Mayor Bloomberg is wasting no time in exploiting the indictments of New York politicians yesterday 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 to aggregate their money to enter the political fray. It handed up such New Yorkers as, say, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Fiorello LaGuardia, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch.

It’s hard to imagine any of them succumbing to the kind of temptation to which State Senator Malcolm Smith allegedly gave in. Mr. Smith, a Democrat, is charged in federal court with a scheme in which he allegedly tried 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 is 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 nonsense, unconstitutional malarky, and entitlement 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 it’s the background to his nagging about non-partisan elections. His scheme aims for all candidates to run for office together 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 issue because, while he originally ran as a Republican, he 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. How different things might have looked had Mr. Bloomberg made his mayoralty about a campaign for lower taxes and spending and less regulation. Had the Republican Party lead that effort, there is always the possibility that it would have lost. No doubt some will suggest such a loss would have been a near certainty. But it is also possible, particularly with the mayor’s skills, that the campaign could have turned things around.

History doesn’t disclose her alternatives. It’s one of our favorite laws. It means that we’ll never really know what Mr. Bloomberg might have accomplished had he run his mayoralty in line with free-market political and economic principle. But we’re prepared to hazard one guess. It is that if the Republican Party had made conservative principles of political economy its hallmark, it’s hard to imagine Malcolm Smith or any other Democrat trying to buy onto their way onto the Republican Party ballot line.