the thrust of his administration, what was the point of charter reform?” Instead, he put through huge pay raises for union workers. He ladled yet more billions into a failing schools instead of letting the money be allocated by parents through a system of vouchers. He imposed new regulations on everything from French fries to traffic to soda pop. For a spell last year, it looked like he might try one last time for non-partisan elections, but he decided instead to confine himself to grousing.

Now Mr. Bloomberg is in his last year, and after he’s gone there’s going to be an accounting of what New Yorkers got for all of their taxes he raised and tax money he doled out, not to mention whether he mixed his charitable donations with his political agenda. How different things might have looked had Mr. Bloomberg used his mayoralty to cut taxes and spending and reduce regulation. Had the Republican Party led such an effort, there is always the possibility — some would say near certainty — that it would have lost. But it is also possible, particularly with the mayor’s skills, that such a campaign would have succeeded.

History doesn’t disclose her alternatives. It’s one of our favorite laws of public life. It means that we’ll never really know what Mr. Bloomberg might have accomplished had he run his mayoralty on a line of political and economic principle. But we’re prepared to hazard a guess about one detail. It is that if the Republican Party had made conservative principles of political economy — limited, transparent government, and a free market — its hallmark, neither Malcolm Smith nor any other Democrat would have tried to buy his way onto the Republican Party ballot line.