It’s hard to think of anyone who has called for Mayor Bloomberg to get into the presidential lists more often than this newspaper, but if the dirge that issued from Norman, Oklahoma, and the so-called Bipartisan Forum is a sign of things to come, it’s hard to see the point. The group of former officials, along with a retiring senator, Charles Hagel, complained that America’s popularity has been shrinking, our credibility has eroded, our bridges are collapsing, our people are uninsured, we lack an energy policy, our educational system is failing. But with all that, they failed to name a candidate among them (like, say, a certain short, Jewish billioniare); instead, as if America were a deadlocked parliament, they called for a national unity government.

The fact is they are behind the curve now, while Senator Obama is galloping to the fore. It strikes us that unless Mr. Bloomberg moves with some decisiveness and joie de vive, his latest demarche is going to meet the kind of fate that was met by his proposal for non-partisan elections in 2003. It went down — as Davidson Goldin reminded us in a column yesterday — to a crushing defeat by voters in New York who, it turns out, love partisanship as much as the rest of the country does. We opposed the mayor on his campaign for non-partisan elections on the same grounds that we are wary of the gathering of his camarilla at Norman. This country has a lot of problems, but the political parties aren’t their cause. They exist for a reason, one of which is to raise money for candidates who aren’t as well-heeled as the mayor.

The mayor is almost alone in standing for immigration. If he’s looking for differentiation, he could start there. He understands the foreign competition that is challenging our markets in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley. He ought to be in a position to seize the issue of, say, the collapsing dollar at a time when no other candidates are focusing on it. He has done a good job on education, but he has shied from the one really big idea in education — parental choice and vouchers. By our lights President Bush offered more sense on the economy yesterday than anyone in Norman or, for that matter, on the hustings. If Mr. Bloomberg wants a stimulus package, now would be a good time to start plumping for it.

What the mayor doesn’t want to do is turn into a scold. He has gotten himself into a situation where he either has to run or end up in the same position as if he’d run and lost. And it looks like he needs to move fast. There has been genuine excitement out of Iowa and New Hampshire, and in both parties. Senator McCain has given us one of the great demonstrations of grit in the history of post-war campaigning, coming, as he has, from a shambles of a campaign back into contention. Senator Obama is showing us verve and eloquence, Governor Huckabee the sheer force of personality. People are watching Mayor Giuliani’s long bet on the later primaries, and are gripped by Senator Clinton’s sudden signs of vulnerability. All this is being given to us by political parties, and if Mr. Bloomberg has another structure he wants to put up against them, now is the time.